Feedback : The Who and Their Generation 9781442240100, 9781442240094

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F EEDB AC K

F EEDB AC K

The Who and Their Generation

Casey Harison

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 16 Carlisle Street, London W1D 3BT, United Kingdom Copyright © 2015 by Casey Harison All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Harison, Casey, 1957– author. Feedback : the Who and their generation / Casey Harison. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4422-4009-4 (cloth : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4422-4010-0 (ebook) 1. Who (Musical group) 2. Rock music–History and criticism. 3. Rock music–Social aspects. I. Title. ML421.W5H37 2015 782.42166092'2–dc23 2014030183 TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction

ix

Chronology

xvii

1 “My Generation”: The Who in Historical Perspective

1

2 “Relay”: The Who and the Transatlantic Music Industry, 1964–1974

39

3 “The Kids Are Alright”: Listening to The Who, 1964–1974

79

4 “The Real Me”: Fans across the Atlantic, 1964–1974

113

5 “Won’t Get Fooled Again”: The Atlantic Generation Comes of Age

147

Notes

177

Glossary

193

Select Discography

195

Bibliography

197

Index

205

About the Author

209

v

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A history of The Who / The Who in history has been lodged in my head for many years. Alicia Valenzuela tolerated my enthusiasm for The Who (though I am not sure she ever fully bought the argument). So, too, did friends and colleagues, including Ron Carpenter, Russ Johnson, and Andy Buck. Russ and Andy reviewed chapter drafts. Michael Kearns read chapters and offered helpful critique. Patricia Sides read the entire manuscript. I would like to thank other rock-and-roll fans whose brains I picked over the years: Nancy Rhoden, Michael Dixon, Rocco Gennaro, and Brian Faucheux. Though not really a fan of rock and roll, John Gibson helped fill in the British background. I want to thank the University of Southern Indiana for providing support for research and a summer devoted to writing. The book is dedicated to Patricia Sides, who despite her better judgment joined me at many Who concerts over the years. Pat’s somewhat late-blooming interest in rock and roll (actually more Dylan than The Who) and the doses of healthy skepticism that she brought to the project helped to keep my enthusiasm grounded—thank goodness—in reality.

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This book had its beginnings in two “places”: fan of the rock-and-roll band The Who and teacher of college history courses. For me, the two are not unrelated. My interest in the past as a vocation and my interest in The Who started together in my late teens. As I gained formal training in history as a university undergraduate, during graduate school, and then as I taught history in the college classroom, I kept listening to The Who, reading about them, and occasionally seeing them perform live. Almost from the start, I thought of The Who as a historian’s band. The time and place where the group began and the times and places through which they moved over the years were easy to spot in their songs, in their eye-catching performances, and in the interviews and writings of Pete Townshend, the band’s main songwriter and guitarist, who came across as self-conscious about the band’s place in the larger sweep of things. As I saw it, The Who “brand” was infused with time and place and with the themes that lent themselves to connecting the past with the present. A similar point is made by the British sociologist Stanley Cohen, who wrote an influential study of the “Mods,” a youth subculture that gave The Who their first “brief” in the early 1960s. The Who, wrote Cohen, “explicitly stood for, sang about and understood (a gift nearly non-existent in the pop world) their origins.” 1 Though it is not hard to make the case that other famous groups of the sixties “British Invasion,” such as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, were similarly representative of their time and place, for reasons I hope to demonstrate in this book, The Who offer a particularly instructive vantage ix

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from which to survey a piece of the past: the Atlantic world since 1945. Thus, the idea of writing the history of The Who as a microcosm of Atlantic history did not seem far-fetched to me. The scarcity of books on post–Second World War transatlantic cultural history, particularly on rock and roll, in the classes I teach on the twentieth century was surprising given the tremendous impact that the music and culture have had. This void in the literature was another spur to the project. I have long been a fan of The Who, but as a historian writing about them, I have had to be conscious of the “noble dream” of the profession: detachment and objectivity. Fortunately, to be a fan and critical observer of The Who is neither mutually exclusive nor, indeed, particularly hard to accomplish, for The Who invited skepticism from fans and observers, maintaining a mildly ironic stance about themselves, about their place in the larger scheme of things, and about “fandom,” which is a focus of this book. Townshend, a fan himself, was both appreciative and leery. As he saw it, The Who’s “job” was to be “the mirror for the desperation, bitterness, frustration, and misery of the misunderstood adolescents, of people in the vacuum.” 2 Even as Townshend “thanked” Who fans for being “the best boss a man could ever have,” 3 he confessed, “I don’t like fans really . . . because they’re my employer—I don’t like the boss. . . . [Fans] are fanatics, obsessives. In a Freudian sense, there is something very strange about them, a degree of obsession, and neither of you really know what the transaction is about.” 4 Townshend and The Who returned the circumspect gaze of their fans with a healthy dose of the same. The Who belonged to a second wave of the British Invasion of rock music that landed in Europe and North America in the 1960s. The band became famous for producing popular songs and albums and for a raw and very loud performing style that set them apart from other bands of the day. The Who used feedback—the distorted sound made when notes are “looped” between a guitar pickup and speaker—in some of their recorded songs and especially in their live performance, which included, along with the extremely high volume, the onstage destruction of instruments. The Who produced a sound that shocked the senses, and the “auto-destructive” element made it all the more outrageous. “The Who’s act,” recalled Richard Barnes, a friend from the sixties and later a chronicler of their history, “was like a total no-holdsbarred assault on the senses”:

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The Who were the most outrageous and stunning live act to hit the British scene. They were sheer violence and frustration set to music. . . . There were no half-measures; they threw everything they had at the audience, ending with a blitz on their own equipment, which they would systematically destroy and, in a cloud of smoke and fused smoldering amps and other debris, simply walk offstage.

“Reactions to the Who’s stage act,” wrote Barnes, “varied from complete and utter awe and disbelief, through total excitement to outright anger and contempt. Experiencing the Who live never left anyone indifferent.” 5 Electrified rock and roll had been loud and energetic from the start, but this was something different. Copied and parodied since the band formed in 1964–1965, the loud, strange noises and the destruction of gear, with no clear precedent in music history, were for many listeners a deeply disquieting style of music making. Some responded to the volume and destruction with shock, mystification, or disgust. But for fans, the auto-destruction, the loud music, and the feedback were genuinely thrilling. It became The Who brand. The Who’s music belonged to a stream of rock and roll that was popular and successful, though surprisingly so because it was also strange. The loudness and violence had little historical precedent, even as the musical roots from Europe, America, and Africa were there to be found. The paradoxes of The Who’s music made it indelibly a product of modernity: the kind, Townshend wrote, by which “one was able to take the rhythms of the modern world and make them as loud as the modern world, as loud as the jet plane, or louder, as thunderous as a locomotive going by.” 6 There were other well-known bands that produced a loud, electrified, aggressive style of rock, but The Who occupied a special niche: “If Led Zeppelin made you want to boogie, and the Rolling Stones and the Doors made you want sex,” wrote an author who saw what made the groups different, “Townshend and The Who made you want to smash something up.” 7 Early in their career, The Who made a name for themselves by playing loud music, using feedback, and destroying guitars and other instruments at the end of live performances. If The Who had done nothing else, they would have secured a place in rock-and-roll history for their high volume and for smashing equipment. But early on, The Who also showed a knack for crafting catchy pop songs and for later

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producing long-playing “rock operas.” “My Generation” became a youth anthem of the 1960s and now, almost a half-century since its release in 1965, a historical “artifact” of the age of rock and roll. The song, whose lyrics are stuttered as though the singer is affected by drugs or nerves, is probably the best example of The Who’s brash, insolent, smart brand. With “My Generation,” The Who made volume, aggression, and attitude commercial. Their career began in 1964, reached a peak in the early 1970s, and wound down in the early 1980s. In the process, their music became a cultural and emotional touchstone for an emerging phenomenon: an “Atlantic generation” that included fans in the band’s native England and across North America and Western Europe. For a time from 1964 to 1974, The Who were on the cutting edge of rock-and-roll modernity, absorbing the music (itself less than a decade old) as it crossed the Atlantic from the United States and then making it their own by playing really loud and with a flair that drew on neighborhood and working-class (or post–working class) roots in their native London. The Who were modern because they were “postmodern”: privileging neither the technology nor the musical genre, approaching both as disposable (as befitting the commercialism of the era), and, to prove it, destroying—literally breaking to pieces—guitars and other musical equipment on the stage. Ever since Pete Townshend smashed his first guitar at a gig in 1964, other rockers have done so too. Because the gesture has become iconic, it is easy to forget how startling the destruction of equipment, the loud music, and the anger and frustration in the songs were in 1964 or to grasp how this kind of music could become lasting and commercially successful. This book takes up the history of The Who as a way to explore the place of rock-and-roll music in post-1945 Atlantic history. It begins with the long-term historical roots of rock across the Atlantic and then delves into the first decade of The Who (1964–1974), when the four members of the band—Roger Daltrey, John Entwistle, Keith Moon, and Pete Townshend—came together and produced their most lasting and commercially successful music. The book places The Who’s story in a historical and Atlantic framework. The Atlantic world is a “place” in this way of thinking. If we can say that Atlantic history began around 1500 with the movement of Europeans and Africans to the Americas, the idea of an Atlantic community was really articulated in the 1940s, with serious scholarship on the topic beginning a decade later. 8 Bernard Bailyn—

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the preeminent scholar of Atlantic history—has emphasized two related points about the field: its focus on the early modern era (ca. 1500–1800) and the fact that its full history through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries still remains “a tale yet to be told.” 9 The concept and contours of twentieth-century Atlantic history—including its cultural transactions—have not been given the attention that it warrants. As European imperialism generated a Eurocentric paradigm across much of the world after 1500, so the economic, political, and cultural influences of the United States contributed to an Atlantic paradigm in the twentieth century. Both influences are very much there in the history of The Who, even as the popularity of their music and their brand eventually spread beyond Europe and America. The Who’s first audience were young London Mods, but over the years the audience became Atlantic and then nearly global. The Who, like many other British Invasion bands of the 1960s, were transatlantic because of the music traditions they drew from the United States, because they returned that music with a British flair back to America, and because they developed enormous fan bases on each side of the Atlantic: “feedback” here refers not only to the discordant notes they played but also to the back-and-forth of music, music industry, and musicians that, beginning in the 1960s, helped to create an Atlantic generation. The Who and English peer groups—including the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Kinks, Dave Clark Five, Cream, and Led Zeppelin— were crucial to the formation of this Atlantic generation. A focus of the book is fandom, including issues of social class, gender, and localism among fans on both sides of the Atlantic. The Who’s original fans were London Mods, but by the end of the sixties, a much broader type had emerged on both sides of the Atlantic: mostly male, from the working or middle classes, young, probably sporting long hair, not always politicized but frustrated by societal norms and ready to challenge them. By “Atlantic,” I mean especially the North Atlantic, including the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and continental Europe (including France, Denmark, Sweden, West Germany, and the Netherlands). Because The Who are a British group whose greatest success and largest number of fans were in their native Britain and the United States, the coverage is greatest for these two countries. The book has four goals. The first is to place The Who and their performance style in long- and short-term historical and Atlantic con-

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text. A second is to explain how the loud, aggressive music of The Who could have broad and enduring appeal, first in England and then across the Atlantic world. A third is to direct the book toward the undergraduate college classroom and the knowledgeable general reader while also making a contribution to scholarship in the field. A fourth is to make the case for casting The Who as a historical microcosm representative of certain modernizing trends of the last two and a half centuries. Music, to be fully appreciated, has to be heard, and so writing about it starts at a disadvantage. I want to emphasize that my approach to the topic is historical. The book is written as a transnational cultural and social history. It joins insights from pop culture with the historical and comparative perspective that I can bring from my own training. It is not a general history of rock and roll. Rather, the book surveys historical trends, including the long- and short-term developments in music, technology, commerce, politics, and society that contributed to The Who brand. In short, the book shows readers and students how some of the popular culture that they or their parents know has a documentable history and how that history may be placed within a broad geographical and temporal context—the Atlantic world beginning at roughly 1500. An argument that the book makes is that The Who may be viewed as a product of historical developments of which they and their fans were hardly aware. The first chapter is broadly framed, covering the long- and shortterm historical roots of The Who’s music and performance style, including African American blues, rhythm and blues, and other forms of American and British pop music. The chapter includes historical background on the technological, social, and cultural developments across the Atlantic that produced fans and consumers; on traditions in popular entertainment beginning in the eighteenth century that help explain The Who’s appeal; and the short-term (ca. 1950–1960) antecedents of the British rock-and-roll invasion. The Who appear intermittently in this chapter, which concludes with the Atlantic perspective of this history. Chapter 2 adds more historical background, explaining the time frame of the book (1964–1974) and adding detail on the technology of rock music: radio, record players, microphones, electric guitars, and amplifiers. The chapter introduces the managers and promoters who played a crucial role in developing and marketing The Who brand and

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creating a transatlantic music industry. The chapter makes a brief introduction of Who fans and the rock journalists who covered the band, the different venues in which the band played, and the logistics and culture of touring in the 1960s, with examples from England, North America, and Western Europe. The third chapter explores in greater detail the singular loudness of The Who, the elements of violence incorporated into their performance, and the sensory experience of listening to The Who live or alone via radio, record player, or headphones. The chapter provides a profile of crowds attending Who concerts on each side of the Atlantic and differentiates between Mods (their earliest followers) and later fans. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the evolution of The Who’s music, from singles and “power pop” to sophisticated albums, including the rock opera Tommy. Chapter 4 provides greater exploration of Who fans (including the idea of an Atlantic generation), The Who and gender, The Who as quintessentially British, and The Who and social class. The chapter also examines The Who and politics, with additional analysis of the violence in some of their early stage performance and music. The chapter concludes with an introduction to the album Quadrophenia (1973). The last chapter takes up the story of Quadrophenia, like Tommy a rock opera but one that is also a musical memoir of The Who’s origins. The chapter includes a description of how The Who toured the album in England, Europe, and North America. The chapter synthesizes and summarizes themes from the book, winding down the transatlantic history of The Who by situating them in the post-1974 rise of punk and classic rock. The chapter describes the last years of the band and iconic moments near the end of their run: the death of drummer Keith Moon (1978); the events of December 1979 at Cincinnati, Ohio, when eleven fans were killed in a rush for seats; and the band’s breakup in 1982. The chapter concludes with a review of the remaining members’ periodic reunions, including a memorable performance in New York City following the September 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. Chapter 5 resituates The Who in Atlantic historical perspective, as well as in a more global context. The sources for the book are a mix of primary and secondary materials. Primary sources include The Who’s music; stories, interviews, and concert reviews selected from newspapers; published collections of

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interviews with members of The Who and their friends, supporters, and band managers; published fan recollections and testimony; album and CD/DVD liner notes; and rock music journals and magazines. Secondary sources include the abundant popular literature (biographies, pop histories, and the like), video documentaries, and the ever-growing scholarly literature on rock music. Pete Townshend was the main songwriter and most articulate member of the group—indeed, among the most literate and thoughtful of his generation of rock ’n’ rollers. For these reasons, he is an important voice in this book.

CHRONOLOGY

1962: Roger Daltrey and John Entwistle form the Detours—Pete Townshend joins 1964: Keith Moon joins as drummer—Pete Meaden becomes manager—the Detours become the High Numbers—Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp replace Meaden as managers—Pete Townshend smashes his first guitar at a performance—the High Numbers change their name (permanently) to The Who—first performance at the Marquee Club in London 1965: “I Can’t Explain”—first appearances on BBC television and radio—“Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere”—first overseas tour (Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark)—“My Generation” (single)—My Generation (The Who’s first album) released 1966: “Substitute”—A Quick One (album) released—“Happy Jack”— “The Kids Are Alright”—“I’m a Boy”—tours of England, Ireland, and Europe—legal struggle with former producer Shel Talmy 1967: First appearance in the United States, at Murray the K’s shows in New York City—“Pictures of Lily”—Monterey Festival in California and subsequent first North American tour—“I Can See for Miles”— Scandinavian tour—The Who Sell Out

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1968: Tour of Australia and New Zealand—North American tour— “Magic Bus”—performance on the “Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus”—Pete Townshend begins study of Meher Baba 1969: Tommy released—concert tour of Tommy in Europe and North America—Woodstock Festival (United States)—Isle of Wight Festival (England) 1970: Isle of Wight Festival (England)—“The Seeker”—Tommy at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera—Live at Leeds released—North American and European tours, including opera houses 1971: Lifehouse project at the Young Vic Theater (London)—Who’s Next released—“Won’t Get Fooled Again”—North American and British tours 1972: “Join Together”—“Relay”—European tour—at the Fête de l’Humanité 1973: Quadrophenia released—North American and British tours 1974: Odds and Sods released—North American, European, and British tours 1975: Tommy (film)—The Who by Numbers released 1977: The Who play at Kilburn State Theater (London) 1978: Who Are You released—Keith Moon dies 1979: Kenney Jones replaces Keith Moon—The Kids Are Alright (film)—Quadrophenia (film)—Cincinnati disaster 1981: Face Dances released 1982: It’s Hard released—Farewell Tour 1989: Tour for Tommy twenty-fifth anniversary

CH RON OLOGY

1997: Quadrophenia tour 2001: Concert for New York City 2002: John Entwistle dies 2006: Endless Wire released

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1 “MY GENERATION” The Who in Historical Perspective

Rock and roll has a history. Or, perhaps, a better way to put it is to say that rock and roll has two histories. The more familiar and conventional of the two is the one that begins in the United States in the 1950s with the music of Bill Haley, Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley, and other performers who went on to become deities in rock’s pantheon. This is a pop history that has been mythologized and reified over the years through glossy coffee table books and video documentaries and in the sensational biographies of those well-known rockers whose lives seemed to follow a predictable arc: the rise to fame, the fall, and—depending on whether or not one survived the hedonistic years of stardom—the resurrection. But rock and roll has another, perhaps less familiar, history: one that has deep and dispersed roots and that is in fact tied to many of the momentous developments in society, economy, politics, technology, and culture across the Atlantic in the last 250 years. This is a long-term history about which most of those belonging to the art and enterprise of rock music—musicians, managers, promoters, studio engineers, and fans—seem dimly aware. But rock and roll is a product of both, and the familiar short-term pop history cannot really be understood without turning to the deeper, long-term history. The Who—a British rock band that had an unremarkable beginning in the working-class clubs and former music halls of the Shepherd’s Bush section of early 1960s London but which, by the end of the 1

