Music: The Who

THE WHO — Rock group performed in concert Saturday night in The Summit. Personnel: Roger Daltrey (lead vocals), Pete Townshend (guitar), John Entwistle (bass), Kenney Jones (drums), John "Rabbit" Bundrick (keyboards). Opening act, Willie Nile. Presented by Pace Concerts.

By BOB CLAYPOOL

Just before the lights went down — after Willie Nile's opening set and near the end of the intermission — just then, this strange noise, this churning started coming from various directions in The Summit. It sounded at first like booing, but it wasn’t — it was merely disjointed, unorganized cries of "WHO … WHO … WHO . . ."

Given time, it might have built up steam to become a real floor-shaking chant, but there was no time. Moments later, the house lights went off, the stage lights bumped on, and they were there. And, as always, their very presence was enough to give any veteran rock fan a bit of a chill, a little tingle to run up the spine and lift the hair on the back of the neck.

There was Roger Daltrey (short-haired, grinning in T-shirt, jeans and sneakers), Pete Townshend (with his guitar strap over a relatively natty blazer), John Entwistle (resplendent in a full suit), and new boys Kenney Jones and Texas' own Rabbit Bundrick. All seemed relaxed and confident, yet — in a very unpretentious way — eager to get on with it.

Then, BAM!, there was no turning back, and the The Who were churning into Substitute, with Daltrey throwing the mike around, Townshend windmilling his guitar, and everybody sitting on the main floor in the sold-out house leaped to their feet and cheered. Cheered right through that and the two other oldies that followed it — I Can't Explain and Baba O'Riley, cheering and screaming for one of the greatest bands in the whole history of rock and roll.

Most of that energy remained for the rest of the night — nearly two full hours by the time I had to leave — as the band presented a fresh, yet pleasantly familiar cross-section of their own long history. They moved from old favorites, like Pinball Wizard and We're Not Gonna Take It (from Tommy), back for My Generation, Won't Get Fooled Again and I Can See for Miles, to relatively new stuff such as Who Are You, doing a superb Music Must Change, then reaching back for Drowned (from Quadrophenia) and punching that home with maximum power and tightness. Just moving and shifting the parts of their own histories (and ours) around to suit the flow of the concert.

The music throughout was as tight and compact as ever, still capable of delivering sledgehammer blows to the cranium, and the additions of Jones and Bundrick gave the music a much fuller, more developed feel. And therein, in a sense, lies one of the few nagging points of the whole show — the idea that maybe, just maybe, the music is a little too full, too thought out and cut-and-dried, too professional to compare with the best Who shows of years gone by.

I mean, as much as I loved it, and as much as I respect the group for their graceful maturation, I missed the old spirit of adventure, that feeling of potential threats, of risks taken, of great, zonking leaps of the soul. Ah . . . but even that couldn’t take away the power and magic of Who-music, and, long before the concert was over, I noticed a weird thing.

It was the realization that the songs told only part of the band's history — the rest of it could be found in the oddly mixed audience. For example, there were old codgers there, like myself — people close to the band members' own ages (mid-30s) — who truly could remember when Substitute and My Generation first came out. But then there were kids, kids in their mid-teens, who were boogieing just as hard over Who Are You. Look at that crowd very long and you wouldn’t need any printed-up, annotated history of The Who to "explain" their success. The reason was, right there, on all those faces in the crowd.