Rock Holocaust Will Accelerate

Roger Daltrey He of The Who

The hard rock holocaust will continue – nay, even accelerate – tonight with the performance in The Auditorium Amphitheatre of the Who, the British foursome.

With the virtual abdication of the Beatles, the Who seem to many chroniclers of the rock music scene to be heir apparent to the throne, shifting and uneasy one it is, of the king of rock.

Tonight's show, to start at 8, will be the first Memphis appearance for the Who, which gilded the lily of its notoriety two weeks ago by performing "Tommy," its rock "opera," in the previously undefiled Metropolitan Opera House. The performance elicited shouts of approval – mostly from young folk in the uniforms of their age – which mingled with the scent of marijuana.

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THE WHO has been in existence since late 1964, stressing experimentation and showmanship but selling a lot of records along the way.

Peter Townshend, who writes much of the Who's material, is prone to such tactics as ramming his guitar into its amplifier to produce a screaming, howling, overpowering feedback.

"It's flat-out apocalypse," a New York Times writer,

Nik Cohn, exclaimed in print, "just the way it used to be five years ago, when he (Townshend) wore his Union Jack jacket and used his guitar like a machine gun, turning it on his audience and slaughtering them one by one"