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decade, had become one of the best-known and most influential groups across the Atlantic—was a product of both the long- and short-term histories of rock and roll. In this sense, it is possible to tell the story of one rock band as emblematic of certain historical trends: The Who, as standing for something larger than the band itself, is a theme that runs through the book. The Who are, of course, not the only rock band that can be said to have represented something bigger than themselves. In fact, they cultivated certain inimitable qualities designed to set them apart, contributing to their early success and to their remarkable longevity in a business populated by endless one-hit wonders. One quality that distinguished The Who and that makes them a good subject for a history like this is the awareness that the group possessed of their place in the larger sweep of things; this is particularly true of guitarist and principal songwriter Pete Townshend. This self-consciousness about the historical moment to which they belonged imparted an unusual prescience to the brand they created, a brand that also made them rich and famous. For those who are open to the idea that the big picture of history can reveal itself in “little” histories like this, it is not hard to cast moments in The Who’s rock-and-roll story as microcosms: historical capsules that capture the convergence of long- and short-term trends. 1 Rock bands came and went quickly in the 1960s. The Who lasted a long time (two of the four original surviving members are still performing), became famous, and achieved financial and critical success because they produced a string of catchy pop singles, including “My Generation,” which became an anthem for its era; because of their influential long-playing albums Tommy (1969), Live at Leeds (1970), Who’s Next (1971), and Quadrophenia (1973); and for the memorable personalities that made up the band, including Townshend, who was to become a kind of rock-and-roll sage. But even if all these accomplishments were somehow taken away, indeed if the band had folded like so many of their peer groups after just a year or two, The Who still would have a special place in rock history for two other qualities: the loudness of their music and their memorable stage performance. Here is a journalist’s description of a Who gig at London’s fashionable Marquee Club in 1965: I arrived late and heard what sounded like someone sawing through an aluminum dustbin with a chainsaw to accompaniment of a drum-

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mer who was obviously in time with another group on another planet and the most deafening bass guitar in the world. The vocalist was virtually inaudible amidst the cacophony. I turned on my heel to leave but Kit [Lambert, one of The Who’s managers] came up behind me . . . promising . . . , “This will be a moment you will remember all your life.” He pulled me into the sweaty, smelly confines of the Marquee where a large number of [Mods, a youth subculture of the era] in their vented jackets and Fred Perry shirts leapt about in delight. I was astonished. The long lanky guitarist with the big hooter (Townshend) was doing a passing impression of a malfunctioning windmill, all the while extracting a tortuous scream from his guitar which sounded as though several Siamese cats were being electrocuted inside his speaker cabinet. This, I was reliably informed, was “feedback.” Then the surly looking blond thug (singer Roger Daltrey) up front . . . threw his microphone at the drummer (Keith Moon) who retaliated by hurling his sticks at his head and thrashing around his kit like a whirling dervish. The bass player’s (John Entwistle) hair was dyed jet black (his tribute to Elvis) and in his black clothes on a very dark stage was almost invisible. He made up for this by turning his volume control up so high that he could be heard in the next world. Finally the apocalypse arrived on cue when the guitarist raised his guitar above his head and smashed it to splinters on the stage while the drummer kicked his drums in the general direction of the vocalist who made a determined effort to hit him over the head with one his cymbals. When the dust finally settled and the cheers subsided, Kit turned to me. “Wasn’t that wonderful, dear boy?” he asked. 2

The Who performed in a physical, almost violent style. They were also deafeningly loud. So loud that lyrics and individual instruments could be hard to distinguish. So loud that the music could be heard at a distance. So loud that the volume had a physical effect, leaving some listeners queasy and disoriented. So loud that it could leave ears ringing for days afterward. It is not surprising that some Who fans would later attribute hearing problems to the concerts they attended in the 1960s and 1970s. Nor is it surprising that Pete Townshend has become a spokesperson on behalf of preventing tinnitus—the ringing in the ears brought about, in his case, by decades of playing and listening to really loud music.

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Along with the sound, the other ingredient that set The Who apart from peer groups and left early observers scratching their heads in bewilderment were acts of onstage destruction: Townshend smashing his guitar, Keith Moon kicking over the drum kit, and singer Roger Daltrey finding ways to extract awful sounds from the microphone. This was strange music that was somehow also appealing. A Swedish fan attending a Who concert in Stockholm not long after the Marquee show described above recalled the odd thrill produced by the noise and mayhem: On stage there were lots of Marshall amps and speakers looking as destroyed as I’d seen from photos. We forced our way towards the stage (not very easy). People were arriving in a steady stream. Then the music started. What a sound. And what volume. What a feeling. The crowd waved back and forth, one second three metres from the stage, the next right in front of it. . . . I guess there was some kind of panic, you couldn’t do anything but follow the waves. I got a terrible feeling someone had fallen down on the floor we jumped around on, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. Then Pete started to smash his guitar and his speakers, and I started shivering. Somebody let off a smoke bomb. It was total chaos. Pete ended the berserk by pushing his whole Marshall stack into the audience. This was of course the heaviest live concert I had ever experienced in my life. 3

Many observers and journalists responded to this part of the act with shock, mystification, or disgust. But from the beginning, rock-and-roll fans—in the band’s native England and then as The Who began to travel in continental Europe, the United States, and Canada—thrilled to the seemingly purposeless destruction. These two elements of The Who’s story—the loud music and onstage destruction—have since become a well-known chapter in the pop history of rock music. Even today when The Who show up in print or on television as part of the master narrative of rock and roll, it is often these qualities that take center stage. Since Pete Townshend smashed his first guitar at a gig in 1964, other rockers have done so, too, such that the gesture has become an iconic part of rock performance. Accordingly, it can be easy to forget how truly startling the destruction of equipment seemed in 1965, along with the loud music and the anger and frustration in the songs. Or how this kind of music could possibly

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become commercial or promise any kind of longevity. Or what it all meant. Pop music, even its brashest new child—rock and roll—had not seen anything quite like this. The Who introduced ingredients to rock and roll that were eyecatching, ear-splitting, and just off the emerging norm, partly to make them stand out against an array of impressive acts coming onto the music scene on both sides of the Atlantic in the early 1960s. To name just a few of the best known, in England the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Kinks were contemporaries of The Who; in the United States, where the variety of pop music formats was greater, there were Bob Dylan, the Byrds, James Brown, and Motown artists such as Smokey Robinson, Stevie Wonder, and the Supremes. The near simultaneous appearance of so many performers who were to become among the most famous and commercially successful pop acts of the twentieth century at a particular moment (the early to mid-1960s) and at a particular place (the Atlantic world of England, Western Europe, and North America) makes it possible to cast the story of The Who, their generation of rock fans, and the strange combination of volume and violence that were part of their brand, as a historical convergence: a development that we can situate in broader context and for which we can seek the threads of causation—the “causes”—that brought it all about. Pop music from the 1960s, like everything around us, has a history—a history with long- and short-term roots. Unlike the adolescent frustrations that Townshend was struggling to get across in the band’s first hit single, “I Can’t Explain,” the history and appeal of The Who’s special brand of rock and roll can be investigated, written about, and, indeed, explained.

“SPARKS”: THE LONG-TERM ROOTS There are few historical precedents for making really loud music and smashing instruments onstage. Among the handful of precursors to The Who was the Italian artist Alberto Savinio, who during Europe’s interwar period (1919–1939) sometimes destroyed a piano at the conclusion to his performances. 4 In fact, The Who’s combination of loud music and smashing of instruments was a more or less authentic, revolutionary innovation.

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Revolutionary as the act may have been and aside from the noise and violence, The Who and other rock bands followed in a historical path of music and performance that had deep, dispersed roots in British, European, African, and North American culture and that over time merged into a stream of Atlantic popular culture. 5 Historians tend to think of the short term as laying out the proximate causes of an event and occurring within the space of years or decades, while the long term describes developments that evolve over the course of centuries. The short-term history naturally reflects the long-term process. The Who played rock and roll, a form of music that justifiably can be said to have been born in the United States in the 1950s. Indeed, the phrase probably dates from its use by an American disc jockey (or DJ) in the early 1950s. But while the phrase and the genre are relatively recent, the roots of the music derive from a mélange of traditions coming out of the Atlantic basin during the early modern era (ca. 1500–1800). The British and European roots go even deeper, to religious and secular traditions that began in the Middle Ages (ca. 1000–1500). The Who were a British band, and in Britain as elsewhere in Europe, the music of the popular classes— what would in the twentieth century sometimes be vaguely labeled “folk” or “roots” music—remained for a long time, especially the music of the countryside, drawing on agricultural and religious practices in European peasant culture, including carnival, charivari, and mumming. 6 Carnival was the pre-Lenten period of feasting and celebration. Charivari was the mocking celebration done by villagers to newlyweds. Mummers were troupes of street performers who acted out plays in villages. All three traditions sought to temporarily “turn the world upside down” by allowing persons from the lower classes to poke fun at those of a higher status. In hindsight, secular medieval music’s most important contribution to the future was probably the troubadours: itinerant musician/poets originally from southern France. Unlike many other forms of medieval art and culture, the troubadours’ musical tradition was not specifically religious, focusing instead on themes of love and play. This was a music designed to entertain patrons in the courts of Western Europe, but also one that was played by and found audiences among the lower classes of both city and countryside. 7 The playfulness and ephemeral qualities of the troubadours’ music is harder to locate in another of rock’s long-term roots—the music of the Christian church, which was especially intended to elevate and help

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guide the pilgrim’s “progress” to heaven. Nonetheless, in England during the Middle Ages, the church—Catholic until the Elizabethan settlement of the sixteenth century led to the creation of the Anglican church—served as a kind of musical middle ground between the folk traditions of the peasantry, who remained the majority of the population during the Middle Ages and who sang mostly in everyday language (the vernacular), and the nobility, who sang in French following the Norman conquest of England in the eleventh century. 8 But for most ordinary British believers—whether Anglican, Catholic, or, later, Methodist, Presbyterian, or one of the many smaller sects, such as Quakers, that came in the wake of the Protestant reformation of the sixteenth century and the civil wars of the seventeenth—the church or chapel was both a place to hear sermons and a village or neighborhood institution where song became central to one’s upbringing. Well into the twentieth century, the church and choir were the places where, for many British, the love of song was first cultivated. This was the case for many twentieth-century rock and rollers. Roger Daltrey, John Entwistle, and Pete Townshend all sang in the neighborhood church choir. 9 The popular music heard and played in British and European cities had somewhat different roots from that of rural music. From the early modern period well into the nineteenth century, the music of the urban lower classes of London, Paris, Vienna, Milan, and elsewhere especially drew on entertainment originally intended for royal courts or the upper classes (the nobility and upper bourgeoisie). The music that we now often think of as classical, including opera, tended to trickle down the social ladder from high to low. This is a different pattern from that of the twentieth century, when the varieties of popular music that dominated in both city and countryside mostly drew their inspiration from the poorer or middle rungs of society. As music and performance moved from high to low in European cities, certain elements were altered to broaden its appeal for audiences less familiar with the techniques and purposes of composition. In seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury Italy, opera evolved in two directions: opera seria, the established form intended for a sophisticated audience, and opera buffa, a variation often incorporating elements of folk comedy that was sometimes a lampoon of the original: bawdier, more sentimental, with stock characters using language (including dialect) that a typical urban audience of artisans, laborers, small merchants, and their families could

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understand and whose story (libretto) usually ended with the triumph of common sense over upper-class egotism. Opera buffa—which was fully formed in European cities by 1740 or so—also introduced entertaining mechanical devices to the stage and a “vulgar carnival atmosphere” that, while criticized by purists, appealed to a broad range of social classes. 10 Opera had originally been mostly a private entertainment for members of the royal court and nobility, but by the eighteenth century, “impresarios” were tailoring performances for a mix of people seated in a range of venues. Performers moved across Europe from city to city in “troupes,” renting spaces and hiring local musicians to accompany the performances. The lower cost of admission fit the new audience. At the same time, opera buffa audiences developed the habit of interacting with onstage performers, who placed greater emphasis on acting and less on singing than in opera seria. Gradually, a kind of performance repertoire evolved in Western European opera, with musicians and audience members prepared to play out their respective roles. 11 The repertoire was altered during the years of the French Revolution (1789–1794) as audiences in the parterre were tamed by bourgeois social mores that kept them confined to their seats, applauding the performance only at the appropriate moment—a rule to which modern audiences still adhere. 12 An interactive repertoire between audience and musicians similar to that of the eighteenth century emerged in the rock concert experience of the 1960s and 1970s. This was certainly the case for The Who—with Keith Moon and Pete Townshend, in particular, engaging in dialogue, sometimes bordering on insult, with members of the audience. Townshend, working under the influence of manager Kit Lambert, who came from a classical music background, even “started to use baroque (era) chords” in the music that he wrote. 13 The opera buffa pedigree is also easy to see in The Who’s “A Quick One While He’s Away” (a mini-opera from 1967’s The Who Sell Out album), some of Townshend’s later individual projects, and especially the band’s rock opera Tommy, which fully incorporated the opera buffa form into the twentieth century’s age of rock and roll. It is tempting to interpret developments in eighteenth-century European opera as signs of the slow disintegration of a formerly impermeable border between high and low—a long historical evolution that could also be seen in other areas of European culture, including literature and painting, and that then became characteristic of twentieth-

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century culture. Almost from the start, opera buffa appealed not just to the lower classes but to many in the middle classes and nobility. This movement between high and low in the popularization of art was part of a larger trend in European society. As historians have described, by the eighteenth century, “market forces” were being felt in many segments of European society, from the baking and selling of bread to the hiring of workers for construction projects to the jostling of customers from all backgrounds paying for seats at the theater or opera. In this evolving, increasingly commercial, gradually more popular setting, it made good financial sense for musicians and entrepreneurs to attract as wide a base of customers as possible. Composers and performers, who had been viewed as technicians in the seventeenth century, adapted to the new regime of free enterprise by styling themselves as both artists and selfpromoting entrepreneurs. 14 The most famous example of the new-style entrepreneurial talent is Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791), who operated comfortably in both high and low spheres despite an upbringing meant to appeal to Habsburg court society of the Austrian Empire. Indeed, the young Mozart seemed instinctually drawn to the raucous and to opera buffa: two of his most famous works, “Figaro” (1786) and “Cosi fan tutte” (1790), were produced for this genre. 15 From the early modern era to the end of the eighteenth century, the carnivalesque and the vulgar—long a part of the cultural life of the European rural and lower classes—moved steadily into the opera houses of Western Europe and, from there, to other entertainment venues. Of course, serious opera (which Mozart also composed) did not die out. There was room for both it and opera buffa, or the “light opera” form that it took in the nineteenth century. The Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901) was a successful composer of light opera in the nineteenth century, as were the team of Charles Gilbert (1866–1910) and Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900) in England. 16 In the twentieth century, Broadway musicals in the United States were to take many of their cues from the opera buffa tradition. The Who’s rock opera Tommy became a virtual opera buffa when translated to film in 1975, as it did in 1993 when it moved to New York City’s Broadway theater. Tommy, with its long-term historical roots in the eighteenth-century opera buffa and short-term origins in the age of rock and roll, remains a popular musical play to stage through the present with an appeal to contemporary audiences, prob-

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ably analogous to the work of Gilbert and Sullivan in the late-nineteenth century. Aside from opera, there were other long-term developments in European and British cultural history—some of them musical, some not— that, with the benefit of hindsight, we can say paved the way for rock and roll to emerge in the second half of the twentieth century. The Romantic era of literature, theater, painting, and music (ca. 1815–1848) played a part by emphasizing and making commercially successful certain personal qualities that still strike us as perfectly modern. These qualities included genius, inspiration, an emphasis on individual liberty, and youth. Mozart had been a kind of star on the European cultural scene in the late-eighteenth century. This was a little unusual in his day; indeed, the term “star” was not used in a way recognizable to us until at least the 1820s. 17 But there was more of this to come. The Polish-born composer and musician Frederick Chopin (1810–1849) came to epitomize the Romantic-era artiste, winning over Parisian audiences with his passionate musical performances and frail physique. Not unlike sixties rockers Jimi Hendrix or Jim Morrison, Chopin seemed a predestined character set upon a course toward a tragic, early death played out upon a public stage. 18 The pianist and composer Franz Liszt (1811–1886) was another nineteenth-century Romantic-era talent who prefigured some of the famous artistes of the twentieth. Interestingly, soon after bringing The Who’s Tommy to the movie screen, the film director Ken Russell latched onto the parallels between the ages of Romanticism and rock and roll when he cast Roger Daltrey as the title character in his Lisztomania (1975), a madcap biopic of the fated nineteenth-century performer for whom the former sheet metal worker from West London now seemed the ideal choice. Mozart had been the first great modern synthesizer of elite and popular music in Europe. Neither he nor successors such as Chopin or Liszt shied away from the adoration of fans. The democratization and commercialization that were occurring in music and performance in Western Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and that were part of the long-term roots of rock and roll helped legitimate and make profitable the “profane” music that had for so long been outshone by the “sacred” in the European tradition. These musical developments, all of which served as roots for rock music and The Who, cannot be separated from the other great historical developments of this peri-

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od, one of which was the emergence of black American culture, itself a product of something quite remote from the British country churches and Viennese opera balls that were also a part of the long-term history: the transatlantic slave trade.

