"This is us!" Pete Townshend said to wild cheers Wednesday night as fellow members of the Who—Roger Daltrey and John Entwistle—beamed across the stage at him.

"This is what you get for STAY-ING ALIVE!" he told the enthusiastic audience at America West Arena.

What did they get? A little balder, wrinkles, hearing loss, straining voices and lots of gray hair, and they had to deal with the supreme irony that they didn’t die before they got old as they "hoped" they would in My Generation.

Together with a five-piece brass section, a pair of keyboardists, drummer Zak Starkey, guitarist Simon Townshend (Pete’s brother), a percussionist, a pair of backup singers and guest stars Gary Glitter and Billy Idol, they had just finished playing Townshend’s rock

REVIEW

The Who

Wednesday, America West Arena.

"opera" Quadrophenia.

With the opera done, they launched into an "unplugged" version of Won’t Get Fooled Again, the only song that the three surviving Who members played without backup. The transformation they worked on the song was successful, and it suggested that maybe there could be a mature direction for the Who, which in its British Invasion heyday was one of the loudest, most energy-crazed rock bands.

It was hard to look at Townshend strumming an acoustic guitar most of the evening and hear him and Daltrey straining at the vocals, because all of the Who’s music, including Quadrophenia, is so wrapped up in the concerns and energy of an electric youth that passed so long ago.

When Townshend strapped on an electric guitar for The Rock, the penultimate number in Quadrophenia, the crowd roared with anticipation.

He did not disappoint, giving them a taste of his full power.

The highlights of the evening included Idol as a natty blond Mod and Glitter as a leather-jacketed Rocker to add a touch of theater to the proceedings. Giant screens allowed Quadrophenia's protagonist to fill in narrative gaps.

There also was Entwistle’s bass solo on 5:15, a buzzing, fleet-fingered extension of the piece.

The strongest numbers—such as 5:15, The Dirty Jobs, The Real Me and Cut My Hair—worked up the energy of the Who of old, getting by with a little help from their friends.

However satisfying that performing the whole of Quadrophenia must have been to composer Townshend, the work’s unity prevented the show from building the headlong rush to a climax that a good rock show needs. Instead, it ebbed and flowed—maturely.

So it makes sense that, at this point in their lives, the members of the Who would be tackling this work rather than reprising such over-the-top youth numbers as I Can See for Miles. I would have preferred the latter, but the former wasn’t bad.