Fans of The Who were all wet, but in high spirits, too Continued from page Al

Big bucks to be had on an American stadium jaunt were just too attractive. The British rockers have made little effort to disguise that their primary motivation for staging three dozen shows this summer is money.

But that didn't seem to trouble many of the folks who worked their way into Cleveland's massive, 58-year-old hunk of concrete.

"Who cares?" said Dave Baxter, 25, of Columbus, earlier. "It's The Who! I'll pay it. It's a once-in-a-lifetime deal."

Baxter was standing in a Stadium parking lot next to his car upon which he had set two portable speakers that were blaring out Magic Bus at world-class volume.

Although it was still four hours until show time, Baxter and his buddy, Mick Hoover, 26, were fired up.

"They're living history," Baxter said of the band. "I want to tell my kids I saw (lead singer) Roger Daltrey. He's up there with Mick Jagger. If you like rock ’n’ roll, you like The Who."

To many, the band is more than just a nostalgia act. "The music still talks to me," said Barberton resident Fred Croft, 30.

Fans didn't even seem to be put off by the fact that Townshend has become so decrepit that he needs a DG (designated guitarist) on the rowdiest solo material because his battered ears can no longer withstand the aural assault.

Yep, the man who wrote about the "deaf, dumb and blind kid" in Tommy is now half deaf himself.

(And you thought your parents were nuts back then, huh? Pardon me? What?)

And the gloomy skies hardly seemed to matter, either. The city was buzzing. The Flats consisted of one, big rollicking party, scheduled to culminate with a post-concert fireworks show. All three downtown hotels were sold out, packed with Who revelers.

A gigantic buzzard and a huge gorilla squared off near the Stadium — inflatable mascots of radio stations WMMS (100.7-FM) and WONE (97.5-FM).

The thought that a little shower might deter a Who fan seemed ludicrous. "If I hadn't had a ride here, I'd have walked," said Mark Stefanovsky, who rode from Brookfield, near the Pennsylvania border, arriving shortly after noon. "If I'm going to take a day off work, I want to make it worthwhile," he said, raising a bottle of Rolling Rock.

"I'm a Who freak," he continued with a big smile. "They're my favorite group."

This despite the fact that Stefanovsky is 21, too young to have seen the band in its previous lifetime.

Not so for Bill Coyne, another person who's happy not to have died before he got old. At 40, Coyne long ago felt the novelty of rock shows wearing off. He had already seen The Who four times. Yet he still drove from Cincinnati.

"The music is timeless," he said.

The band, which played the previous night in Buffalo, N.Y., was holed up in a trailer behind the bleachers. The musicians took the stage only 10 minutes after the advertised 8 p.m. starting time — a somewhat recent development in rock history.

Another new twist Wednesday night was the look of the Stadium floor. It wore a black, synthetic cover put in place in an effort to spare the facility's customary residents (the Indians and Browns) the post-concert miseries they suffered a couple of years ago after a Pink Floyd show that wrecked the surface for months. This cover supposedly allows the grass to "breathe."

If the turf was indeed breathing, it might have gotten stoned because it was sucking in large quantities of another type of grass, the kind that has been burning at The Who shows for a quarter of a century. The ears may be shot, the hair grayer, but in one sense, apparently, My Generation hasn't changed much at all.

Spotlight is on Roger Daltrey, lead singer for The Who

By all the hot air, hoopla and hubbub Wednesday, you'd have thought the sea of humanity awash outside Cleveland Stadium was queueing up for ringside seats to the second coming of you-know-who. (And we're not talking Springsteen, here.)

By the giddy frenzy that seemed to possess them, they probably thought they were, too.

And they weren't far wrong, either. At least not in terms of almighty rock 'n' roll.

The Who was in town to celebrate its silver anniversary in the biz — that's right, 25 years of gettin' down; and the crowd was up for it.

Way up. Especially the ones who found themselves perched in the far reaches of the cavernous cathedral, an area from which the band's presence was almost as much rumor as reality.

But even such distant proximity to the action didn't seem to diminish enthusiasm … or thirst. (Three-dollar beers were moving faster, at least than the snakelike lines to the rest rooms.)

By the time the fabled ensemble — that's Roger Daltrey, Pete Townshend and John Entwistle (drummer Keith Moon passed away in ’78) — tottered on stage some 10 minutes past the appointed 8 p.m. starting time, the teeming mass that covered the field and filled the stands was beside itself . . . a condition that made the assembled 65,000 seem much larger.

Then the trio of middle-aged limeys and their 14-piece accompaniment drew a bead on the throng and pulled the trigger on a quarter-century of rock 'n' roll.

BA-BOOOM!

Okay, make that ba-booom.

Although the three-hour spectacle was far from a dud, it was hardly the blast pre-show hype would have had us believe.

The opening set, for instance, which included material from The Who's groundbreaking rock opera, Tommy, didn't make it.

The problem, of course, is that nuance is not easily translated in Grand Canyon-size echo chambers.

There also was a feeling that — more often than not — the principals were going through the motions.

OK, there was plenty of Daltrey's mike-swinging and running in place, and Townshend's obligatory roundhouse, windmill swipes at the guitar.

But they seemed more a contrivance than an expression of the spontaneous combustion that marked the band's glory years in the mid-'60s and early '70s.

In other words, the theatrics were probably written into their contracts.

Still, the sparks occasionally burst into flame, particularly during an unscheduled reading of the old Muddy Waters standard, Mannish Boy — a tune that moved Daltrey's vocals and Townshend's guitar work to a magnificence that was all too rare Wednesday.

But even if the delivery wasn't always on schedule, the music evoked enough reflected glory and nostalgia to sustain the 40-tune performance that included just about everything from the band's first hit, Can't Explain, in 1964, through such other nuggets as Substitute, I Can See For Miles, Boris the Spider, My Generation, Who Are You and all the rest.

Okay, so maybe The Who isn't what it used to be.

But then who is?

Westminster Abbey to get Olivier’s ashes

Associated Press

London

The ashes of Laurence Olivier will be buried in Westminster Abbey among monarchs, prime ministers and great artists of past centuries.

The Very Rev. Michael Mayne, dean of the church where England's kings and queens are crowned, said a public memorial service for the actor would also be held in the abbey this autumn.