“SUBSTITUTE”: BLACK AMERICA’S CONTRIBUTION TO THE WHO “Substitute,” a top-ten single in 1966 for The Who, mocked the facades of British society with an irony and sense of humor that was unusual in pop music of the day, though typical of the lyrics of the precocious twenty-one-year-old Pete Townshend. “You think we look pretty good together / You think my shoes are made of leather” went the tune, though the singer was really just “a substitute for another guy.” When Roger Daltrey sang, “I look all white, but my dad was black,” he was pointing to the obvious prejudices of the North Atlantic world in which he and the rest of the band had grown up. This was a world in which rock and roll arguably owed its origins more to the music of black Americans than to any other group and yet a world in which centuries of racial oppression and prejudice meant that it was white performers in the twentieth century, including The Who, who would especially reap the benefits—accolades, career, money—of that music. In listening to well-known Who tunes such as “Magic Bus” or “Baba O’Riley,” it seems odd to think that medieval British culture and the work of Mozart could have historical ties to the band. Indeed, the connection might not be there were it not for the transatlantic slave trade—the terrible thread tying together the long-term musical histories of Africans, Europeans, and Americans to sixties British Invasion bands such as The Who. The transatlantic slave trade is one chapter in the long history of European commerce and empire in Africa and the Americas that began in the fifteenth century and continued until after the Second World War. The forced movement of enslaved peoples from Africa to the Americas started in the sixteenth century and continued until the trade was ended through the combined efforts of abolitionist societies and governments in Britain and Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century, although slavery persisted in the New World in the United States, Brazil, and Cuba into the second half of the centu-

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ry. In the United States, the “peculiar institution” ended only with a civil war (1861–1865), the emancipation of 1863, and an amendment to the constitution. Still, it would take another century for black Americans to become fully enfranchised citizens. 19 Enslaved Africans originating mainly from western Africa and carrying with them musical traditions stemming from agricultural and hunting ways of life were brought by Europeans to South and Central America, the Caribbean, and what became the Southern United States. During the centuries of slavery and the decades following emancipation, blacks in the rural American South retained traces of this earlier history, transforming African songs into American “field hollers” and a call-andresponse cadence that fueled the rhythm of agricultural work. 20 Some of these very old African elements were evident in twentieth-century pop music. As with European popular music, religious institutions played a crucial role in black American music. This was notably true of gospel, which came out of Southern churches in the nineteenth century and then expanded to Northern cities after the turn of the century as blacks embarked upon a “great migration” in search of opportunity and better living conditions. 21 With remarkably few exceptions, the famous black American performers of the first half of the twentieth century— whether they played jazz, ragtime, rock, rhythm and blues, soul, or blues—began singing and playing music in church. Despite the limits on civil rights for black Americans, black pop music—often labeled “race” music in the United States in the first half of the century—had achieved some commercial success by the 1920s as radio expanded and as music producers and promoters began scouring Southern cities and countryside for the singers and musicians who could sell sheet music and records. Music entrepreneurs seeing the economic potential of black pop music in the 1940s and 1950s marketed some styles as “rhythm and blues.” At roughly the same moment, the “deep blues” sound migrated with blacks from the Delta (a geographical and cultural region stretching from Louisiana to north of Memphis) to northern American cities less plagued by the legal and economic segregation of Jim Crow: Detroit, St. Louis, and, especially, Chicago. It was in Chicago that the mostly acoustic deep blues style was electrified to create Chicago blues. 22 All these developments would come to have a truly profound impact on a section of British youth, such as the members of The Who, who

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almost invariably went through a phase of musical development as teenagers where they delved as deeply as they could into the music of the black American blues masters and then, as young band members, covered their songs. In the early 1960s, when American records were hard to come by for British teenagers, Townshend was able to exploit the extensive blues collection of an American friend, Tom Wright. 23 Once Townshend encountered Wright and his collection of hard-to-get R&B and blues records, “everything changed.” In his autobiography, Townshend recalled visiting his new friend, guitar in hand and eager to listen to the records: I had already bought a number of blues albums of my own—by Leadbelly, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and Big Bill Broonzy. I had heard Chuck Berry, but only his pop-chart stuff. [Tom Wright] had albums by Lightnin’ Hopkins, Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker, Little Walter, Snooks Eaglin and other blues artists entirely new to me. . . . Every album was a revelation. . . . You had to be prepared to really listen, and ultimately really feel the music. This seemed less absurd for a young middle-class white boy in 1963 than it does today, so I proceeded without difficulty to learn to play the blues. 24

The Who, like other British bands, fully grasped and by and large acknowledged the enormous debt that they owed to black American musicians such as Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, and Jimmy Reed, even though The Who would never really develop much of a fan base among black populations in England and North America. Listening to the American blues masters and other American music, including rockabilly and the country music of stars such as Johnny Cash, served as a kind of primary school education for The Who’s generation of British musicians and fans. It also left them with an affinity for older black Americans. These were role models that sometimes set them apart from Americans of their own generation, highlighting a curious divergence between British and many American rock fans. For Roger Daltrey, “we identified with American blues and those early black American artists. We started listening and thought this is great. And we started playing the blues.” 25 Yet, on the other side of the Atlantic, institutional and cultural racism made it difficult for white American kids to embrace the black American roots of pop music with the same kind of empathy. And while there was racism in British society, it was of a different order than

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that in the United States. British “lads” drawn to music from across the Atlantic saw themselves as an oppressed social class able to identify with the “hard knocks” lives of the older blues legends whose songs they so loved. An early manager of The Who, Chris Stamp, himself a product of the British working class, thought that “all these young [British] kids loved the blues because the working classes were in a similar sociological position to blacks in America.” 26 Still, it was probably Elvis Presley—the young white American rock and roller who himself drew on African American, country, and gospel music in his native Mississippi—who fired the imagination of “wannabe” British rockers such as John Entwistle and Roger Daltrey. Daltrey remembered being “absolutely gobsmacked” the first time he saw Elvis on television. Elvis was so new, so different, that it seemed to Daltrey as though the Southern American was “a Martian.” Yet for so many British teenagers like Daltrey, when Elvis appeared, “suddenly the world made sense.” 27 Elvis was not much older than Daltrey, Entwistle, and the rest of The Who when he made a career for himself. If he could make it in pop music, then so could his young British fans. American pop music transformed the listening habits of British youth. Still, The Who, Rolling Stones, Animals, Dave Clark Five, Hollies, Kinks, Cream, and other bands were British, and so the stamp that they put on the blues was distinctive—“Maximum R&B” was how The Who advertised it in one of the more memorable poster images of the era: rock and blues songs originating from the American South and Chicago but always electric, really loud, and with a distinctive attitude that fit the time and place: London circa 1964.

“I’M FREE”: POLITICAL CHANGE AND ROCK MUSIC Blacks in the Americas endured slavery for centuries. Upon gaining their freedom and in combination with the technological and other developments described below, their musical traditions were to become the critical ingredient in the recipe for rock and roll—the variety of American pop culture that, like jazz before it, was to have so much sway across the world in the twentieth century. The political context, too, played a role. The cultural roots of rock music were accompanied by and, indeed, in some ways dependent on the Atlantic revolutions of the

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late-eighteenth century. Political freedom enhanced cultural influence. For African Americans, the two—political rights and cultural success— slowly advanced together. For British kids such as The Who, the democratic political changes of the previous three or four generations opened up opportunities of creative expression and pop consumption unavailable to their forebears. These, too, were prerequisites of the age of rock and roll. The parallel shift in the early modern European musical tradition and the makeup of audiences with the transatlantic slave trade were critical long-term ingredients in the development of twentieth-century pop music. Likewise—if we continue to think with a long-term perspective—some of the great political and economic developments of the eighteenth century also belong to the history that helped produce rock and roll and The Who. The American and French revolutions of the late-eighteenth century and the industrial revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were historical watersheds for Europe, North America, and, indirectly, for many parts of the world. Odd as the connection may seem to today’s music fans, without these political and economic developments the later emergence of rock and roll is all but unimaginable. With the age of democratic revolutions (ca. 1776 to 1830) in Europe and the Americas, a historical engine started that would transform subjects into citizens claiming human rights, including the expectation of active participation in politics. 28 Beginning in the late-eighteenth century, through political and social revolution or through the reforms enacted by their elected representatives, citizens could produce the kind of societies that most of us have come to take for granted. Of course, the achievement of human rights—including a free press, freedom of religion, suffrage (the right to vote), and the right to hold political office—did not happen everywhere or to everyone in a single moment but rather advanced piecemeal or in waves from society to society over the last two and a half centuries. To cite just a few examples of at least partial enfranchisement in the last two centuries: working-class males in England by the mid-nineteenth century, emancipated slaves in the United States after the 1860s, women through most of the Atlantic world after 1918, and young adults eighteen years of age or older in the second half of the twentieth century. At roughly the same time, these growing categories of voting citizens also began to win economic rights, such as control of personal property and the right

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to join trade unions, mostly in the same way as political rights: through reform and revolution that produced new constitutions and laws. Most new or reformed political and economic systems across the Atlantic world since the eighteenth century have been more or less based on laissez-faire principles that viewed individuals as economic free agents, free to win or fail economically. 29 Laissez-faire ideas embedded in constitutions, laws, and, increasingly, an evolving market culture were part of the first industrial revolution (ca. 1750–1850), which started in northern and central Europe and was then disseminated through North America. The modernizing process continued through a second industrial revolution (ca. 1850–1914). The first industrial revolution was about the development of textiles, railroads, and heavy industry. The second saw greater emphasis on technology, science, and expanding the choice of consumer goods—whether labor-saving devices, such as the sewing machine and vacuum cleaners, or objects designed for entertainment, such as inexpensive newspapers and magazines, “moving pictures,” or phonographs. The industrializing revolution also regularized the measurement of time and work, consolidating the hours of labor but also creating space for leisure after the end of the workday and on the “weekend.” Entertainment venues adjusted to the new schedule of life. As the Atlantic revolutions helped turn subjects into citizens, the industrial revolutions helped turn producers into consumers—and after 1950 the kinds of consumers who would spend money on rock-and-roll records. 30 This period of political and economic modernization and the development of something new in world history—the citizen/consumer of the Atlantic world—had a long formative period in the decades from about 1750 to 1920. Even though we mostly take for granted the societies produced by these changes, it is nonetheless tremendously important to recognize them as part of the long-term root of many twentiethcentury cultural developments, including rock and roll. It is not hard to make the case that today’s world is as much the product of the Atlantic and industrial revolutions as it is of any other set of historical processes. By 1900, in those places where rock and roll was born and had its greatest initial impact—North America and Western Europe—there were populations of citizens/consumers with the time and money to spend on entertainers who came from conditions very much like their

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own. This could not have happened without the great political and economic changes of the Atlantic and industrial revolutions.

“PICTURES OF LILY”: THE BRITISH MUSIC HALL TRADITION AND POPULAR ENTERTAINMENT ACROSS THE ATLANTIC It will come as no surprise that The Who—four young men, all of them from working- or lower-middle-class backgrounds and with no special interest in the topic—did not write about the industrial revolutions in their songs, at least not directly. Still, in England, the process of industrialization after about 1750 both created new social classes and deepened divisions among them, and as individuals, The Who were deeply conscious of the stratum of English society from which they came. Pete Townshend, especially, but also Roger Daltrey had a keen sense of the group as products of a British past that was not all that distant. If the event that weighed most heavily on Townshend’s songwriting was the Second World War (1939–1945), other developments from England’s past—empire, industry, and social class—were there, too. Among the many social and cultural changes that accompanied the age of revolutions and the industrial revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were the ways that music was performed and the places where it was heard. It is not hard to imagine Who fans feeling at home in an eighteenth-century opera buffa but even more so in a British music hall of the nineteenth or early-twentieth centuries. Music halls were one variety of new-style music emporium that sprouted across the Atlantic world in those places where a commercialization of culture and a democratization of politics were happening: England, the United States, Canada, France (where the English term “music hall” was adopted into the language), Belgium, Germany, as well as Latin America. 31 Still, there was something distinctive about the British music hall, which by 1850 was a place where workers, sometimes with their families, gathered at the end of the work day to sing, drink, relax, and be entertained. By 1868, London had about two hundred music halls offering a solid mix of entertainment: singers, musical and theater troupes, magicians, ventriloquists, and more. They were among the first venues to emphasize “variety.” Indeed, over the years, music halls be-

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came mostly just this: large rooms or auditoriums with space for hundreds of people and offering inexpensive, assorted entertainment, food, and drink. Some of the best known were in the working-class and immigrant East End section of London—areas of the city where the “cockney” type was born. 32 By the turn of the century, the styles and locations of music halls had expanded across the city, offering variety entertainment for assorted crowds. Some continued to cater to working-class tastes, while others were geared toward upper-class “men of leisure.” Although music halls originated in London, they became a national phenomenon and a breeding ground for many of the most famous British performers of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. 33 The British music hall as a popular entertainment venue peaked before the First World War (1914–1918). During the interwar years (1919–1939), music halls continued to emphasize variety, which now included newer kinds of music, such as jazz from the United States. By the 1920s, the success of two other novel forms of entertainment— radio and movies—signaled an end to the music hall as it had been known. But the physical structures and the attachment to neighborhood and local culture remained. When The Who began performing in Shepherd’s Bush and other sections of working-class West London in the early 1960s, they sometimes did so in venues that had been built as music halls a century earlier and to audiences whose parents and grandparents had long been patrons. Naturally, popular entertainment born of the nineteenth-century commercialization of entertainment and offering a variety of acts was not exclusive to England. Many forms similar to that of the British music hall and likewise catering to audiences receptive to variety could be found throughout Western and Central Europe and the Americas. “Vaudeville,” “burlesque,” and “cabaret” were all nineteenth- and twentieth-century forms of popular entertainment meant to appeal to socially mixed audiences that did not require the fixed attention of, for instance, serious opera. The terms themselves derive mostly from the French, and it was in France that the popular musical styles of cabaret, chanson, and café concert thrived in the second half of the nineteenth century. 34 But the forms of entertainment that they represented could be found all across the Atlantic and into central Europe. New York, London, Paris, and Vienna were all centers of the “revolution” in popular music described by Derek Scott. 35 Burlesque, also with European

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roots, normally included a “revue” of acts, some of which in the United States could be on the bawdy side: the American “striptease” was an offshoot of burlesque. In the United States and Canada, vaudeville was burlesque’s more family-friendly counterpart, enjoying a golden age (ca. 1870–1930) that, like the British music hall, declined with the advent of radio and cinema. Cabaret, too, offered sometimes ribald entertainment. Originating in Paris in the 1870s, cabaret was a slightly more highbrow version of burlesque, with comedians offering satire and with female dancers showing their legs, with much singing and a master of ceremonies. The “Chat Noir” in the Montmartre district of Paris became the model for the cabaret, but there were distinctive national styles in the United States and Germany. In Berlin of the interwar years, cabaret took on arguably its most famous aspect. 36 This cultural legacy is easy to see in the career of The Who, with Townshend acknowledging that the group “knew that what [they] were doing owed more to the British music hall than to grand opera.” 37 The “Lily” of their song “Pictures of Lily” is a popular performer in the style of cabaret. Furthermore, the “wink of an eye” with which The Who smashed their instruments and the antics of Keith Moon—who would have fit in perfectly well in the era of burlesque and vaudeville (see his performance as “Uncle Ernie” in the film version of Tommy)—are clear evidence of The Who’s ties to the British music hall tradition. 38

“PINBALL WIZARD”: TECHNOLOGY AND ROCK MUSIC When The Who and other English bands began performing in the early 1960s, before they became famous and shifted to larger venues, they sometimes did so in British music halls or pubs with roots in the nineteenth century. Opera buffa, the individual artiste playing to socially mixed audiences, popular entertainment venues offering a variety of acts—all of these developments were set in an Atlantic world where, after the eighteenth century, individuals increasingly had the political and economic opportunity to follow their own stars. There were the ingredients that made rock and roll possible in England, Europe, and North America. But the long-term historical roots of rock and roll are not only cultural, political, and economic but also technological. Indeed, it is impossible to think of rock music without taking into account

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the many devices that gave it that distinctive electrical and amplified sound and made it portable. In the twentieth century, more people than ever could listen to more kinds of music in a greater variety of settings—concert hall, living room, bedroom, and while on the move— because of advances in technology. The phonograph and radio were two crucial technological developments in the spread of pop music in the twentieth century. The first practical phonograph or gramophone—the American record player of the 1960s—was developed by the American inventor Thomas Edison in the late 1870s. Phonographs were sold commercially in the United States and England by the 1880s and subsequently in continental Europe and elsewhere. It is not surprising that music was among the first sounds to be recorded. At the start, sound was reproduced by being pressed onto metal cylinders or discs. By the early 1920s, the disc was the most widely used recording format, as it was to remain through the 1970s. By the 1940s, most records were pressed onto discs made of vinyl, which was a relatively inexpensive and durable material that was ideal for the mass market. By the 1950s, electromagnetic tape and the tape recorder were replacing recording onto wax master discs. The digital recording that recently has come to dominate was introduced in the 1970s. CDs (compact discs) were available by the 1980s, all but eliminating the market for vinyl records and cassette tapes. 39 Today, music is available simply by downloading or streaming from the Internet via computer or other device, ushering in yet more changes in how music is acquired and listened to. All these technical changes made more music more available to more people than ever before while challenging musicians and recording engineers to keep up with the technical innovations that seemed to redo the music business every generation or less. In hindsight, we can see that the changes in technology and music format in the age of rock took place with amazing speed. 40 By the late 1960s and early 1970s as The Who were becoming famous, fans could listen to the group in any number of ways: on single vinyl records or long-play albums; on cassette or eight-track tape; by turning on the radio or television; or, if a tour landed nearby, as a live act. In the years when The Who and their first fans were growing into young adults, from the late 1940s through the late 1960s, many persons listened to music on the radio or on a record: whether a 45—a vinyl

