Lead singer Roger Daltry

Guitarist-composer Pete Townshend

Drummer Keith Moon

Guitarist John Entwistle

(Continued from Page 3)

"Cause we get around," begins the Townshend lyric which includes the following advice to one’s elders: "Why don’t you all fade away?" The aging process is summed up with "Hope I die before I get old."

Eight years later in The Who’s most recent release, a two-record set called “Quadrophenia,” the same banal negativism is revived. The songs deal with Jimmy, an English teenager during the mid-60’s who is a “quadrophenic” because his personality is split into four equal parts. Jimmy hates his parents, his psychiatrists, his school, his job, the teen-age culture to which he belongs, the leaders of the English government and just about everything he encounters. At one point, he moans "Every year is the same, And I feel it again, I’m a loser — no chance to win."

Without question, however, “Tommy” is the Who’s most significant work. No one had suspected that a band devoted to dramatizing rebelliousness would come up with the notion that basic loud rock music could be stretched to tell a story as was done in “Tommy.” Written primarily by Townshend in 1969 for the Who to perform, it is essentially a parable with the Who’s familiar mix of violence and failure. It tells of a boy who becomes deaf, dumb, and blind after he witnesses his father killing his mother’s lover. Tommy is tormented by his cousin, sexually assaulted by his uncle, and dosed with LSD. He eventually becomes a pinball champion, enters a state of grace, regains his senses and starts his own pinball religion only to be finally discarded by his disciples.

It is a mild understatement to say that the points Townshend intended in this parable do not emerge with total clarity. Nonetheless, the work became a major hit. A ballet company danced it. A symphony orchestra recorded it. Opera companies adopted it. Serious music critics all over the country subjected it to musicological scrutiny. And its libretto was interpreted with an intensity usually reserved for an Ezra Pound Canto.

"See me, feel me, touch me, heal me," Roger Daltry will wail in his keening “Tommy” voice sometime during the course of each of the Who’s forthcoming concerts. And once again, Tommy’s familiar wail will stir crowds. A feeling of community will flood the arena.

And yet to the untutored eye, it is frightening to see so many people identifying with basket-case Tommy who echoes their own need to be “healed.”

To those who have observed the Who over the years, it will seem more like a re-hash of the late 1960s notion that youth and rock were going to save the world.

There is not much talk about salvation these days even though the music keeps increasing in popularity. This music revives the myths of youth power of the late-1960’s as if to give lip-service to the vitality that has faded. In reality, a concert by the Who is now an entertainment for the young much the way girlie-shows once existed to please tired businessmen.

There will be lots of shouting and foot-stomping at the Garden this week. But the music—as loud as it is—will be tired. And so will its audience.