Aging rockers with something to prove can be a sight to behold. What a spectacle to see Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend at the Palace of Auburn Hills Friday night, driving home their message: We’re still standing, dammit!

Keeping the show going must be their way of honouring John Entwistle, the bass player who died on the brink of this tour. Certainly his loss, second in the history of The Who after Peter Moon, seems to have jacked up the determination of the two surviving members to keep on rocking.

Townshend, balding and worn, windmilled the very first guitar chords of the very first song, Can’t Explain. Daltrey, that seemingly ageless brick of a man, soon had the mike twirling on its wire. They punched out Substitute, another early number, and then a long Who Are You, hitting a crest of energy that nothing else in the two hours would surpass.

Over and over, Pete laid down his claim to rock-guitar sainthood through long and loud solos.

His brother Simon added guitar and vocal fills, staying so far back that the big-screen TV never once caught him in a close-up.

Zak Starkey thundered the drums more ferociously than his dad Ringo ever has.

Rabbit Bundrick was along on keyboards again, while bass substitute Pino Palladino, over to one side, worked even more self-effacingly than Entwistle.

Review of history Even with six on stage, only Daltrey and Townshend mattered. They carefully reviewed their history – three pieces from Quadrophenia, a couple of less-favoured items including Another Tricky Day, and Tommy saved to the encore.

The one song that stays alive on its own currency is Won’t Be Fooled Again. The rest are bracing artifacts, even if the transitions sometimes sputtered (and Pete’s attempt to make up rhymes in honour of Detroit, and his first-ever American gig in Ann Arbor was lame.)

To hear a middle-aged audience shouting out Teenage Wasteland from $100-plus seats suggests ritual more than lifeblood.

And yet it was heartwarming to see the old friends boast their legacy. If anything they played with an urgency beyond their level a couple of decades ago, when times were changing and the band’s individual personalities headed towards disconnection. Now they are The Who for better and worse, frozen in time, and too easily knocked as just another golden-oldies band, a tribute to themselves. That dismissal would underrate the power of the past to give meaning to the present. Here and now, this is who they are.

Robert Plant opened the show with more than an hour’s music, a golden oldie looking for change.

Surprising screamer How surprising to find that Led Zeppelin’s primal screamer, not even an instrumentalist, would become one of the most forward-looking of the four-decade English survivors.

Plant played a lot of his new album Dreamland, a disconcerting blend of folk instruments, orientalist voodoo, and acid rock.

Most of the songs are not new, yet Plant channels them into his own possessions – the familiar Hey Joe turned upside down, the folk-rock standard Morning Dew now very rocky, Jesse Colin Young’s Darkness Darkness stripped of its West Coast lightness.

No dummy, Plant anchored his set with some of his own standards, among them Fixing to Die, and ensured an encore with a ferocious Whole Lotta Love that opened with a Delta blues introduction.

So long after heavy metal, that banshee wail of Plant’s remains undiminished, a fair notice that he continues to be a force to be reckoned with.