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record moving at 45 rpm (rotations per minute) that had a single song on each side (the A-side, normally a hit tune heard on the radio; the Bside, a less familiar tune)—or an LP (long play), moving at 33 1/3 rpm, which provided forty-five minutes or more of music but was more expensive than a 45. (Before the LP, the 78-rpm record had been popular.) A standard LP might have five songs on each side of the disc. The early rock-and-roll hits were released as 45-rpm singles. It was not until the mid-1960s that an album culture began to develop, with rock bands now conceiving and releasing entire sets of songs on “33s.” The Who belonged to both phases of rock record history, initially establishing themselves as a singles band with hits such as “I Can’t Explain” and “My Generation.” But as the band and their managers began to explore new directions in the late sixties and as Townshend’s song-writing skills matured, The Who moved almost seamlessly into recording sophisticated concept albums such as Tommy and Quadrophenia, in which the full set of songs revolved around a central theme. There were other technological developments that contributed to twentieth-century pop entertainment and to which a link to The Who and other rock bands seems obvious only in hindsight. One was the microphone, or mic, which was developed in the second half of the nineteenth century and was incorporated into musical and other performances beginning in the 1920s. The mic is important because the amplified sound it produced allowed the individual performer, whether singer or musician, to be as loud as the rest of the band. In the past, it was not hard for instruments to dominate the stage; with a mic, singers could now compete. Every rock-and-roll band would have a front man (or woman) who sang the songs and was attached to a microphone. It was only with the aid of a mic that Roger Daltrey could match Townshend and Entwistle’s loud guitars and Moon’s thundering drums. Daltrey would add a distinctive, nonmusical twist to the use of the mic by swinging it on a long cord during concerts—a gesture that, like Moon’s flailing downstrikes or Townshend’s windmilling, became an expected part of The Who’s stage repertoire. Coinciding with the evolution of the album culture and the elaborate production and packaging accompanying it in the late 1960s were a number of technical improvements to record players that enhanced the pleasure of listening. These included the development of stackable players that allowed several albums to be played consecutively, jacks for

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attaching headphones, and improvements in the reproduction and quality of sound. Stereo systems integrating components of the record player, radio receiver, tape player, and speakers were available by the late 1960s. These developments were driven partly by the marketing designs of manufacturers but also by the demand for higher-quality sound from a developing cohort of audiophile rock music fans. For teenagers and young adults of the 1960s and 1970s, having the right stereo system became almost as crucial as the music itself. Radio, of course, played as much of a role in the success of rock and roll as the record player. Radio was developed in the 1880s and 1890s by engineers and scientists on both sides of the Atlantic, although the Italian Guglielmo Marconi is usually given most of the credit. Radio offered a range of uses that were quickly exploited by business and government. Commercial radio went “on the air” for the first time in the 1920s, and from the start, music was a staple of broadcasts. 41 Initially, commercial radio seemed to promise overwhelming competition for the phonograph, but in time, the two modes of listening came to complement each other, partly because both technologies increased the appetite for the catchy pop tunes that could also be sold as sheet music for home musicians. Well into the twentieth century, families in England and America used sheet music at home on upright pianos or with guitars and other instruments that were handed down from parents to kids. Home pianos and sheet music became important to the Atlantic music industry in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century. Brothers Ray and Dave Davies, who grew up in post-1945 suburban London and formed the British Invasion band the Kinks, attributed their musical inclinations to family sessions in the living room. 42 Pete Townshend and John Entwistle, too, were raised in musical families that always kept instruments at hand. Radio, record players, and home instruments whetted the growing appetite for pop music across the Atlantic. After 1960, rock music was given another boost by the mass production of transistor radios, beginning first in Japan. The transistor radio was small, handheld, battery powered, and inexpensive—the perfect portable device, as it turned out, for teenagers keeping up with their favorite groups on the subway, on the school bus, at the beach, or in the bedroom. In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission expanded the availability of the FM (frequency modulation) broad-

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casting band in 1965, and a section of the rock audience shifted its listening habits to FM radio. FM brought stereo sound and thus a much richer listening quality compared with the “mono” AM (amplitude modulation) stations that had been the staple. This change in listening quality also directly contributed to the growth of a rock album culture. American FM radio stations in the late 1960s and 1970s hired disc jockeys to play songs or entire albums to appeal to a new, increasingly self-conscious and sophisticated rock music fan. This was a section of the rock audience to which, by the end of the sixties, The Who— somewhat surprising given their pop beginnings—had much appeal. Rock and roll adapted energetically to the ongoing changes in technology. By the late 1960s, musicians and studio technicians were crafting the sound so that it could be better appreciated with the greater fidelity now within reach on the radio and on the sophisticated stereo systems played at home and in the car. The Who were one of the bands—there were not many—that adjusted to these developments in technology and broadcasting with remarkable ease. Townshend was a devoted and knowledgeable audiophile, embracing the evolving technology and the new formats even as he and the band worked hard to maintain the distinctive loud, raw sound of The Who. Although they had gotten a start covering the songs of other, mostly American bands and crafting catchy, distinctive singles, it turned out that The Who also had a knack for the concept album. Indeed, Tommy and Quadrophenia took the rock album format to unprecedented places, with both albums ideal for disc jockeys to play in their entirety for an audience of sophisticated rock fans listening at home on high-quality stereo systems.

“YOUNG MAN BLUES”: AMERICAN POP The first half of the twentieth century was an exciting period in the evolution of pop music across the Atlantic, including the variety of ways in which ordinary people could listen to and play music. Music halls and clubs, weekly choirs at the church, radio, inexpensive sheet music, home instruments—all contributed. Other historical developments more recent than the coming of citizens/consumers or technological developments such as the phonograph, radio, and microphone are also part of the background of The Who and other rock bands of the sixties.

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These additional developments have to do especially with the impact of American music upon British teenagers such as Daltrey, Entwistle, Moon, and Townshend. Although they were touched upon earlier, they are truly important and so deserve more attention. A short-term ingredient that is rightly recognized as the most telling in the history of rock and roll is the influence of musical genres, or “streams,” originating particularly in the American South in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 43 These streams included jazz, blues, gospel, rhythm and blues, jump, rockabilly, soul, and country and western. Their role in the birth of rock music is well known, and like rock and roll, each has a history that draws upon the short term and the long. Jazz was a mostly urban music that originated in New Orleans around 1900. Other varieties of American black popular music, such as the different styles labeled rhythm and blues or R&B, came mostly from the rural South. Deep blues began in the Delta, especially western Mississippi, in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Jump music started a little later with the big band era of the 1930s and 1940s. Soul had roots in large American cities after 1945. Jazz, jump, blues, R&B, and soul mostly originated with African Americans, while country and western music often, though not solely, featured white performers. It, too, came mostly from the rural American South and from Appalachia (its headquarters was the city of Nashville, Tennessee). Rockabilly traced its origins to both black and white performers from the South but with hints of the Texas swing of Texas and Oklahoma. New Orleans jazz became world famous, achieving commercial success via musicians and entrepreneurs who carried it to cities across the United States, England, and Western Europe. The speed with which jazz triumphed across the world between 1900 and 1930 rivaled that of rock and roll after 1945. During the interwar years and the mass movement of people during the Great Depression (1929–1940), Southern migrants brought blues, R&B, gospel, and country and western music to Northern and Western cities in the United States. At the same time, music entrepreneurs from New York City and elsewhere scoured the “honkytonks” and clubs of the rural South to find the music and musicians that could sell sheet music and records. By the end of the Second World War, the music of the American South had achieved remarkable popular success across the United States, as it was taking hold elsewhere in

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the Atlantic world, including Canada, England, continental Europe, and the Caribbean. 44 Black American music and performing style played a formative role in the dissemination of pop culture trends across the Atlantic in the second half of the twentieth century, though in fact black American performers had been known earlier in England and Western Europe. Black revues and minstrel shows from the United States (the early ones of which featured white performers appearing in blackface) were visiting England by the 1840s. American ragtime music—another form of urban pop that had some of the same roots as jazz—traveled to France and England with American soldiers after the United States entered the First World War in 1917. In the Interwar years, black American performers such as Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong were popular in England and France, influencing, among others, Pete Townshend’s father, Cliff Townshend, who was a saxophonist in a traveling band. The black American female vaudeville performer Josephine Baker was a star on Parisian stages in the 1920s. This period also saw the arrival in Europe of black American musical theater and a growing interest in two instruments from the American scene: the banjo and the ukulele, both of which show up in the occasional song by The Who. Jazz and swing— the latter of which began in the 1930s and was a favorite genre of the big bands during the years bracketing the Second World War—were still drawing audiences in England and Europe when rock and rockabilly arrived in the 1950s with the American Bill Haley and his band the Comets. Haley’s version of “Shake, Rattle and Roll” entered the British music charts in 1954. In 1957, his band toured England to wildly enthusiastic crowds. American bluesman Muddy Waters, originally from the Delta but subsequently settling in Chicago, toured England in the late 1950s, shocking audiences by playing the blues standards on electric, rather than acoustic, guitar and thus introducing the Chicago blues to the other side of the Atlantic. In the 1950s, yet another American music, Caribbean—particularly Trinidadian calypso—became popular in England, laying a path for ska in the 1960s and rock steady and reggae in the 1970s. 45 These were all varieties of popular music, mostly with roots in the American South and Appalachia, that drew inspiration from countryand-western influences stretching from Nashville, Tennessee, to Bakersfield, California, and from the jazz of New Orleans, and St. Louis,

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Missouri. It was music that had moved across the United States in the first half of the twentieth century as Southern migrants sought work and settled in the neighborhoods of Northern industrial cities such as Detroit, Cleveland, and Chicago. Most of it was African American music that—working around the restrictions of Jim Crow (the system of legal segregation of the post-Reconstruction American South) and the racial prejudices of the day—eventually joined the artistry of musicians such as Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, and Little Walter to that of white American performers, including Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis, and in turn found producers to broaden its commercial appeal to mostly young white audiences. Mose Allison was a white musician from Mississippi whose “Young Man Blues” became a staple of The Who’s live performance. These developments influenced a section of the population of the United States but, arguably, England even more. Heard occasionally on BBC radio or through hard-to-acquire vinyl records in the late 1950s and early 1960s, this music transformed the lives of British teenagers Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey, Keith Moon, and John Entwistle, along with a generation of contemporaries who also were to become famous performers in British rock bands: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Eric Burdon, Ray Davies, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Ginger Baker, Keith Richard, Mick Jagger, and many others. British kids, especially those with working-class roots and an affinity for pop music, were drawn to black American music in a special way. In recent years, Townshend reflected on this transatlantic phenomenon: The combination of complaint, confrontation, and self-healing that was wrapped up in the average R&B song—usually sung by a disgruntled but sanguine older black American—was the right model for my white middle- and working-class British generation too. It changed for the next forty years the purpose and function of pop music itself. 46

The post–Second World War years ushered in an era in the history of Western Europe where American pop culture quickly gained ground. This was certainly the case for England, which in any event had exceptional historical and cultural ties with North America, dating from the colonial era of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and including, most recently, the special relationship forged with the United

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States after 1940 between Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin Roosevelt. Crucial to the Anglo-American relationship was the fact that both were predominantly English-speaking (Anglophone) nations. America’s cultural influence was also a reflection of what Steven Ambrose called the United States’ “rise to power” in the second half of the twentieth century. If any country had emerged a “winner” from the awful devastation of the Second World War, it was the United States, whose mainland territory had not suffered invasion or destruction and whose human and material losses were comparatively less than other belligerents. The Cold War after 1945 between the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union and its allies meant a continuing American military presence in Europe and across the world. American pop—music, film, style, attitude, and taste—was one element of the phenomenon of American “neoimperialism.” The historian Tony Judt (born and educated in England but later a transplant to the United States) writes of the impact of America in Europe after the Second World War: The [post-1945] American presence in Europe was felt less in direct economic investment or leverage than in the consumer revolution that was affecting America and Europe alike. Europeans were now gaining access to the unprecedented range of products with which Americans were familiar: phones, white goods, televisions, cameras, cleaning products, packaged foods, cheap colorful clothing, cars and their accessories, etc. This was prosperity and consumption as a way of life—the “American way of life.” For young people the appeal of “America” was its aggressive contemporaneity. As an abstraction, it stood for the opposite of the past; it was large, open, prosperous— and youthful. 47

Even so, as Judt notes, “American” music could be received differently in different places. In Britain, the process was “subtly different from ‘American’ music in France or Germany. French taste in particular was influenced by black performing artists who made their way to Paris to escape prejudice in the United States—one reason why the idea of ‘America’ in French culture was markedly infused with the image of racism.” 48 Likewise, The Who would sometimes be received differently in countries of the Atlantic basin.

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Europeans before the Second World War watched Hollywood movies and heard New Orleans jazz. There was more of this kind of cultural imprinting after 1945 as American troops stationed in military bases across Western Europe brought their musical tastes with them and as the United States helped set the course of economic recovery for England, France, Italy, West Germany, and the Low Countries via the Marshall Plan, NATO, and other transatlantic policies. As the Detours in 1962, Townshend, Entwistle, and Daltrey played American pop tunes, mostly country-and-western fare, before GIs at clubs on nearby American military bases, such as the Douglas House Lancaster Gate in West London—a booking arranged by Townshend’s mother (Betty), who like Townshend’s father, had made a career performing Americaninspired songs of the big band era. For Pete Townshend, like so many others of his era, the influence of American pop culture was all around and passed down from one generation to another. 49 This is not to say that postwar British kids drew their influences solely from American popular culture. In the 1950s, music from the United States joined with native ingredients to produce England’s “skiffle” craze. Skiffle was the immediate antecedent—the shortest of the short-term causes—to the music that The Who played in the 1960s. Skiffle music was fast-paced, lighthearted, fun, and fairly easy to learn on simple, sometimes homemade, instruments: guitar or banjo, washboard bass, snare drum, kazoo, and jug. It was pop music to the core, the kind that teenagers could learn on their own and play at home and anywhere in the neighborhood—the British equivalent of the slightly later American “garage band” phenomenon. England’s favorite skiffle musician was Lonnie Donegan (1931–2002). Born in Scotland and raised in a family of musicians, a young Donegan absorbed the varieties of music coming from the United States while learning to sing and play the guitar and banjo. In 1954, Donegan scored a hit on both sides of the Atlantic with a fast-paced version of the American folk song “Rock Island Line.” If Lonnie Donegan could have a hit, then it seemed that just about any British kid could. As in the United States, where particular styles emerged from Chicago, Detroit, San Francisco, and elsewhere, in England varieties of rock music came out of London, Manchester, Birmingham, Dublin, and Glasgow. Liverpool, a port city with a rich tradition of commerce and international trade, was the heart of the “Merseybeat” (named after the River Mersey), producing many

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successful pop and rock bands, including the most famous of all: the Beatles. 50 The skiffle craze was short-lived, sweeping Britain in the late 1950s before being displaced by rock and R&B. Nonetheless, skiffle served as a musical springboard for many of the successful rockers of the 1960s. John Lennon began his music career in the 1950s as a member of the skiffle band the Quarrymen, which evolved into the Beatles. Jimmy Page, one of the leading session musicians of the early 1960s and then a member of influential bands the Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin, was playing in a skiffle group at age thirteen. Among The Who, Roger Daltrey remembered, “From the time I heard Elvis Presley and Lonnie Donegan, I didn’t want to do anything else.” 51 As members of a local schoolboy band (the Confederates), John Entwistle and Pete Townshend also experienced the impact of Lonnie Donegan and skiffle, along with the “trad jazz” style of American-inflected music popular at the time. For so many in The Who’s generation—such as Townshend, who had grown up listening to his father’s American favorites (Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Sara Vaughn, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald)—American pop, skiffle, and trad jazz were logical entrées to rock and roll. 52

“I CAN’T EXPLAIN”: THE WHO AT THE BEGINNING These were some of the long- and short-term musical influences that the individual members of The Who absorbed with others of their generation in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In this way, they were hardly different from other teenagers coming of age in a postwar England still recovering economically and psychologically from the effects of the Second World War. Theirs was a fairly coherent historical generation— self-identified as such, with a strong sense of time and place and even of a kind of mission that set them off from the experience of their parents. 53 It was a generation that emerged at a telling moment, politically and economically, in British and Atlantic history. A postwar Keynesian consensus—the term derived from the work of British economist John Maynard Keynes—had grown out of the global crisis of capitalism during the Great Depression and the Anglo-American alliance of the Second World War. In countries across the Atlantic, this meant varying levels of continued government oversight of economies and a willing-

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ness to “prime the pump” to avert financial collapse like that of 1929, as well as to stoke the economy and satisfy the demands of citizens/consumers. In England, the Keynesian consensus entailed policies under both Labour and Conservative political parties designed to achieve nearly full employment and the erection of what came to be called a “welfare state.” Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government (1957–1963) signed on to England’s twentieth-century social contract originally forged by the country’s other main political party, Labour, and was adhering to just these policies as the members of The Who were moving into their teen years. The adolescent years of The Who were also the era of “de-colonization”—the sometimes wrenching breakdown of European global empire. The Suez Crisis of 1956—during which Britain and France were compelled by the United States and the Soviet Union to concede Egyptian sovereignty of the Suez Canal (over which England had maintained control as a link to India since the 1880s)—was a sign that the balance of world forces had shifted markedly with the end of the Second World War. England and France, the two dominant imperial powers of the previous three centuries, had now fallen into a second rank. The watershed year of 1945 thus saw the European era of global dominance that had begun more than four hundred years before give way to a new bipolar world in which the tone was set by extra-European powers the United States and the Soviet Union, themselves engaged in a Cold War struggle over competing ideas of modernization. The United Kingdom’s close ties with the United States (once the discomfort of the Suez Crisis had died down) remained even as England developed its own nuclear deterrent and as the country was temporarily rebuffed in an effort to join the European Economic Community (the “Common Market”). Strategically and culturally, England seemed more connected to America than Europe when Macmillan’s Conservative government, weakened by a series of scandals, including the sex-and-spy Profumo affair, gave way to Harold Wilson’s Labour government in 1964 as Daltrey, Entwistle, Moon, and Townshend were calling themselves the High Numbers. 54 Later, Townshend would repeatedly emphasize that the emotions that came to the surface in the album Tommy (1969) reflected how he and his generation still lived in the long shadow cast by the Second World War and England’s reduced place in the world order that followed it. 55

