Rock Review

The Who Offers Up a Repeat of Last Year

By Peter Goddard

Star Staff Writer

Singer Roger Daltry didn’t have to tell the capacity crowd at Maple Leaf Gardens last night that the Who’s show was going to be a repeat of the one the band gave there last year.

After three or four songs everyone would have guessed as much and cared as little had he announced the band was going to play everything backwards.

Who fans are nothing if not loyal. (Although fanatical may be a better word, considering the way hundreds crowded the aisles and crowd control broke down completely.)

Not that the material the band plays is all that important.

After all, it offered yet again an almost complete version of Tommy, the so-called rock opera that guitarist Peter Townshend wrote in 1969 and was first played locally at the Canadian National Exhibition Coliseum.

Other bands may project themselves through songs. The Who operates at a much more basic level.

Their songs are orchestrated rhythmic patterns, with Townshend booming out enormous root-position chords, bassist John Entwistle pinning these chords down, and drummer Keith Moon directing matters with the aplomb of a traffic cop in the middle of Picadilly.

Each song, then, becomes part of a thrusting rhythmic flow, just as each concert, especially last night’s, seems very much a part of the past.