CONCERT REVIEW: THE WHO

STEVE RUSSELL / TORONTO STAR

Roger Daltrey grooves while Pete Townshend plays guitar as The Who rock out with their Quadrophenia tour at the Air Canada Centre Friday. The band performed the 1973 double-LP rock opera Quadrophenia front to back.

Greatest hits save tepid Quadrophenia

BEN RAYNER POP MUSIC CRITIC

If you play rock ’n’ roll for a living for your entire life, what else are you gonna do but keep playing rock ’n’ roll for your entire life?

I get it. I get why the Who — which, since founding bassist John Entwistle’s death in 2002 has been just one mortal step away from being forced to bill itself as a Who — came dragging Quadrophenia through the Air Canada Centre on Friday.

I like to think so, anyway, because Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey surely have enough royalties trickling after 48 years in a band together that money is no longer the main motivator for getting out again.

There was a time when I’d be all “why don’t they just pack it in?” about it. But my stance toward the greying first-generation rock acts who insist upon haunting our arenas season after season keeps mellowing with — yes — age.

Rock ’n’ roll is as important and exciting and life-affirming to me today as it was 25 years ago, and were I a praying man I’d pray regularly that 25 years from now I still feel exactly the same about those points as, say, Keith Richards seems to.

Rock ’n’ roll was never designed with aging in mind and the first true rock ’n’ roll generation is still actively writing its own history with no carved-in-stone “retirement” date to honour. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean that hacking away at it in perpetuity will result in perpetual greatness.

At the ACC on Friday, for instance, Townshend and Daltrey’s ongoing efforts to honour the lofty Who songbook — accomplished with assistance from a band that included Pete’s brother Simon on guitar and occasional vocals, Beatle offspring/Noel Gallagher sideman Zak Starkey on drums, Pino Palladino on bass, three keyboardists and a horn section — resulted in a general abundance of goodness, yes, but nothing that had you nodding your head and going: “By gum, the Who’s still got it! I hope they never stop.”

The Who’s front-to-back performance of Quadrophenia, its 1973 double-LP rock opera about a disaffected youth named Jimmy diagnosed with “double schizophrenia,” was studiously perfect and professional, despite the 68-year-old (and still open-shirted) Daltrey’s recurring difficulties in hitting the high notes upon which many of his vocal performances depend.

For a good chunk of the night, however, this felt like a self-imposed test by Townshend to lead this lineup through a slightly flabby and dated song cycle that he himself described at the end of the night as “nonsensical, overblown crap” and which — as Rolling Stone recently remembered — drove him “to the brink of madness” when the Who first took it on the road 39 years ago, due to their reliance on “primitive tape machines” to flesh out the dense arrangements.

Quadrophenia is no Tommy, and even Tommy could stand an edit or two. Nothing really slammed it home until “5:15.” The 10-piece “revue” jammed the song out long enough for Townshend to let loose a firebrand guitar solo and for Entwistle to conduct a solo from beyond the grave — beamed in via video from the Royal Albert Hall in 2002 — and suddenly the ACC was alive in a way it hadn’t been before. Suddenly you saw what you’d been missing, and you wanted more.

Founding drummer Keith Moon, who died in 1978, appeared on the video screens to deliver his verses on “Bell Boy” to everyone’s delight, while Townshend and Daltrey appeared to finally go full throttle for the late-stretch winners “Dr. Jimmy,” “The Rock” and the long-awaited “Love, Reign O’er Me.”

One got the sense the night had just been a preambular warm-up to the blast of non-Quadrophenia hits — “Who Are You,” “Behind Blue Eyes,” “Baba O’Riley,” “Pinball Wizard” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”

Townshend and Daltrey looked genuinely pleased at the response their songs were still getting from a packed house after all these years, too, which made it tough to cling to any cynicism that might have intruded earlier in the night.

Great songs are great songs. Might as well keep playing them.