Thomas Carlyle once wrote

that heroes make history, and the rest of us are born to worship those heroes. It’s doubtful that, with his Victorian mores, Carlyle would care much for our modern heroes, but I couldn’t help but think about heroes and hero worship recently as I stood shoulder to shoulder with 37,000 other Missourians at Kansas City’s Arrowhead Stadium, all of us completely mesmerized by the heroic mythos projected by three middle-aged gentlemen collectively known as The Who. And as I watched Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey and John Entwistle detonate their powerhouse repertoire with both bombast and professionalism, I couldn’t help project myself out of the role of worshiper into the the role of worshipee.

More specifically, I wondered if The Who saw the people around me the way I saw them. Did they notice the thirtysomething man down the row who blew marijuana smoke into the air above our heads? Did they hear the dipsomaniac at my side who felt compelled to confess her life story to me during the intermission? Did they hear the obviously befuddled young man a few feet away who kept yelling “Play ‘Satisfaction’”? (I’m still trying to figure that one out).

Of course they didn’t. Nor did they hear me join in on every verse of every song as if I belong right up there under the lights. Along with those other thousands of people, my face was just another piece of the adoring mosaic that unrolls before our pop culture heroes. Whether or not I was getting what The Who really said wasn’t the point. The adoration was the point.

That’s probably the most dissatisfying thing about going to any concert, be it at a small club or an arena — we realize those songs aren’t ours. The home stereo creates the illusion that we and the song are one. Whether we simply wear earphones in the dark or jump up and down playing air guitar, we feel our emotions come alive through the melody and words. And though it energizes us, our fervent Walter Mitty imaginations pretend it is us energizing it. Yet when a 17-year-old girl blocking your view yells “it’s only teenage wasteland” with a kind of decadent glee rather than the battered stoicism you inflect in that line, well, you quickly remember who you are — the guy in Row 17.

Pete Townshend made that exact point earlier this summer when an interviewer from Musician magazine badgered him about the use of classic songs in commercials. “It’s my decision. It’s my right. It’s my song,” he said, throwing a good deal of emphasis on my. He wrote the songs; we listen. What is created in the fantasy isn’t the original. It’s just a version, so how can we expect ours to be the version?

Still, for all the irony of being among people so diverse in interpetation (or for that matter, being a second-wave fan myself; after all, it wasn’t my generation — it was my parents’), a wonderful sense of community ignites when music comes alive. The Who were and are arguably the best example of what is only one kind of music — rock. If the concert stage brings us to the reality that we’re only worshiping, then we can retreat back to the fantasy of creating.

And as for Thomas Carlyle’s probable dislike of that concert: Well, he probably didn’t die before he got too old.