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The Who were thus born of a time and place that put an imprint on their music. The enforced austerity of the immediate postwar years and the diminished role of England in world affairs as it ceded ground in the special relationship with the United States was eased by the expansion of a social safety net that guaranteed work, health care, housing, and education to all Britons. 56 But the creation of a welfare state also came with certain costs felt acutely by a postwar generation of young people. Although British bands of the early 1960s, such as The Who, Rolling Stones, Animals, and Kinks, rarely sang directly about postwar, postindustrial, or postimperial, it is not hard to hear in their music the voice of a generation that was disaffected, lost, and often angry. Though still a young man, Pete Townshend was instinctually and intellectually aware of the historical moment in which The Who had sprung and, moreover, that—with typical pretension—he was a voice of a segment of that generation. “Everybody was full of resentment,” with The Who “leading a revolt against the old values and order of music.” 57 This acute sensitivity to time and place would show up especially in The Who’s first songs and in the album Quadrophenia from 1973. After two early formulations, first as the Detours and then as the High Numbers, the four members of The Who—singer Daltrey, drummer Moon, bassist Entwistle, and guitarist and main songwriter Townshend—came together in classic form in 1964–1965. This was a bit later than some of their famous counterparts, and so The Who did not belong to the first wave of British Invasion bands to bring their Americaninspired electric rock and roll to the United States. It was not until 1967 and an appearance at the Monterey Pop Festival in California and subsequent American tour (during which they were the opening act for another British Invasion band, Herman’s Hermits) that The Who gained attention across the Atlantic. In the meantime, they had a string of successful pop singles in England, including “I Can’t Explain,” “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere,” and “Substitute.” The most exciting and influential early hit was “My Generation,” which was released in late 1965 and climbed to number two in the British record charts (a ranking of songs by number of records sold). A dispute with the record’s producer, the American Shel Talmy, complicated the song’s release in the United States, where it received little promotion from the recording label and reached only seventy-four in the American charts. Accordingly, when The Who arrived in the United States in 1967, they were not well

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known. But with persistent touring, the publicity generated by their explosive stage performance and rowdy behavior (Keith Moon was to become infamous for trashing hotel rooms), and the great success of their Tommy album of 1969, they soon built an American fan base. The size and loyalty of The Who’s American audience and the critical and popular triumph of Tommy from 1969 made the band rich by the end of the decade. 58 Three other successful long-play albums followed: 1970’s The Who: Live at Leeds, 1971’s Who’s Next (which produced three of their most recognizable songs: “Baba O’Riley,” “Behind Blue Eyes,” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again”), and 1973’s Quadrophenia. By the early 1970s, The Who had become hugely successful, rivaling contemporary British acts the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin for popularity on both sides of the Atlantic and being generally acknowledged as the best live rock act anywhere. But at the start, before they began writing, performing, and recording their own songs, The Who played covers of songs that they heard on the radio and on vinyl records, favoring the pop genres coming from the United States—in 1964, blues, R&B, rock and roll, rockabilly, as well as the Motown tunes that were just beginning to get airplay. Here is a typical set list of songs—all of them covers—played at gigs in the summer of 1964: “I Gotta Dance to Keep from Crying” “Young Man Blues” “Long Tall Shorty” “Pretty Thing” “Here ’Tis” “You Really Got Me” “Spoonful” “Smokestack Lightning” “Green Onions” “Money” Most of the covers played in 1964 by The Who were also the musical influences that were very important to a contemporary English youth movement—namely, the Mods, of which The Who became a favored band. The Mods (from “Modernists”) originated in London in the early sixties as a subculture of mostly male youth who adopted a distinct style of dress, music, and attitude. 59 Along with American or American-in-

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spired music, the Mod homology (code of behavior) required continental European fashion, including Italian dress and French haircuts and Italian Vespa or Lambretta motor scooters adorned with lots of mirrors. Although the typical Mod probably aspired to something other than manual or factory labor, most came from working-class backgrounds. The Shepherd’s Bush section of West London, which was Daltrey’s home and where The Who often played in the early years, included the working-class neighborhoods where the Mod lifestyle thrived. The frustration and disdain that Mods evoked in demeanor and musical taste were partly a function of social class. Drugs were part of this way of life, too, and the drugs favored by Mods were amphetamines (“purple hearts,” “uppers,” “leapers”), which if taken in quantity could induce stammering (“blocked” in Mod lingo). 60 “My Generation,” The Who’s great pop anthem of youthful disaffection, has lyrics that are stuttered as though spoken by a Mod on leapers. In the evenings, the typical London Mod frequented music clubs that played the R&B and Motown songs that The Who were playing at the time. The Mods also had a reputation for violence, the most famous instances of which were their battles in 1964 at Brighton Beach resort south of London against a rival youth subculture, the “Rockers.” These episodes generated frantic (in hindsight, exaggerated) coverage in the British press. The riots, along with the Mods’ favored territories of Shepherd’s Bush and Brighton Beach, were later incorporated by Townshend into the story of Quadrophenia. 61 At this stage, the band was managed by the youthful fashion maker and Mod hipster Peter Meaden and then by the team of Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp. As the movement began to fade, the latter two pushed the group away from the Mods and had them refine their distinctive style at venues around the south of England and in London—notably, the Marquee Club, a central location that resonated with the era’s generational and cultural ambiance.

“ANYWAY, ANYHOW, ANYWHERE”: MAKING THE WHO “BRAND” Pete Meaden, one of their early managers, intended that The Who should be a Mod band, while Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp wanted to broaden their appeal. It was at this transitional moment (1964–1965)—

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as the group was changing names and managers; as they were finding ways to give American rock, R&B, and Motown songs a distinctive British twist; and as they were tentatively assimilating into Mod culture—that The Who created a brand marked by loud music and aggressive lyrics and performance. It was a brand that owed much to the musical technology of the day. Electric guitars and amplifiers were already loud, but Townshend and Entwistle found ways to make them even louder by turning up the volume and stacking large speakers on the stage. The brand also developed from recognition about the time and place in which the group was living. One of the qualities that make The Who an appealing subject for the historian is the self-consciousness they possessed about living in a particular moment and belonging to a certain course of history. For Kenney Jones, who replaced Keith Moon as drummer when the latter died in 1978, this was a reflection of being “the first teenagers after the war. What we wanted to do was just liberate ourselves really and just have fun.” 62 But the self-awareness is especially acute in the case of Townshend, whose sensitivity to the past— particularly to the Second World War and its aftermath in Europe and the formative experience it had for his generation—comes through in his songs, in his writings, and most directly in the numerous interviews that he has given over the decades: “I was born into that world [postwar Europe],” he said. “I was born in the hour that Albert Speer [a member of Hitler’s cabinet] was arrested. . . . My father got these two messages: Speer’s been captured, and the other ‘It’s a boy, Mr. Townshend.’” 63 Townshend has always been among the most introspective of sixties rockers and in recent years has become a mentor for some younger performers. 64 His comments on the ingredients, historical and otherwise, that were part of The Who’s early style—the loudness, the violence, even the stuttering lyrics in “My Generation”—have not always been consistent, but taken as a whole, they offer an explanation for the genesis of their brand and a sense of how the band saw their place in a larger Atlantic history. The loudness and onstage violence that The Who used from the start was partly a reflection of Townshend’s personal frustrations and the angst felt by his generation of British teenagers: “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere” (1965) was both a hit song and a pose that the band adopted. In 1965, when Roger Daltrey stuttered the lines of “My Generation” and when the band smashed its instruments onstage, Mods

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understood why they did so, even if few others did. 65 The guitar smashing first appeared during a performance in 1964, when Townshend accidentally thrust the neck of his instrument through the venue’s low ceiling. Seeing no reaction from the audience, he proceeded to smash it to pieces. The crowd roared its approval, and from that moment on, fans would inevitably call on him, “Smash your guitar, Pete!” A biographer wrote, “For Pete, this simple yet wildly dramatic act provided a major ego boost. . . . Once he stepped into the floodlights he was transformed into an uninhibited exhibitionist, a jittery persona whose acts he often didn’t even recall afterwards.” 66 Daltrey, never overly impressed with this part of the act, thought that the violence had to do with too many drugs and with the boredom of playing the same songs over and over. Keith Moon, who happily joined the mayhem, thought it just a big “laugh” while also recognizing its adolescent seed and real author: “This ‘being angry at the adult world’ bit is not all of us. It’s not me and it’s not John. It’s only half Roger, but it is Pete.” 67 On occasion, the violence could stem from frustration with the audience, as in the 1967 American tour when young fans repeatedly called for headliners Herman’s Hermits to come to the stage. Egging on and facilitating the pandemonium were managers Lambert and Stamp, who relished the publicity and notoriety it generated. The Who’s memorable performance style had little to do with politics per se, though some of the initial inspiration for the onstage violence came from the influence of Gustav Metzger, an Austrian proponent of “auto-destructive” art whose work Townshend knew from his time at Ealing Art School in the early 1960s. In 1965, the twenty-yearold Townshend echoed the ideas of Metzger when he told the London newspaper The Observer, “From valueless objects—a guitar, a microphone, a hackneyed pop tune, we extract a new value. We take objects with one function and give them another. And the auto-destructive element—the way we destroy our instruments—adds immediacy to it all.” 68 He said in another interview, “To me it wasn’t violence, it wasn’t random destruction. At the time I considered it to be art. . . . I used to get up on stage and think this was high art.” 69 Years later, Townshend would describe the smashing of guitars as “performance art.” Townshend also confessed that he “used to get terribly frustrated and compensate visually for what I didn’t achieve as a musician.” In this sense, he approached the guitar as metaphor:

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My guitar is like a machine gun. When I play it, it’s like grenades going off. It silences the audience. It makes them hear me. . . . It was also a means of intimidation: This is all there is. If you’re in this room with us, all you get is us. . . . We are the mirror for the desperation, bitterness, frustration, and misery of the misunderstood adolescents, of people in the vacuum. 70

“I tried,” Townshend said, “to make playing the guitar look lethal.” 71 But at the same time, the violence was a reflection of the time and place where it began—London, circa 1964—and a reaction to the inarticulateness and search for the right words felt by Mods, the band’s first fans. The meaning of it all was pressed on Townshend in the response by Mod fans to another early Who song: Having written “I Can’t Explain,” which was a love song of frustration, I was informed by various members of the Goldhawk Club audience [a well-known London Mod venue] . . . these uneducated, inarticulate kids, that what it actually was was a song about their inability to communicate their inability to communicate. Now that’s a pretty high concept. They got it, and I didn’t. When they came to me with that idea, telling me, “You have to write more songs like that,” sort of nailing the nail into my skull for me to get it—like they’re idiots, and they’re going “Yes, that’s what we mean. We want you, because you’re articulate and you can speak and you can write songs . . . .’” So I was charged with this job.” 72

Still, the loudness and energy were not quite a call for fans or audience to act out, since the mayhem by and large was contained onstage. The smashing of instruments and the loud music that had begun spontaneously in 1964 quickly became a self-conscious part of The Who’s style. Eventually, the novelty and the effect diminished. By 1966, the destruction of guitars and tossing of smoke bombs had become a routine, if not an exactly choreographed part of The Who’s stage show, and the violence itself almost a parody. This development was not surprising, since like so many other rock bands of the day, The Who initially saw themselves as ephemeral. The calculated spontaneity of The Who’s “pop culture Luddism” was a partially manufactured element for a band that, at this early stage of what turned out to be a remarkably long career, doubted that it would be around much longer. 73 By 1967–1968, it became clear to band members that if they were to beat

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the odds and survive, they would have to evolve. Even so, in the coming years, as The Who kept going and as they found ways as musicians to explore other sides of the rock-and-roll genre, they continued to close their stage set with reworked but still loud and energetic versions of “My Generation,” during which instruments were only occasionally destroyed. By 1973–1974, when The Who were revisiting their early history with the album Quadrophenia, “My Generation” had come to stand as the band’s signature about their place in the larger history of rock and roll. Dave Marsh, a longtime writer about rock music and a chronicler of The Who, put it this way: “Townshend never had control over ‘My Generation’ because the song was an expression of an historical process that operates quite independently of individual will—and it was Townshend’s good fortune to have been an open channel for it.” 74

“GO TO THE MUSIC!” THE WHO IN TRANSATLANTIC PERSPECTIVE The “historical process” for which Townshend was an “open channel” was apparent not only to perceptive rock critics but also to anyone who can read the ways in which The Who stood for something new. For historians interested in popular culture and the ways that cultural artifacts—whether dress, dance, food, or music—are disseminated across national and geographic boundaries, it is not hard to argue that the early years of The Who can be written as a microhistory of some of the broader developments across the Atlantic over the last two centuries. Atlantic history as a formal field of study began in the postwar years with an academic and elite interest in politics and diplomacy. But separately, there operated at a lower, popular level of society—very much aided by the new technology of the day—a diffusion of culture, of which rock and roll was a vital ingredient. Atlantic history has expanded in the last two or three decades to focus especially on the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, with much recent scholarship bringing in the experiences of Native Americans, Africans, and Latin Americans to a literature that otherwise has mostly been about relations between Europe and North America. Much of the scholarly analysis has focused on the eras of discovery, colonialism, and the Atlantic slave trade of the

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early modern period and, in the twentieth century, the cultural and economic expansion that was part of the American century. 75 A history of The Who—a band composed of four young, mostly working-class Britons—is a part of the American century and Atlantic history and, as the present and the past become ever more globally interconnected, an even larger story. The Who began as products of the Atlantic world, but they were to become known—they are known—in many other corners, including Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean, Latin America, Australia, and Japan. Many of the Atlantic elements in The Who’s history are obvious to an Anglophone audience. British and American rock bands and their fans spoke the same language and could look back over the previous three and a half centuries upon a shared and still developing history of empire, industry, trade, war, and diplomacy. This was a history that had been taught (if they were paying attention in school!) to a generation of sixties rockers and their fans, the ongoing evolution of which they could read about in the newspapers or hear on the evening news. The Who acquired many of their musical and stylistic references from the United States, whose pop culture history did not spring in one piece from the American setting but drew on influences from Africa and Europe. The Who combined these threads with the European musical traditions with which they had grown up. The technology of rock music—from electric guitars and amplifiers to microphones and laser lighting to the Danelectro guitar strings that John Entwistle used for his memorable solo on “My Generation”—was developed and shared in England and America, as it would be in the coming years by wannabe rockers in the Netherlands, Japan, Mexico, Hungary, and elsewhere. Although rock and roll was born in the United States, it was refashioned in England by bands such as The Who, Rolling Stones, and Beatles and then reintroduced to America via the British Invasion of the 1960s. The back-andforth elements of rock history are obvious and ongoing.

2 “RELAY” The Who and the Transatlantic Music Industry, 1964–1974

When the history of rock and roll appears in print or on television, it often begins with the middle decades of the twentieth century in rural areas of the American South and with ordinary people playing local, traditional music. Although the musicians may have been only vaguely aware of it, their music had both long- and short-term roots around the Atlantic—in Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean. American pop came to dominate world music in the twentieth century, but its early overseas connections have sometimes been taken for granted. We can see the long-term roots of rock and roll stretching back many centuries to European medieval traditions and to opera, and then joining a mélange of African ingredients in a short-term American “melting pot” even as, to look ahead, the rock music of the 1960s would itself help prepare the ground for punk rock and New Wave in the 1970s and 1980s and for rap and emo in more recent years. The British Invasion of the 1960s brought an electrified version of American blues and rock back to the United States, but before that, Europeans and Africans had cultivated the roots of New World music. Pop music’s cultural threads are thus intricately woven over the course of time. But there is more to rock music than the almost imperceptible long-term transmission of culture. Rock and roll was also a business, an enterprise, or even—the term was used frequently—an 39

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“industry.” Indeed, the rock music industry played a vital role in popularizing the genre and making it tremendously profitable on both sides of the Atlantic. Like the cultural roots of the music, the rock music industry has a short-term history that begins no later than the 1950s and a long-term history that can be traced to developments across the Atlantic world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the age of rock and roll, which, properly speaking, began in the 1950s, local talent drawing on long- and short-term roots and tucked away almost anywhere—in backwater English villages, in poor neighborhoods in the Southern United States, in small towns in Ontario, Canada—might become overnight sensations at home and, with perseverance, luck, and the right management, on both sides of the Atlantic. Such a startling leap into fame and fortune for ordinary people could happen because of the growth of a music business that tirelessly sought out young talent that was then molded, marketed, and sold mostly to other young persons in affluent societies in the postwar Atlantic world. Cultural capital and economic capital, as the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu might have described, mixed easily in the world of rock and roll. In reality, the road-to-riches stories were the exception. Laissez-faire capitalism, which has dominated most economies of the Atlantic world for the last two centuries, and the market culture that sprang from it have tended to celebrate the successes while pushing aside the failures. “Overnight sensations” and “has-beens” are the bookend realities of the dynamic modern world of free enterprise. The rock music industry emerged as a result of long-term developments in Atlantic society and economy, putting in place mechanisms that encouraged and rewarded pop sensationalism and the drive for fame and money. “I’m a sensation,” announced the title character of The Who’s Tommy. Although Tommy was describing his meteoric rise to pinball champion and new age messiah, he could just as easily have been talking about the individual life stories of the members of The Who and other heroes of the age of rock and roll, along with the entrepreneurs who promoted and made money off the bands. 1 The historical setting for the age of rock and roll was the relative affluence of nations across the North Atlantic beginning in the 1950s. The postwar United States was the great generator of capital, the consumer of resources, the trend setter for pop fashion, and, with some protests and counterexamples, the economic model for the Atlantic

