For over a decade, ever since they recorded an untamed non-hit, "My Generation," hundreds of American high school rock bands have attempted to copy the sound of the Who. Last night, at the Calderone Theater in Hempstead, someone who should have been able to get the Who sound perfectly, John Entwistle, the group’s erstwhile bass player, only managed to approximate it with his new solo group, the Ox.

That wouldn’t be such an enormous difficulty if Entwistle weren’t so obviously trying to purvey a Who-derived sound with Ox. But it becomes worse because, while the Who have one of the most exciting stage shows in rock, Entwistle, long known for standing stolidly in the midst of the rest of that band’s antics, has chosen sidemen who are as static as he is. His guitarist is busy exploring the conventions of a sound that the Who’s Peter Townshend created with “My Generation” and succeeding records, the drummer imitates the Who’s Keith Moon down to lolling his head whimsically to the side now and again, and the keyboard man and the saxophonist are nonentities. Only Entwistle seems like the real thing, and he could hardly help it.

Even though Ox sounds like just another Who spin-off (which it is, after all), it has its advantages. Entwistle invented rock macabre, writing about creatures such as “Boris the Spider” and the—he claimed last night—autobiographical “Whiskey Man” long before Alice Cooper turned his one-joke act into a multimillion-dollar property. The best part of the Ox show featured those songs, and others including—“My Wife” and “Heaven Hell.” The second best part featured some rock and roll oldies, including “Not Fade Away,” “Something Else” and “Keep a Knockin’.” The worst of it featured such Entwistle originals as “Cell Number Seven,” the saga of the rock band on the road, destroying hotel rooms as efficiently as it sells out concert halls, and “Do the Dangle,” a semi-spoof of a dance number.

The basic problem is that the group’s ideas are trite. Even if the drummer could control the band’s tempo—which he cannot—even if the guitarist had imagination, even if the sax and keyboards could be heard, the concept of the show does a serious disservice to Entwistle’s work, which is much deeper than the pop stuff he’s playing now. He is certainly not a major artist, as Townshend clearly is, but Entwistle’s early horror-rock attempts brought a different kind of spirit to the music. “Heaven and Hell,” for instance, is couched in seemingly innocent colloquial religious terminology—“On top of the sky is a place where you go / If you’ve done nothing wrong”—yet, even in its simplicity, it presents a view of religion as interesting as Townshend’s confused mysticism. “My Wife” is an account of marital relations which, though humorous, is also perceptive, and “Whiskey Man” has plenty more than the obvious to say about the perils of drink.

Like Townshend, Entwistle is a moralist. But where Townshend’s moralism is utopian, Entwistle’s is dark and defeatist. That makes his ideas more interesting, but more difficult, richer but more threatening. It also scares off his audience, or allows it—because of the comic terms in which those morals are couched—to laugh them off. That’s the problem Entwistle has to confront, but the solution is obviously not to discard the deepest part of his material—both musically, where he’s a match for Townshend, as well and thematically—which is what he’s doing on this tour. If “Heaven and Hell” means what it says, it is at least as serious a statement about pop religion as “Tommy.” It deserves a treatment that’s just as worthwhile, not the trivial context its author is giving it with Ox.