Townshend Rocks On

Powerful guitar saves The Who from nostalgia-band status

By Craig Marine

Of The Examiner Staff

MOUNTAIN VIEW — Pete Townshend was ticked off Monday night, which was good. After all, this was The Who onstage at the Shoreline Amphitheatre — albeit an aged version — and The Who is a band that has always been fueled by anger and frustration. This is the group, you may recall, that many of the Flower Children did not want at the all-too-groovy Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, because The Who smash things and generally misbehave. God bless ’em.

Whatever was stuck in Townshend’s craw Monday night, he used his electric guitar to work through his emotions, sending crashing chords out into the cool night air with his trademark windmill gestures, scowling and jumping about like the angry young Brit who wrote these songs decades earlier.

Considering that this tour is a trip down memory lane, with many of the group’s earliest songs, it seemed fitting that Townshend became reacquainted with his bad attitude. The band opened with “Can’t Explain,” a song Townshend wrote when he was 18.

He has described the song as being about “the frustrations of a young person who is so incoherent and uneducated that he can’t state his case to the bourgeois intellectual blah blah blah.” That’s Townshend all over — angry, brilliant and unwilling to take himself too seriously, at least publicly.

Of the three remaining original members, only Townshend conveyed any type of emotional connection to the music. Roger Daltry, shorn of his flowing locks but still in great shape, looked like the poseur he has always been. He still sees himself as a Rock Star, and his attempts at re-creating the stage moves he used at Woodstock — microphone spinning and knee diving — looked foolish. John Entwistle kept his dignity by standing there and playing the hell out of his bass, but his blue leather jacket, cut short Eisenhower style, looked bad in the ’70s and looked worse here.

The other two musicians onstage fared better. Drummer Zak Starkey — Ringo’s kid — was smart enough not to try to copy the late Keith Moon on drums.

[ See WHO, B-6 ]

Pete Townshend manages to maintain his middle-age dignity and perspective while driving The Who through songs of adolescent angst.