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world. Following a stretch of austerity after the Second World War, England, France, West Germany, and other Western European nations enjoyed a period of economic revitalization that coincided with the letting go of empires (especially for England and France, which had the largest) and continental European cooperation—notably, the creation of the European Economic Union, headed by France and West Germany and which England joined in 1973. Postwar Western European recovery was framed by American economic and political support and the American military umbrella. Following the devastation of the “Second Thirty Years War” of 1914–1945, West Europeans demilitarized, relinquishing their empires and acceding to a bipolar Cold War world dominated by the strategic pursuits of the United States and the Soviet Union. Listening to the music of The Who, one can detect that the young members—Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey, John Entwistle, and Keith Moon—sensed that they were coming of age at this transitional moment in world history: the end of the European age of dominance that had begun around 1500. During the two decades or so following the end of the Second World War, young people on both sides of the Atlantic had more expendable cash and more free time than their parents or grandparents. Economic assistance from the United States helped restore prosperity in Europe, but prosperity was also the result of continental economic integration and a focus on new technology and transference of expenditure away from military and colonial projects to consumer goods tied to national and international markets. Much of the extra money and time available to European kids after 1960 went to entertainment. Meanwhile, advances in marketing and technology allowed for the widespread, rapid dissemination of the music, movies, television, and fashion to which the young people of the 1960s quickly became attuned. 2 Youth culture, rock music, and business came together after 1945 to help remake the basin defined by North America on the west and England and continental Europe on the east. This became a cultural space where music managers and promoters with the right entrepreneurial drive and an awareness of rock music’s potential could make bands famous and where a great deal of money could be made quickly—even if, as it turned out, that money did not always end up in the hands of the musicians themselves. The pop music industry turned out to be a setting ripe for the exploitation of bands: the era abounds with examples of

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groups, including The Who, and individual performers who were taken advantage of by corporate executives and astute operators or managers, some of whom were not especially interested in the music and yet who were able to seize the opportunities incumbent in laissez-faire society, the soaring popularity of rock and roll, and the energy and naiveté of a youthful generation. As it happened, the rock music industry and the economic elements composing it—the promotion of bands and songs, the manufacturing and sale of records and albums—were probably more truly transatlantic than the musicians themselves. “Relay,” the heading of this chapter, is the name of a song from Lifehouse, the 1971 music project that Pete Townshend hoped would be a follow-up to The Who’s enormously successful album Tommy. Lifehouse was a reflection of some of the spiritual counterculture themes of the day: a rejection of the materialism of the world and the rock music industry and the desire to use music and performance to “get in touch” with or tie together the emotional lives of fans and musicians. The setting of Lifehouse was an unhappy, futuristic world. Townshend’s dystopian vision in Lifehouse drew partly on the teachings of the South Asian avatar Meher Baba, of whom he had become a follower. In this regard, Townshend sought a path toward spiritual enlightenment that, like a number of other sixties rockers, including George Harrison and Jimmy Page, looked to India for inspiration (Baba was born in India, although he was of Iranian lineage). Where the subcontinent had been the crown colony in England’s global empire between 1857 and 1947, British kids of Townshend’s day now reversed the imperial hierarchy of their parents by learning from the teachings of Asians, operating in religious traditions that long predated the episode of British colonialism, itself a blink of the eye in the subcontinent’s millennia of civilization. For British youth, the utopianism of the 1960s was partly a reaction against the faded glory of empire. But it also had historical roots in Townshend’s own England and in continental Europe, dating from the first half of the nineteenth century when “utopians” such as Robert Owen and Etienne Cabet sought alternative ways of living and production to the capitalist industrial relations that they believed were harming their societies. Similarly, Lifehouse was in part conceived as an alternative to the sordidness of the rock music industry. A problem with nearly all utopian projects—whether communal experiments such as Owen’s New Harmony, Cabet’s “Icaria,” or Pete Townshend’s Life-

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house—was that not everyone who was involved was actually on board with the project. The other members of The Who and the audiences before which the music was tentatively performed in 1971 never really grasped what Lifehouse was all about. Nonetheless, at Townshend’s persuasion, even as the new decade of the 1970s was injecting a dose of cynicism into the leftover “good vibrations” of the 1960s, The Who attempted to stage Lifehouse. The project’s failure showed that while Townshend, in his ongoing search for “something bigger,” could be caught up in some of the spiritual currents of sixties youth culture, the other members of the group mostly seemed content to enjoy the material rewards of rock stardom. Especially for Keith Moon and John Entwistle, the riches and lifestyle had been the attraction all along, even as the excesses later were their undoing. The failure of Lifehouse was emblematic of the sixties tension between spiritualism and universalism on the one hand and the often hedonistic pursuit of wealth and pleasure—the mantra of “sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll”—on the other. Lifehouse proved too ambitious and too complicated for the band and the audience to grasp, and so the project was aborted. But among the many musical leftovers from this creative period were a number of memorable Who tunes, including “Relay,” a song about how music can connect one person to another and cannot be contained by boundaries.

“CALL ME LIGHTNING”: GUITARS, AMPLIFIERS, AND THE TECHNOLOGY OF ROCK MUSIC From the point of view of a fan listening to The Who play in a small, cramped club on their home turf in the Shepherd’s Bush section of West London in 1964 or, years later after they had become rich and famous, pressed in with other concertgoers at a large outdoor venue such as London’s Charlton football ground, where in 1974 they played to a crowd approaching 50,000 people, the band seemed to be as much about volume and power, amplification and electricity, as about the music itself. Live, the band’s sound was both heard and felt. As much or more than other rock bands of their day, The Who used modern technology to increase the volume and to extract strange noises—feedback and distortion—from guitars. The manipulation of sound to produce

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high volume and unusual noises was part of the sixties rock style pioneered by The Who. Guitars especially, but also keyboards and drums, can be connected to external power sources so that the volume can be significantly increased and dissonant sounds produced. Since the 1960s, the use of loud volume and feedback have become so much a part of the rock-and-roll norm that, even today, one goes to a concert seeking this experience. However, it must be emphasized how historically new this kind of expectation is. In the early 1960s, the idea of spending money to be entertained by a band playing painfully loud music struck many observers as ludicrous. But young fans thought differently, and as the years went by, The Who would continue to keep the music shockingly loud. The electrification of music—a signal characteristic of rock and roll—was perhaps one of the unforeseen long-term applications of the “industrializing revolution.” Although electricity was seen as a novelty in the eighteenth century, by the late-nineteenth century, individuals and enterprises across the Atlantic had begun to turn it to a range of industrial, commercial, and entertainment uses. Electricity generated by the burning of coal or petroleum or by steam or water power was applied to more and more uses during the second industrial revolution (ca. 1850–1914). The first industries to apply electricity were lighting, communication, and transportation. The Atlantic basin of Europe and North America, as in many areas of modernization, was the early center for the development and application of electricity. 3 Not only was electricity used for industry and transportation, but it was also applied commercially to devices that eventually led to forms of entertainment, such as television and movies, which we take for granted today and which, again, happened first in the Atlantic basin. Photography, which had its origins in Western Europe in the nineteenth century, saw electrical motors attached to film projectors in the 1890s to make “moving pictures.” The first films were experimental and showed mundane activities, such as workers leaving a factory in Lyon, France, but it was not long before the commercial applications were being explored. By 1914, there were burgeoning movie industries in France, the United States, England, Italy, Germany, and Russia. As technological developments in the late 1920s permitted sound to be added to film, singers and bands were among the first to star in the new “talkies.” As it turned out, The Who would be involved with film as much as any rock band,

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partly through the interest of managers Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, each of whom had short careers in film production before joining The Who and whose initial collective interest in the High Numbers (one of the group’s early formulations) came from their desire to make a movie about an up-and-coming British rock band. Eventually, both of the band’s rock operas—Tommy (1975) and Quadrophenia (1979)—were turned into feature films. A great deal of the impetus behind Townshend’s Lifehouse project was the expectation that it would produce a film as well as an album. The band would also be the subject of several commercial documentaries, including The Kids Are Alright (1979) and Amazing Journey (2007). Roger Daltrey would have an acting career in film and television outside the band. The Who even showed up as cartoon characters in a 2000 episode of the popular American television program The Simpsons. Even more important to the history of rock and roll, electricity was applied to music through recordings that were then played on a phonograph (“gramophone” in England), powered by an electrical connection or electrically charged batteries. By the 1930s, electricity was also being used to increase volume and alter the sounds of musical instruments and singing voices. Electricity had been set to musical instruments as early as the eighteenth century, but the idea was not taken much further until after World War I. The first electrical instrument for which compositions were specifically written was the theremin, a creation of the Russian inventor Lev Teremen (1896–1993), himself a product of the atmosphere of experimentation made possible in Russia with the revolution of 1917. The theremin went on to be used to produce the spooky soundtracks of 1950s science fiction movies coming out of the American filmmaking hub of Hollywood. Elsewhere during the interwar years, organs and other instruments were electrified. The synthesizer, an electrical instrument dating from the 1930s, was later improved by the American Robert Moog (1934–2005). Moog synthesizers would provide distinctive background drones to sixties pop and rock with bands such as the Moody Blues—like The Who, a part of the second wave of the British Invasion of rock music. But the electrified instrument without which rock and roll would be unrecognizable was, of course, the guitar. The origin of the first electric guitar seems to be endlessly disputed, but most experts agree that the form that would lend itself best to rock music was developed in the

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1930s in the United States. 4 Les Paul (1915–2009) was the influential early proponent and designer. Other electric guitars with origins in the 1930s were the Gibson, Epiphone, and Rickenbacker models. The Fender Stratocaster of the 1950s became the iconic electric guitar for rock and rollers, in both appearance and sound. In the early years, John Entwistle usually played bass guitars made by Gibson or Fender. Pete Townshend started with Rickenbackers but switched to Gibsons and Fenders—the latter because Stratocasters were less expensive than Rickenbackers and more durable and easy to repair following the endof-the-concert smashup. Given his destructive antics, it is not surprising that Townshend did not fetishize or romanticize the guitar but rather saw it as a tool to be applied practically to his profession and, more abstractly, as an implement of the “postmodern” world: “The guitar when it became electrified,” he said, “became in my case an instrument of control, aggression, latent violence.” 5 Although Townshend was not a virtuoso in the vein of contemporary “guitar gods” Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, or Jeff Beck, his rhythm playing and physical showmanship influenced many successors. “He invented so many things,” said Edge of the Irish band U2, and for Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam—one of the next generation of “hard rock” bands—Townshend simply “had a lot weapons in his arsenal.” 6 The American blues and early country songs that were the foundation for so much of the pop music of the twentieth century were mostly composed on acoustic guitars, and for a long time, there was resistance from pop, country, and blues musicians to electric instruments. Indeed, few musicians in the rural American South could actually “plug in” before their counterparts in American cities because electricity began coming to the Southern countryside only as the Tennessee Valley Authority project of the 1930s built the dams and reservoirs necessary to power generators and produce electricity. But the electrification of the blues was even more the product of another structural development: the migration of African Americans from the Delta and elsewhere in the South to Chicago and other Northern cities. Their music became the Chicago blues especially associated with performers such as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Buddy Guy, who in turn had such an enormous influence on the post-1945 generation of British rockers. 7 By the early 1960s, mass-produced electric guitars were inexpensive enough to be within the purchasing power of teens in America, Eng-

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land, and Western Europe. The affordability of instruments and amplifiers meant that it was relatively easy for almost any kid to assemble a skiffle group in England or a garage band in the United States. “So you want to be a rock-’n’-roll star,” sang the American band the Byrds in 1967. “Then listen now to what I say—just get an electric guitar—then take some time and learn how to play.” With the availability of inexpensive electric instruments, it seemed just that easy. Virtually all the British stars of sixties rock and roll—Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, and others—began their rock-and-roll careers in just this way. Among the members of The Who, Entwistle and Townshend were enthusiastic technophiles and collectors of guitars. Even before they and the rest of the band were “The Who”—when they were teenagers belonging to the Detours or High Numbers, still loading their equipment onto a van driven by Townshend’s mother—they began to experiment with ways to alter the sound of instruments. Townshend was one of the early innovators in the use of guitar feedback, both in live performances and in recording: “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere” (1965) may have been the first recorded rock song to purposely incorporate feedback. Indeed, when the American producers heard the initial “demo” of the song, they sent it back because they thought that the sound was a flaw in the recording. Thereafter, feedback showed up in other songs of The Who, such as “Call Me Lightening” and “Relax.” Townshend and bassist Entwistle also sought ways to increase the volume, and so they started stacking the latest high-wattage Marshall amplifiers (this became the “Marshall stack”) to produce a bigger sound onstage. Over the course of their career, The Who’s sound system would grow and grow, from two hundred to seventy-five thousand watts. 8 Entwistle became a connoisseur of bass guitars, eventually owning a huge collection. He used a hard-to-get Danelectro bass guitar for the distinctive solo on “My Generation.” The strings on the Danelectro gave it a special sound, but because they kept breaking and because replacements were not available in England, Entwistle had to buy several brand-new instruments just to complete the recording. 9 The equipment used by the band—including guitars, drum kits, and amplifiers—was costly, and so Townshend (and, later, the band’s roadies) became adept at repairing guitars destroyed at the end of shows. Often, the band and their managers tried to persuade local music stores or manufacturers to provide

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free equipment. Townshend would later recall episodes from the early “heroic” era of The Who when he would rush into a local music store, take a guitar off the wall, and rush out the door, all the while promising future payment. 10 The ways in which the band used technology to produce extremely loud volume and feedback were the hallmarks of their live performance and their brand. The electrification of music and the rise of rock and roll, both with long-term historical roots, converged in the short term in a variety of ways, including The Who’s characteristic style of loud and distorted sound. But not everything about The Who brand had to do with their sound. Much of the early notoriety and success also came from their theatrics in live performance. Although the image of the rock band onstage is familiar enough today that we know almost automatically where the performers station themselves—singer out front, drummer center-back, guitarists on the flanks and a step back from the singer— and although we expect the band to be plugged in and to be loud, these are in fact relatively recent developments in the history of music. The Who assumed the familiar pose onstage, although they were hardly immobile. Townshend had an unusually active and physical style of guitar playing. Over the years, he developed a repertoire for the live act that included a number of moves, the best known of which was the wind-milling style of strumming that he all but invented. 11 Other stock stage moves included a pose in which he held the guitar like a machine gun aimed at the fans in the front row, another in which he used the stock of the guitar as though he were blessing his fans (this briefly prompted a nickname: “the pope”), another in which he held the guitar high over his head with out-stretched arms, another (nicknamed the “birdman”) in which he allowed the guitar—feedback blaring—to dangle by its strap from his neck while he stretched out his arms as though flying, and then the big finale that often included smashing the instrument. But this was not all. Throughout the performance, Townshend punctuated notes and chords with jumps and scissor kicks, “duckwalked” across the stage à la Chuck Berry (one of the original American rockers), collapsed or slid to his knees, or threw a leg in a high kick over the microphone—all the while (somehow) continuing to play the guitar. It was a nonstop energetic show—no doubt, part of the reason why Townshend was rail thin in the 1960s and 1970s. Keith Moon likewise did not rely on noise alone to keep the crowd entertained, throwing

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drumsticks in the air, mugging incessantly, keeping up the manic “Keith Moon style of drumming,” and sometimes punctuating the end of the show with smoke bombs or firecrackers. Because of the development of the microphone earlier in the century, The Who’s front man, Roger Daltrey, was able to compete with the noise from the guitars and drums. Daltrey added a visual and nonaural element by attaching the mic to a long chord, swinging it in looping arcs toward the audience, and then deftly catching it on the return, all between verses of the songs he was singing. Entwistle’s stationary, stoic style to the left of the audience was the visual and physical anchor to the relentless motion of the rest of the band. These were all signature features of the band’s stage presence and its brand, which was memorable enough even without the loud music and strange noises.

