TACOMA — Throughout the 25th anniversary tour by The Who, the public emphasis has been on the commercial aspects: the fact that the group has reformed because its members needed the money, the heavy corporate sponsorship involved, the size of the arenas.

Who leader and songwriter Pete Townshend, perhaps the most articulate man in rock, didn’t help matters by admitting the mercenary aspects of the tour, nor by detailing his own weariness with playing (Townshend has actually lost a good part of his hearing from the high decibels of a life in rock ’n’ roll).

But if money was the reason for this tour, it didn’t matter much at The Who’s Tacoma Dome concert. There was blood on the stage Wednesday night, and that doesn’t happen with guys who are going through the motions.

The blood was quite real. At the climax of the concert, during a coda to a triumphant “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” Townshend brought his arm down in a trademark windmill against his guitar strings and then abruptly pulled up. After finishing the song, he threw down his guitar and rushed off stage, from whence he was taken to the hospital to have his punctured hand repaired; he’d slammed the “whammy bar” of the guitar right through his palm.

Roger Daltrey led the band through two encore cover tunes, “Hey Joe,” which he dedicated to local hero Jimi Hendrix, and “Born on the Bayou.” But he was obviously a bit lost without Townshend (and the audience seemed unnerved) so the band called it quits.

Until Townshend had to leave, however, the show was a stirring repudiation of the we’re-only-in-it-for-the-money hype. Fronting a large ensemble, the three surviving Who members were in form: Daltrey was lithe and full-throated, bassist John Entwistle was rock solid, and Townshend was maniacal, windmilling with gusto and dancing with glee.

The opening consisted of about 45 minutes’ worth of “Tommy,” and it was hard not to feel a thrill when the band leaned into the ecstatic final choruses of “We’re Not Gonna Take It.” The rest of the show covered most of the Who classics, from “I Can See For Miles” to “Behind Blue Eyes” to “Who Are You.”

“Face to Face,” a song from Townshend’s solo work, was also a delight, as he shimmied merrily about the stage. The second half of the show got off to a high-voltage start with “Magic Bus” followed by “Baba O’Reilly” (accompanied by some wonderful psychedelia on the big screens that flanked the stage), then into the anthem, “My Generation.”

“My Generation” contains Townshend’s most famous lyric, the now-ironic “Hope I die before I get old.” That line has been used against the band lately, as though they ought to heed their own advice. (Their late drummer, Keith Moon, did.) But The Who, after 25 years, attacked “My Generation,” thrashing through it and making it sound like a song for all modern generations.

In short, they didn’t look much like dinosaurs. They did look like a rock ’n’ roll band that has outlasted a lot of storms and earned the right to make money with their music. They’ll probably survive even that.

Roger Daltrey does his signature microphone twirl during Wednesday’s concert. The Herald/ROBERT SORBO

Daltrey and Pete Townshend on guitar bring back the memories.

There was blood on the stage Wednesday night, and that doesn’t happen with guys who are going through the motions.