PETER POWER / TORONTO STAR

STILL ROCKING: Ex-Who frontman Pete Townshend shows he still has what it takes during his first solo tour appearance at Massey Hall last night.

The Who’s Pete Townshend half-jokingly refers to rock stars of his vintage as "clapped-out old ’60s hellraisers."

But if he really was of that ilk, his sold-out show last night at Massey Hall would have been either a greatest hits run-through or a forced march into his new concept piece, PsychoDerelict, the latter to prove he can still write a rock opera hit like his Broadway-acclaimed Tommy.

Instead, for the first show of his new North American tour, the guitarist and songwriter for the group that used to be known as the world’s second-greatest rock band (the Stones being the first), showed respect and love for his fans, by both indulging and challenging them — a rare combination in these days of superstar jukebox tours.

Townshend, 48, bookended a complete playing of his difficult new work with rock rave-ups through his solo material, plus a brief nod to The Who — such as on "Behind Blue Eyes," a song he helped close the evening with.

He and his eight-member band cheerily marched onto the stage like a drunken parade, with Townshend beating a snare drum and the rest happily bashing and tooting along on their own instruments.

Townshend joked that it was a tribute to the late, great Keith Moon, The Who’s wildman drummer. In a pre-show press conference, Townshend

Rock

Peter Howell

had said the spirit of Moon still hangs over the three surviving bandmembers, making them uncomfortable when talking about the possibility of reuniting yet again.

But he was completely comfortable with the role of rock band frontman, as he roared through his early solo hit "Face The Face" and selections from an even earlier project called Rough Mix, an album with Ronnie Lane of The Faces, whom Townshend credited with giving him the courage to try solo playing.

There was also a nice cover of Dylan’s "Corrina, Corrina" and much of Townshend’s trademark leaps, hops and windmill guitar playing, before he begged our indulgence to spend the next hour listening to PsychoDerelict.

The new rock opera/theatrical work is a complex love story-cum-future shocker involving a burned-out ’60s rocker called Ray High, his scheming manager Rastus Knight and blood-sucking journalist Ruth Streeting.

The three characters were played by actors — John Labanowski, Linal Haft and Jan Ravens — who weaved in and around Townshend as he and his band played such great new songs as "I Want That Thing" and the self-mocking "Let’s Get Pretentious."

Add to this a Pink Floyd continuous slide show of psychedelic swirls and ’60s photo memories — all to advance an impenetrable subplot about computerized virtual reality "grid life" controlling our lives — and PsychoDerelict amounted to a very ambitious, very challenging proposition.

The stage was cluttered, and PsychoDerelict often seemed like so much acid-flashback hippie flapdoodle — with too much doodle and too little flap.

Yet it was also the sight and sound of a great mind at work, and Townshend lept over the logical gaps by letting us know that, unlike most other rock superstars, he doesn’t pretend to have all the answers.

At the end of the PsychoDerelict set, the Ray High character stands in the spotlight to simply observe that he too, finds talk of "virtual reality" rather confusing and, like all of us, he’s torn by memories of the past and concerns about the future.

"What happened to the truth? What happened to The Dream? What happened to all that lovely hippie s—?" he asked.

It was high speaking for Townshend, summing up an evening where an elder statesmen of pop music proved that rock can still roll both mind and body.