“I CAN SEE FOR MILES”: MANAGERS, PROMOTERS, AND THE DIFFUSION OF ROCK MUSIC Scholars use the term diffusion to describe how modern inventions and innovations, such as the technology of the industrial revolution, spread from country to country. There was, for instance, a diffusion of steam power across the Atlantic after the eighteenth century, as in more recent times there has been a diffusion of computer technology. The diffusion of technology can happen in a variety of ways, including emulation, purchase, or even theft. Culture, too, diffuses, and in the case of The Who, it was especially through the efforts of their managers and record companies that The Who and their brand crossed the Atlantic. For years, The Who—to remain the band that fans expected them to be—required lots of equipment to produce loud volume and to replace the instruments destroyed during performances. But the group also needed managers and promoters to arrange and publicize gigs, and once they started recording songs, to help produce singles and albums. Unlike the long-term developments in technology that allowed rock bands like The Who to turn up the volume, the managers and promoters of the 1960s come across as a comparatively unique product of the age. The combination of powerful new technology and a great deal of money—along with the emergence of a distinctive type of promoter

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with good entrepreneurial skills and the determination to focus on the youth market—was also part of the sixties rock music industry. In some ways, the managers of 1960s rock-and-roll bands were simply the latest example of a “new men” phenomenon that accompanied the rise of laissez-faire capitalism in the Atlantic world in the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. The term laissez-faire comes from a group of eighteenth-century European economic thinkers known as the physiocrats, while the word capitalism—which we sometimes think of as very old—was coined only in the 1820s. The newness of these terms is a sign that the systems they stand for are historically also new. Laissez-faire meant a belief that natural laws governed the economic relations of humans perhaps in the same way that physical laws governed the rising and setting of the sun. Turn these laws loose, release the economy from the control of government and custom, and the result, as the Scottish economist Adam Smith famously forecast in 1776, would be a rising of all boats—a “wealth of nations.” This was the great promise against which the history of capitalism was to be measured. In “leaving alone” people and economic interests, individuals became free agents. The “market”—rather than tradition, culture, or a “moral economy”—now became the modus operandi of modernization across the Atlantic world. Sometimes this new regime of capitalism seemed to produce anarchy, sometimes the monopolization of great resources and wealth, and sometimes rags-to-riches stories. The Who were a rags-toriches story, whose success is hard to imagine outside a system of laissez-faire capitalism. 12 The business of music in the Atlantic world took off late in the nineteenth century, and by the first two decades of the twentieth century, the marketing of pop music was deeply connected to the emergence of the citizen/consumer. Vaudeville, the British music hall, and the popularity of home music—particularly during a golden age (ca. 1850–1930) of the home piano—encouraged the development of entrepreneurial new men to make and market popular music. By 1900, Tin Pan Alley in New York City was the place where pop music was mass produced and sold, with Denmark Street its London parallel of the 1950s and 1960s as rock and roll was coming to England. 13 By the early 1970s, a handful of major record companies in England and the United States controlled most of the recording industry in the Atlantic world and increasingly beyond—Anglo-American artists and music achieving

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virtual dominance in a market that, as Keith Negus writes, had been “constructed to provide a series of opportunities for British and American artists across the globe.” 14 Working upon the Tin Pan Alley model, American entrepreneurs had elevated obscure performers in the decades before the Second World War. Yet the bravado and drive of the generation of the 1960s and early 1970s, a new era of “corporate rock,” was exceptional. Without aggressive and energetic managers, rock bands could not succeed in the 1960s. Well-known successful managers from this period include Brian Epstein of the Beatles, Andrew Loog Oldham of the Rolling Stones, and Peter Grant of Led Zeppelin. A youthful cohort of rock managers also latched on to The Who. These were, first, Peter Meaden and then the team of Christopher (“Kit”) Lambert and Chris Stamp. Meaden (1941–1978), The Who’s first full-time manager, embodied much of what was novel about London of the early 1960s. He became manager of the band in 1964 when Modism was at its peak. A selfprofessed Mod, Meaden was determined to make The Who the movement’s favorite band. Within the group, Townshend empathized with Mods and at various times described himself as one, though the rest of the band was more circumspect. Nonetheless under Meaden’s guidance, during 1964 The Who (still calling themselves the High Numbers for part of this period) dressed liked Mods, played at Mod venues, and wrote and performed songs that appealed to Mods. A longtime friend of The Who, Richard Barnes, recalled, Meaden single-handedly turned The Who into Mods for about fifty quid each. . . . He took each member of the band and had Jack the Barber trim and comb Mod styles neatly into place. Seersucker jackets, Levi’s, two-toned shoes and cycling shirts and a new name, “The High Numbers,” completed the picture—numbers being the moddy boddy slang for the younger Mods, who emblazoned their T-shirts with little stuck on numbers. 15

As it turned out, the Mod phenomenon was short-lived, and so if The Who were to continue as a band, they would have to evolve. Managers and promoters on the lookout for opportunities in the 1960s could be aggressive in taking over bands. The musicians themselves were often too young, too inexperienced, and too distracted by the attractions of the rock-and-roll lifestyle to set their own course or to really take

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notice of the things happening around them. And so Meaden, who was prey to addictions (he died at age thirty-six after years of drug and alcohol abuse) and who did not really grasp the fading Mod moment, was outmaneuvered by two other young promoters who were keen to take over the band’s management and who would play a crucial role in making The Who famous on both sides of the Atlantic. These were Kit Lambert (1935–1981) and Chris Stamp (1942–2012). Like the members of The Who, Lambert and Stamp came from backgrounds that were in some ways typically British, with British rules of social class governing their markedly different upbringings. Kit Lambert was the son of Constant Lambert, a composer and conductor who was a well-known figure in classical music and elite London society. 16 The Lamberts belonged to a social milieu that seemed to produce eccentric, quixotic, and elusive characters—figures such as Kim Philby and Guy Burgess, creatures of the upper social echelon and elite British universities, with ties to the leaders and institutions of the fading British Empire, and yet characters who seemed not to fit in. Philby and Burgess rejected their backgrounds and put themselves at the center of an international scandal by becoming spies for the Soviet Union during the Cold War. 17 Kit Lambert did not choose quite this route, seemed hardly political at all, and yet still pursued a similarly unexpected life course. Indeed, he turned out to be as remarkable a character as any member of The Who. After getting a degree from Oxford University, Lambert went into the British army, where he took part in, among other adventures, an expedition to map a South American river that ended with the death of a close friend. Back in England in the early sixties, he used his social connections and a gift of gab to move into the film industry. Then, despite having little real affinity for the music, he shifted his talents to rock and roll, which he recognized as the “next big thing” in England. Lambert was looking for a rock-and-roll band to include in a film when he saw the High Numbers perform at the tavern of London’s Railway Hotel in 1964. At the time, the plan, according to partner Chris Stamp, was simple: “We would find a group. We would manage the group to success. And we would all the time film it.” 18 The chaos, noise, and attitude of the High Numbers instantly appealed to Lambert’s instincts as a promoter. Lambert’s business partner, Chris Stamp, came from the “other side of the tracks,” socially: the British working class. Stamp was “the son of

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[a London] East End tugboatmen, a street fighter who dropped out of grammar school and drifted into show business on the heels of a successful actor brother [Terence Stamp].” 19 Raised with five siblings by his mother, Stamp was the product of a proletarian upbringing and maybe as socially different from Kit Lambert as it was possible for another Englishman to be. The way that the two looked and talked bespoke their classes. Keith Moon thought that Stamp chattered away in a “nearly unintelligible East London cockney” accent (an attribute that probably made it easy to fit in with early Who fans), which contrasted with Lambert’s “Oxonian” speech and dress. 20 Nik Cohn, one of the era’s best-known rock journalists, remembered The Who’s managerial team this way: Kit was an utter maniac who lived off nervous energy and the sound of his own voice, who was so tense it hurt, who hardly ever went to sleep. . . . Chris, by contrast, was the voice of sanity, very cool and hard. Together they fitted like Laurel and Hardy. They shared two significant traits: a taste for hard, flashy living, and a burning ambition to make enough money to afford to act it out. Though Lambert was as openly gay as he could afford to be and Stamp chased skirts, they were perfect for one another, a matched set. 21

Along with managing The Who, Lambert and Stamp also founded Track Records, which before folding in 1978, would release music by The Who, Jimi Hendrix, and other recording artists. Lambert and Stamp belonged to a generational cohort of distinctive, ingenious, energetic promoters that included Epstein, Loog Oldham, and Grant, all of whom became nearly as famous as their charges. In hindsight, given their distinct backgrounds and the fact that they were almost as young and inexperienced as The Who themselves, it is surprising that Lambert and Stamp were able to join as a team or that they would eventually find a way to guide a neighborhood Mod band to transatlantic success. Yet, this was just the sort of path to fame and fortune that could be blazed in the age of rock and roll. In this sense, promoters such as Lambert and Stamp—like band members Townshend, Daltrey, Moon, and Entwistle—were not entirely free agent makers of their own history but rather products of a particular time and place. Lambert and Stamp saw in the qualities that defined The Who— youth, frustration, anger, brashness, irony, loudness, onstage violence—

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ingredients for success beyond local Mods, beyond England, beyond the seemingly inevitable year or two of rock-and-roll success, and (particularly for Lambert) beyond the music itself. “I Can See for Miles,” a hit song for The Who in 1967, was for Townshend about personal relationships, but for Lambert and Stamp, it spoke to the potential for fame and fortune. The two managers’ ambitions meant that the band should travel from England to the United States, whose cultural imprint had been felt by so many young Britons but, more important, was economically the “pot of gold.” It was Lambert and Stamp who took The Who to continental Europe, the United States, and then other Anglophone countries (Canada and Australia) where rock and roll had also penetrated. Where Pete Meaden had kept the band attuned to London and the local Mod phenomenon, Lambert and Stamp wanted to create fans and make money around the Atlantic basin in Europe, North America, and beyond. After taking over The Who’s management in August 1964 (and settling for good on the group’s name), Lambert and Stamp became tireless and inventive promoters, arranging performance after performance across England and then through Western and Northern Europe. It was during this period (late 1964 through 1967) that The Who built a growing continental European fan base in France, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, West Germany, and the Netherlands. Drawing on their earlier careers in movie production, Lambert and Stamp were keen to the influence of film and television, and beginning in 1965, they were able to get The Who a number of appearances on British and American music television shows, as well as live guest performances on BBC Radio. 22 Television shows in England, Western Europe, and the United States directed at a developing generation of media-centric youth were important opportunities to publicize rock bands. In this period (ca. 1964–1967), radio and television programming in nations across the Atlantic, certainly England, was governed by cultural or institutional norms that kept the avant-garde, the unusual, the loud—in other words, rock and roll—at arm’s length. For a long time, it was difficult to hear rock music on British radio. But where BBC Radio was slow to turn over program time to rock music, BBC Television was somewhat more adventurous. In 1965, The Who appeared on popular programs Ready Steady Go! Top of the Pops, and The Beat Room in England, as well as Shindig in the United States, Music-Hall de France in France, and on

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Dutch television during a visit to The Hague. Lambert and Stamp eventually got The Who live gigs on BBC Radio, as their early songs were also being played on the “pirate radio” stations Radio Caroline and Radio London. Pirate radio began transmitting music, especially rock and roll, in 1964 from ships positioned off the coast of England to avoid restrictions on the kind and amount of airtime of popular music imposed by the BBC. 23 “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere” became a hit on pirate radio and after a televised appearance by The Who the theme song for Ready Steady Go! A gig on the American variety program The Smothers Brothers in 1967 got the attention of television viewers in the United States, during which the band destroyed their instruments and Keith Moon set off a bomb large enough to frighten the other performers and catch Townshend’s hair on fire. The years when Lambert and Stamp were trying to make The Who famous (ca. 1964–1967) were also difficult for the band because personalities—especially those of Daltrey and Townshend—clashed. As the individual members of the band took to arguing and fighting (often literally) among themselves, Lambert brought Townshend under his wing, schooling him in the history of classical music and encouraging the young musician to expand his creative ambitions to exploit what turned out to be a remarkable talent to write songs. For Townshend, it became crucial that the band “get its sound right.” During these early years and under the direction of their new managers, The Who perfected a style that came to be known as “power pop.” The years from late 1964 through 1967 were the first really creative song-writing period for Townshend, resulting in a string of successful tunes that kept the band near the top of the British pop record charts. Some of these early songs were eventually to achieve classic rock status: “I Can’t Explain,” “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere,” “My Generation,” “Substitute,” and “I Can See for Miles.” Following the successful work of British bands the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Hollies, Dave Clark Five, Kinks, and Animals, these singles from The Who, along with other original compositions and cover songs, were compiled in long-playing albums that were sold on both sides of the Atlantic. Ever on the lookout for pushing the boundaries, Lambert and Stamp encouraged the band to come up with something grander: a concept album. This became 1967’s The Who Sell Out. The concept in this instance was a set of songs linked by short, phony radio “jingles.” This was, for The Who, a joking, ironic statement that

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they had “sold out” their art for commercial gain. The tension between art as a higher calling and its commercialization, which had characterized cultural developments in the Atlantic world since the late-eighteenth century, became, in 1967 for The Who, an object of irony and humor. The Who Sell Out was released in the same year that the band embarked on their first tour of the United States and Canada after an invitation to appear at the Monterey Pop Festival in California. This initial period of success under Lambert and Stamp was followed by another short stretch when it seemed that the band was again losing direction. As Daltrey, Moon, Entwistle, and Townshend continued to bicker, it looked like the band might come apart. Few sixties rock bands stayed together very long, and individual members of The Who—who seemed to believe that their personalities could never really mesh—had always assumed that any success that they might achieve would be ephemeral. By 1968, it looked like it might be the end for The Who. It was at this juncture that Lambert again pushed Townshend to go beyond the existing boundaries of rock music to write something new, something “linear” and pretentious. This was the rock opera Tommy, the tale of the “deaf, dumb, and blind” boy who endures family trauma and his elevation by fans to messiah status on the path to inner enlightenment. Tommy gave The Who new life, updated their brand and made the band and their managers rich. Along the way to Tommy, The Who experienced problems typical of 1960s rock culture and industry. Band members bickered and fought. Townshend and Daltrey struggled over leadership of the group. Townshend later recalled: “When the band started in 1964–1965, I really thought that we were gonna’ explode, I thought I was gonna’ die.” 24 Moon and Entwistle periodically threatened to quit. Drugs, alcohol, and youth made it all very difficult. Townshend’s memory of the time was, “I never ate. It was all dope, dope, dope and horrible vibes of aggression and bitterness.” 25 Finances, too, were an issue. Under Lambert and Stamp, the band signed a contract with the American record producer Shel Talmy that came under dispute. The sides—band and management versus producer Talmy—claimed financial rewards from the recordings that they had produced together, including profits from “My Generation.” The dispute ended up in court, with Talmy winning a breach-of-contract suit and legal rights to “My Generation” and other

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songs from 1965. Here was an early example of The Who, like so many of their peer groups, becoming subject to the strategies of record producers or concert promoters. The legal struggle with Talmy left a bitter taste for the band and their managers. In the future, there were to be more unpleasant transactions over finances and music, including The Who’s involvement at the famous Woodstock festival in 1969, where Townshend believed that the band was essentially conned into performing. However, sometimes it seemed like everyone, even the promoters, actually were “in it for the music.” On a 1968 tour of the United States, The Who played memorable gigs at venues that seemed perfect for a rock-and-roll show: Detroit’s Grande Ballroom, where they were surprised by a local audience steeped in rock music that really knew their songs, and the Fillmore West in San Francisco, where Bill Graham was among the first promoters to view rock music as a form of art that deserved a “framing” no less appropriate than a painting or a sculpture. In the coming years, The Who were invited to storied music venues where rock bands had never before played, performing the full album Tommy at opera houses across the Atlantic in 1969–1970, including memorable shows at the Coliseum in London and the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. With the help of managers Lambert and Stamp and promoters such as Bill Graham and by playing huge outdoor festivals at Monterey, Woodstock, and the Isle of Wight in England, The Who were as successful as any group in bridging the gap between the pop, “lowbrow” roots of rock and roll and the “highbrow” pretensions implicit in Tommy. Following the release of Tommy in 1969, Townshend and Lambert drifted apart. Lambert, like Meaden before him, became prey to drugs, and in 1973 he and Stamp were let go as managers. By this time, most of the band members, Daltrey especially, had become savvier about the business side of the rock music industry. Managing The Who turned out to be a high point in the career of Lambert, whose eccentric life ended tragically in 1981 when he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage after falling down the stairs at his mother’s home. 26 Ever since the early-nineteenth century, laissez-faire capitalism had held out the promise of great riches to be gained relatively quickly for “new men” with the entrepreneurial talent and nerve to take a risk and promote what was novel and appealing. In the dynamic and increasingly

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affluent post-1945 Atlantic world dominated by the American model of capitalism, there was a great deal of money to be made by producing and selling the “products” of rock and roll: the bands themselves and the many ways that their music could be marketed live or through recording. In this setting, young bands—and sometimes their young managers—could lose out financially. In fact, this is what had happened to so many black Americans earlier in the century. The members of The Who were very much enthralled by a rock music industry that generated wealth and seemed to take over their lives, even if, as individuals, they did not really start to become wealthy until Tommy. The members of the band reacted in their own ways to becoming rich: Moon could not control himself; Daltrey retreated to the countryside; Entwistle spent too much money on material things; and Townshend struggled to find motivation and keep his sanity and his family together. During the age of rock and roll, musicians, producers, and managers seemed to succumb easily to the temptations that came with the lifestyle. Most survived the years of excess, but some—such as Pete Meaden, Kit Lambert, and Keith Moon—did not.

“SEE ME, FEEL ME / LISTENING TO YOU”: FAN MAGAZINES AND CRITICS ACROSS THE ATLANTIC The 1960s generation of rock-and-roll promoters had a special panache and drive to succeed, but promoting performers and encouraging the adulation of fans was not new to England or the Atlantic world. Starting in the early-nineteenth century, a culture of fandom had evolved in Europe and North America. Our own contemporary sense of “stars” and being “star struck” probably dates from the 1820s. In the United States, the 1850s was a crucial period when, as Mark Cavicchi writes, audiences started to develop a “heightened awareness of performers’ personal qualities.” 27 A new kind of fan thus emerged in the nineteenth century, who, while attending musical performances and concerts, reveled not only in the aural and the artistic, but also in the “astonishing physical experience” of the event. 28 Near the end of the century, some doctors were even fearing the negative effects of this kind of attachment to music and performers, coining a clinical term—musicomania— to describe the “ailment.” 29 Another stage in the modern evolution of

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“fan” occurred in the early-twentieth century with the emergence of film and film stars. But it was “music lovers, as witnesses to the beginnings of the commercialization of popular culture in the nineteenth century, [who] were among the first to assume the role of audienceconsumer and to create the strategies many use today for understanding the world of stars, merchandizing, and spectacle.” 30 There were two qualities that were special about fandom and promotion in the 1960s: first, it was directed at a younger generation than before—namely, “teenagers,” a word and concept that came into common usage in the Atlantic world only in the twentieth century; 31 second, it was based on the rise of an economic, political, and increasingly Anglophone North Atlantic that offered ample opportunity for pop music to appeal across wide social and geographic boundaries. Thus, in the 1950s, British teenagers Townshend, Daltrey, Moon, and Entwistle became fans of African American musicians Sonny Boy Williamson, John Lee Hooker, and Jimmy Reed—as in the 1970s, Soviet and East European teenagers would become fans of The Who, the Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan. As we have seen, popular music genres from earlier decades, including ragtime and swing, had appeal for different people in different countries. Aside from the case of jazz—which likewise earned swift appeal in different corners of the world—the draw of rock music in the 1960s for such a wide range of youth, regardless of social class or geographic boundary, makes the impact of other pop music styles appear comparatively limited. Rock music thrived across the Atlantic, then the world, in almost unprecedented ways. Publicity was central to the sixties music industry and to the success of a rock band—maybe even more so than actual musical talent (to the disgust of purists). It seemed that almost any young person with some ability and charisma could be turned into a rock-and-roll star, so long as he or she also had the luck and the management to generate attention. At the start of their relationship with The Who, Lambert and Stamp were fairly shameless in encouraging band members to smash their instruments and dress and behave in ways that would draw the attention of the media. Later, as the onstage antics started to wear thin, Lambert and Stamp came up with other schemes to get The Who into the entertainment news—for instance, pushing the band toward making themselves objects of pop art and briefly grooming Moon and Dal-

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trey to appeal to the teenage girls who often followed groups in the early sixties. 32 As The Who’s music and performance style and their managers’ promotional tactics created fans, so too did the coverage of the band by rock music writers and critics. An ingredient in the success of rock music—likewise with counterparts in the past but that expanded in new directions in the 1960s—was the appearance of commercial publications devoted exclusively to rock bands and their fans. The best-known and most influential of these were two English-language publications: New Musical Express (NME), published in England, and the American magazine Rolling Stone. NME began in 1952 by covering a variety of popular music, with rock and roll becoming its focus in the 1960s. Like the American publication Billboard, NME produced a singles chart that encouraged a certain amount of competition among promoters and bands. In the early 1970s, as NME lost ground against another important British publication, Melody Maker, it retooled its image, shifting gears to track the emergence of punk rock. Meantime, the American publication Rolling Stone debuted in San Francisco in 1967. While there were similar music magazines on the American market (Crawdaddy! which began a year earlier, and Creem, which started in 1969), Rolling Stone was the most influential and the most widely circulated. One way that NME and Rolling Stone set themselves apart from other magazines was by offering extended, timely, and serious coverage of rock music and bands. Both were priced low enough to be within the purchasing power of young adults. Rock magazines and the critics and writers who worked for them were important participants in an expanding sixties rock culture that branded some rock music as sober and less like pop and that fed a growing body of fans eager to know more about their favorite performers. Rock music navigated the frontier between industry and art, and the new publications were comfortable with the dual aspect. Because they provided “hip,” serious coverage of the rock world, the magazines were ideal places for a band such as The Who, with an articulate spokesperson such as Townshend to receive coverage. The fan base of The Who thus expanded beyond the rowdy Mod clubs of the early days and the “teeny boppers” who briefly gushed over Keith Moon in 1966, into a shrewder audience partly through the coverage in NME and Rolling Stone.

