Pete Townshend, sweat shimmering in the laugh lines that radiate from the corners of his sardonic eyes, placed his lips against the microphone and sang himself into a quandary: “Don’t cry, don’t close your eyes, it’s only teenage wasted…"

The crowd of 45,000 that packed the Pontiac Silverdome Tuesday night to see Townshend, singer Roger Daltrey and bassist John Entwistle — known collectively as the Who — cheered approvingly at Townshend’s restatement of his 20-year-old parable of youth culture, desperation and angst.

Possibly the only sound louder than the glorious shouts and adoring chants of “Who, Who, Who,” was the noise of rending credibility.

Townshend, Daltrey, Entwistle, and the Who’s late drummer Keith Moon began as some of the most relentlessly vitriolic advocates of the angst-filled English youth culture of the ’60s. Other bands may have assimilated their cheeky, disrespectful attitude, their quasi-intellectual pose, and even their propensity for stage violence. But the Who may have been the only English band of its generation to make the emotional awkwardness and ungainly hormonal drives of adolescence and post-adolescence a workable creative principal.

Throughout the late ’60s and the very early ’70s, Townshend, the band’s unofficial leader and chief songwriter, codified the stance of the brave new young in the bracing, often unforgiving verses of “My Generation,” “I Can’t Explain,” “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” and “Baba O’Reilly.”

Now, after eight years of sometimes bitter separation, Townshend and his cohorts find themselves together for a much-hyped “25th Anniversary Tour” that seems to have more to do with avarice and macho, middle-aged pride than with music.

And while it was clear Tuesday that the Who remain a formidable performance unit, something else was clearer: Youth only works for the young.

Knowingly or otherwise, the Who gave credence to that idea by digging relatively deep into its song catalogue and coming up with a concert that didn’t place undo stress on the youth anthems. And when the older youth culture songs did get a major going over, many of the new wrinkles came courtesy of the Who’s 11-member back-up band (that number doesn’t include drummer Simon Phillips).

Songs from “Tommy,” the Who’s ever-present rock musical, dominated the beginning of the three-hour show.

The Who certainly had all the trappings for “Tommy’s” expansive metaphoric bluster. The stage was some 145 feet wide, 80 feet high, festooned with Op art banners suggesting the band’s songs and its English homeland, and flanked by theater-sized video screens showing the concert in progress.

The packaging didn’t help the Who during diligent but somewhat disinterested performances of “Tommy” songs like “What About the War?” and “Acid Queen.”

A smoldering “Pinball Wizard” was redeemed by Daltrey, who

see WHO, D2

The Who’s “25th Anniversary Tour” has more to do with greed, macho and middle-aged pride than with music

Press photos by Rex D. Larsen

Bassist John Entwistle shined on “Eminence Front.”

Singer Roger Daltrey

The crowd of 45,000 that packed the Pontiac Silverdome Tuesday adoringly chanted “Who, Who, Who”

Roger Daltrey gave “Pinball Wizard” life.