Who Raise Pontiac Roof

By John Laycock

The Who made history at Pontiac Stadium Saturday night with a performance as big as the 78,000-person audience.

Just by showing up, the only surviving band from the "British Invasion" days rewrote the record book — there has never been a bigger indoor concert in North America, maybe never in the world.

The Who did more. They filled that soft-topped football stadium with irresistible music as surely as they had with people.

The fans knew it was a special event. Usually rock audiences dawdle in late; Pontiac was filled hours early.

They got what they came for, from the opening chords of Can't Explain to the dying oscillations of Don't Be Fooled Again an hour and 45 minutes later. No encore; the Who had done it all.

The band stuck to the favorites, the crowd-pleasers: My Generation, Magic Bus, Behind Blue Eyes, Substitute, a half-hour of Tommy. That medley is still the most exhilarating in rock, its climactic finale spraying white light over the seething crowd.

The band's next "rock opera", Quadrophenia, got scant attention; its attractions are more cerebral than seminal. Though a new album has just come out, they played only two songs — Squeezebox and Dreaming From the Waist, the evening's least exciting number.

So it was a simple, straightforward show. At its heart was that essential rock beat, needing no Broadway staging or gimmicky props. Just the Who, playing their lives out. I can use all my old descriptions for they still apply: Roger Daltrey, the electric dandelion, whirling the microphone like a yo-yo; Peter Townshend, jumping like he was launched from a trampoline while slamming powerfully clean lines from his guitar; John Entwistle, a frozen creature of darkness behind his bass; Keith Moon, flailing drums like a lawn mower run amok.

The same stuff — still as good, still as exciting.

And no place knows it better than Detroit. The city is almost, as Daltrey said, the band's home in America. It has seen their entire history here, from their first-ever North American date, in Ann Arbor, through frequent visits to the tiny old Grande Ballroom, where Tommy was first played, until now, setting Pontiac's dish aswarm with humanity like a beehive upside down.

Rock music's prestige has changed; witness its very presence in suburbia's most hallowed shrine. The Who haven't. Nor have their fans. The media elite sipped white wine in the broadloomed press box, but down on the floor the masses still crushed ribcages against the stage and brought the old festival cry to move back, to keep cool and gentle.

Money, that irresistible leveller, admitted the Who to Pontiac, of course. Close to 77,000 tickets had been sold, according to Who press spokesman Paul Wasserman, and 1,000 freebies given out. At $8 per, that's $616,000.

Wasserman said two-thirds goes to the band's organization and the rest stays behind for expenses. The stadium gets about 15 per cent, $94,700, enough to keep the roof aloft for quite a while.

Some of the revenue was spent on the customers, appropriately. TV cameras flung yards-high pictures of the band on an enormous screen slung above the stage. Keith Moon's grin could be seen in the back rows.

Yet what really counts is the music. The Who may play a better concert sometime, but 78,000 will not need to be there.

CONSUMER NOTES —

The sound system was two-thirds larger than usual, and it carried clear and true from the stadium's skin to the snackbars under the stands.

— Tour personnel report a smooth excursion. No technical hang-ups, and despite advance publicity the band has been getting along famously. Not even a smashed hotel room yet.

— The new album, The Who By Numbers, is okay. No concept this time; just good tunes, much in the Who's Next mood. Squeezebox is being touted as the single, but I prefer Slip Kid. Vintage Who combining furious rock with a deceptively simple-sounding tune.