I LOVE THE WHO dearly, and I have mixed feelings about seeing them perform in the year 2016. They probably do, too. This is the band that famously sang “Hope I die before I get old.” And this is the band in which two of the founding members did exactly that, more or less: Not-old-at-all drummer Keith Moon died back in 1978, and only-a-little-bit-old bassist John Entwistle died in 2002. Both incidents were drug-related, the result of these musicians being unable to give up their rock-star excesses. That leaves us with curly-haired singer Roger Daltrey and windmill-armed guitarist/songwriter Pete Townshend to carry the Who’s weighty time capsule into the present day, a freighted catalog that’s filled with Townshend’s songs about the simultaneous rage and optimism that accompanies adolescence and young adulthood. It’s a tricky task for a pair of septuagenarians.
This particular outing marks the band’s ostensible 50th anniversary and follows the release of a compilation called The Who Hits 50!, but the length of the tour—and a delay due to Daltrey contracting viral meningitis that necessitated the rescheduling of the Portland show from September 2015—means the numbers are being fudged a bit.
Daltrey, Townshend, Entwistle, and Moon became the Who in 1964, with a brief sidetrack under the name the High Numbers. They unabashedly courted London’s mod scene as their fanbase, despite none of the members actually being mods. (Most of the Beach Boys didn’t surf, either.) Playing speed-addled versions of Motown and Stax tunes for frustrated youths, the group attracted two would-be managers: Kit Lambert, the homosexual son of a famous classical composer, and Chris Stamp, brother to handsome English actor Terence. These two had their own chips on their shoulders, and they turned the band’s careering, chaotic sound toward London’s fledgling pop-art scene. At one gig, Townshend accidentally broke the neck of his guitar, then proceeded to deliberately smash the rest of it to bits. It became the band’s trademark.