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The story was similar in other countries with developing rock music cultures. Rock—“Oz rock,” as it came to be known—hit Australia big in the 1950s and 1960s and grew over the years in a series of developmental “waves.” 33 Australia was part of the Anglophone rock world, as opposed to the Atlantic world. Melbourne was Australia’s rock capital of the sixties, and it was there that the main pop music magazine Go-Set was published after its founding in 1966. Go-Set, like NME and Rolling Stone, offered broad, serious coverage of rock music and the sixties culture of style and dress. It provided Australians with entertainment news from England and the United States, covering, for instance, the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 and the lively London scene of the period. In Canada, rock and roll took hold in the 1950s as it did elsewhere in the Anglophone world, producing a number of musicians who would have great success across the Atlantic. The first independent Canadian record companies focused on rock music were established in the 1960s. The trade magazine RPM began in 1964, featuring song and album charts for Canadian pop music. Still, there was not really a Canadian equivalent to NME or Rolling Stone in the 1960s. 34 Similar developments were occurring in Western Europe, though again there were no rock music magazines to rival NME or Rolling Stone. In France, Rock & Folk was published in the Paris suburb of Clichy beginning in 1966, and it carried stories about American and English bands, with the Rolling Stones a favorite. 35 Rock music had an impact in West Germany, too, where a native style (labeled “Krautrock” by the British press) was identifiable by 1968. But until Spex was founded in 1980, there was no important German rock magazine. 36 Although Dutch youth liked and absorbed rock music, as with West Germany in the 1960s and early 1970s, there was no Dutch rock music publication to challenge NME or Rolling Stone. For fans of The Who and other rock bands, the rhetorical tone was set in the Anglophone portion of the Atlantic world. Part of the story of the rise of rock music magazines in the 1960s was the appearance of professions that had no clear antecedents in the past: “rock journalists” and “rock critics.” These were professional writers who interviewed musicians, followed bands and individual performers as they toured, and sometimes lived the lifestyle of the rockers whom they wrote about. Critics reviewing albums became arbiters of taste. On occasion, they also tried their hand at rock-and-roll music, with a handful becoming successful performers in their own right. Before they

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began writing about The Who in the early 1960s, British journalists Roy Carr and Nick Jones were in bands. The American Lenny Kaye reversed the order: before he became a collaborator and guitarist for the Patti Smith Group, he was a contributing writer for several rock music publications, including Creem and Rolling Stone. Similarly, the American Chrissie Hynde—founder, lead singer, and songwriter of the Pretenders—had a short career writing for NME in mid-1970s London. In the 1960s and 1970s, a number of rock journalists and critics took a special interest in The Who, following the band as it toured and writing about them in NME and Rolling Stone. Among these was Nik Cohn, the son of a well-known British historian. Cohn often socialized with The Who, but he could nonetheless be scathing in his reviews of their music when he felt that they had not lived up to their own standards. Another rock critic who knew and followed the group closely was the American Dave Marsh, who went on to write what is probably the definitive popular history of the group: Before I Get Old: The Story of the Who (1983). The Briton Nick Jones had been a follower of the band since their Shepherd’s Bush days and then did early interviews with them for Melody Maker magazine. Rock journalists did not necessarily have to pester members of the band to get them to talk. Townshend was usually a willing and, as it turned out, sophisticated talker about all things related to rock, providing a number of memorable interviews over the years. If there was a rock-and-roll intelligentsia in the sixties, Townshend belonged to it. His interviews in NME and Rolling Stone were opportunities to publicize The Who and for the magazines to sell copies. But they also provided the occasion for both writer and performer to expand on the larger meanings of rock and for Townshend to flesh out his musical ideas. This was something that many journalists, performers, and fans sought in the 1960s: a more profound meaning to rock and roll. Years later, Townshend admitted: Time spent with a journalist was always valuable to me. The fact that sometimes journalists might have misread my openness, my eagerness to fly my wildest and flimsiest ideas past them before they’d even properly formed in my mind, did not bother me. I was reading their faces while I brainstormed, looking for a reaction. I was building my ideas in the time I had available, knowing that—in any case, as a natural part of my career—I had to do the interviews to keep

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fans engaged and to keep the record company aware that we were indeed working on making new records and had new ideas. I figured that I might as well allow my interviews to perform a double duty. I began to rely on, and made deep lasting friendships with, a number of journalists that (our respective professional career roles of rock star and rock critic aside), were based on reciprocal respect and a truly symbiotic interdependence. 37

Townshend’s magazine interviews made him appear artsy, self-conscious, and pretentious. This was mostly in contrast to the rest of The Who. In conversation and interviews, Moon was funny, witty, and ironic, but there was rarely serious content. The cynical Entwistle probably did fewer interviews than anyone in the band, and when he did talk, he was unabashed in admitting that he was in it for the fun and the money. Daltrey was slow to drop the defensiveness of the early years, though in time he came to see himself as standing for the sheer joy of playing with and listening to The Who. In this sense, Daltrey—probably more than any member of the band—represented the attitude of the majority of The Who fans.

“NAKED EYE”: VENUES As the music grew louder and the crowds larger in the 1960s, the performance venues changed, too. Like most bands with roots in the neighborhoods where they had grown up, gigs at the beginning of The Who’s career mostly took place in the local clubs, pubs, and old music halls of London where bands and performers had played for decades. These were the settings to which managers Pete Meaden, Kit Lambert, and Chris Stamp looked for the kinds and size of crowds—at first, mostly Mods—that the band was likely to draw. These early physical spaces tended to be cramped and were set up to hold at best a few hundred people. Most had minimal or no public address systems, though this was hardly needed since The Who played so loudly. In 1964–1965, one of the places where The Who often played was the Railway Hotel in the Harrow and Wealdstone section of London. The Railway Hotel was a small space with a low ceiling that required the band to be packed tightly together on a podium just above the dance floor, with the fans almost on top of them. This was where Kit

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Lambert first saw them as the High Numbers and where Townshend first smashed a guitar. Another typical early venue was the Goldhawk Road Social Club in the band’s own Shepherd’s Bush. This is Dave Marsh’s description of the Goldhawk: [It] was not a pub, nor was it your average workingman’s club. Like any urban area laced with immigrants and possessed of an open-air market, Shepherd’s Bush developed its share of hard cases, so that a club like Goldhawk, which in another area might have been merely a place for the local yobs to catch a couple of pints away from the ball and chain of home life, was tinged with hints of danger. On weekends, especially, the garden was often the site of punch-ups and worse. This is not to say that most of the clientele were of the criminal persuasion, though it’s true that a good many of them were working toward it. 38

And here is an even more detailed description of the ambiance and clientele of the Goldhawk (marked by Mod lingo) from “Irish” Jack Lyons, a Mod and an original fan of The Who: The Goldhawk Club. What a place! It looks like a women’s institute private residence from the outside, but that place can take off like nowhere else on a Friday and Saturday night. . . . There are five steps leading up to the front door. The door is oak. I should know, I’ve knocked on it enough times when the place has got packed out. I’m usually let in cos I’m a regular. Regular? I spend my whole life there every Friday and Saturday night. . . . When you come out of the bar section in the Goldhawk Club you have to go down a short flight of stairs to get to the dance floor. There’s a door frame leading to the dance floor with Chinese plastic drapes hanging from it. Some people slit their hand between the drapes in a gesture of club politeness to get on the floor. But us [Mods], when we’re pilled we just walk through the silly drapes like we was made of iron. The bouncers hate that. But there’s something electric about walking through the drapes. Like it’s really flash walking through with your hands in your jacket pockets and a stream of red, green, yellow and black drapes hanging around your shoulders. It’s got face written all over it. . . . It’s five shillings to get into the Goldhawk Social Club . . . ! Hardly anyone drinks pints. It’s all halves and bitters, Charringtons, Watneys Red Barrell. . . . I don’t bother too much with booze. Maybe one Brown Ale. Pills are more my scene. Pills and coke. . . . Along the

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sides of the dance floor are these big sofas which are ideal if you’ve got off with a girl. This particular seating arrangement is nearly always filled by the usual collection of sex maniacs piled on the sofas with their girl friends. I never give these randy bastards a second glance when I’m dancing because when I’m pilled sex is too slow and anyway my legs are like rubber and I feel like I can out-dance anyone. Anyone except fucking Townshend. Some Friday nights, this geezer Townshend the lead guitarist of The Who, joins us on the floor during the interval and dances with a whole bunch of us. When the band go back onstage he tries out some of the steps he’s just pinched from us. . . . They sling you out of the Goldhawk Club at eleven. 39

The “scene” at the Goldhawk and similar Mod hangouts came and went fairly quickly. The growing Atlantic, if not quite yet universal, appeal of rock music in 1964–1965, along with the quest for new markets and customers, pushed The Who and their managers to seek new audiences beyond Shepherd’s Bush. When Lambert and Stamp took over the group’s management, they wanted success not just in London but across England and, like the Beatles and other British bands, to the European continent and America. Taking over from Meaden in late 1964, Lambert and Stamp booked their charges in clubs outside the capital while insisting that the teenage band members make a full-time commitment to the job. Under Lambert and Stamp, The Who now became a relentlessly hardworking group. In 1964, they made at least 181 live performances, all in England, most of them in the London area. The next year, they performed 234 times, again mostly in England but for the first time outside the country. 40 A crucial early set of gigs for The Who was at one of the characteristic clubs of “swinging” 1960s London: the Marquee on Wardour Street, “the most respectable R&B-oriented club” in the city’s fashionable Soho district and, according to “Irish” Jack, a place that attracted a different sort of crowd from the Mods—more hip, including “beatniks” and members of the CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament). 41 The Marquee was thus some distance socially and geographically from The Who’s West London roots and from the mostly working-class Mod audiences to which they were accustomed. Playing at the Marquee for the first time in 1964 was a sign that The Who were stepping up in location and broadening their appeal.

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But the Marquee was just one of hundreds of places where the band performed in the 1960s. What follows is a small sample drawn from a compilation put together by Lyons and American fan Joe McMichael of the venues across England, Western Europe, and North America where The Who performed between 1964 and 1968. 42 Saturday, July 18, 1964, Trade Union Hall, Watford, England. “Billed as The Who (this was the period when the group were switching names between The Who and the High Numbers) with Chris Farlowe & The Thunderbirds as the supporting act. The Who played a series of Saturday night gigs here during July, and Farlowe had initially been billed as the headliner but was eventually switched to the supporting slot when The Who proved to be the more popular attraction. Adverts cite the name The Who, not the High Numbers, for this date.” Wednesday, October 7, 1964, Town Hall, Greenwich, England. “Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp tried to expand the High Numbers’ appeal beyond their usual West London stronghold and booked a series of gigs in Greenwich. This was the first of four dates at the Town Hall which were eventually terminated on October 28 because of poor attendance.” Saturday, June 19, 1965, Uxbridge Blues and Folk Festival, Uxbridge Show, Park Road, Uxbridge, England. “The Who appeared here during the afternoon, sometime between 2:30 and 4:30 pm, and then moved on to play the Cavern in Leicester Square that evening. Their fee for the Uxbridge Festival was 150 pounds. Among the acts on the bill were Marianne Faithful, The Spencer Davis Group, American soul singer Solomon Burke, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, The Birds (with future Rolling Stone Ron Wood) and others.” Saturday, September 25, 1965, Folkets Hus, Helsingfors, Denmark. “The Who performed their first Scandinavian concert at 9 pm with about 600 fans in attendance. They then rushed back for a midnight set at the K.B Hallen 20 odd miles away.” Saturday, April 2, 1966, La Locomotive Club, Place Blanche, Paris, France. “Two shows, matinee and midnight performances. The Who flew back to London on Sunday, April 3.” Friday, May 20, 1966, Ricky Tick Club, Newbury, England. “Controversy surrounded this date when an incident on stage was splashed across the pages of the music trade papers. Although there are conflicting reports, it appears that Keith and John arrived late, by which time

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Pete and Roger had played a short set with the supporting group, The Jimmy Brown Sound. When The Who finally went on stage there was menace in the air, and during the destructive finale in ‘My Generation,’ Pete lost his grip on his guitar as he was slamming it into his amps and Keith was hit in the head with the instrument. Keith received a black eye and badly bruised face and also required three stitches in his leg. The next day Pete went to Keith’s house in Wembley to apologise but Keith refused to open the door.” Wednesday, January 25, 1967, Kingsway Theatre, Hadleigh, Essex, England. “Two shows at 6:15 and 8:45 pm. Other acts on the bill were The Roulettes, Sounds Around, The She Trinity and The Sovereigns. The Who’s set list was: ‘I Can’t Explain,’ ‘So Sad,’ ‘Barbara Ann,’ ’Run, Run, Run,’ ‘Don’t Look Away,’ ‘Substitute,’ ‘I’m a Boy,’ ‘Happy Jack’ and ‘My Generation.’” Tuesday, August 1, 1967, Mississippi State Coliseum, Jackson, Mississippi, USA. “The Who had joked since mid-1966 of playing a version of Nancy Sinatra’s ‘These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,’ with John Entwistle on vocals! And in the same spirit they played at this concert a version of Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood’s recent hit ‘Jackson’—a one-off and utterly unique Who performance. This unlikely occurrence was confirmed by Kit Lambert, who told (a fan magazine) the following: ‘. . . in Jackson, Mississippi, they rehearsed, the day before, a version, a rock version of the Nancy Sinatra song.’ The fans delighted in Roger singing ‘I’m going to Jackson.’ The Who finished their set with the usual equipment destruction before a stunned audience. They never appeared in Jackson again.” Tuesday, July 23, 1968, The Mosque, Richmond, Virginia, USA. “Two shows with The Troggs on the bill, although neither performance in the 3,730-seat hall was a sell-out. Guitar destroyed: Fender Jazzmaster (custom colour).” Friday, November 15, 1968, The Roundhouse, Chalk Farm, London, England. “10:30 pm til dawn. Another ‘all-nighter’ extravaganza with Joe Cocker, The Small Faces, The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, The Mindbenders, Yes and DJ Dexter on the bill.” The Who’s first appearance in the United States took place in March 1967 when they played a set of shows in New York City sponsored by the well-known American DJ and impresario Murray the K. The shows were held at the RKO, a theater/concert hall in midtown Manhattan.

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The format called for several groups to perform short sets several times a day over the course of a week. This was strenuous work, something only young persons energized by adrenalin and drugs could carry out. The Who’s performance was a memorable one for an American audience that, by and large, had not heard of them. One person who had an inkling was Al Kooper, a well-known session musician of the era: I had read all about [The Who] in the imported English papers, so I knew what their trip was. . . . The first day, everyone in the cast stood in the wings to see what all the talk was about. Well, they launched into “My Generation,” and you could feel it coming. . . . Moon just beat the shit out of [the drums] for fifteen minutes nonstop. Peter Townshend leaped in the air, spinning his arms wildly and just being the most generally uninhibited guitar player ever seen in these parts. Roger Daltrey broke a total of eighteen microphones over the full run of the show. And John Entwistle would just lean up against his amp taking it all in. They reached the modulation part of the instrumental, and Townshend spun his guitar in the air, caught it and smashed it into a placebo amp. No cracks in his Strat, so he aimed for the mike stand. Whackkk! Crack number one. Then the floor. Still got signal coming from it! All of a sudden, Moon kicks his entire drum kit over and the curtain rings down in a cloud of artificial smoke. Just then I realized my heart was beating three times its normal speed. I figure, as a critic of that show, my electrocardiogram was the best testimonial I could have offered. 43

Later that year, following the outdoor festival at Monterey, California, The Who embarked on their first full North American tour, playing locations in the American South and Midwest that seemed both exotic and familiar for the four young Englishmen as the places that had produced the rock-and-roll music that they were now returning, with their own London flair, back to its original home. During this first North American tour, The Who played memorable shows that helped generate a reputation and a fan base that they would build on in subsequent years. A typical performance was before a crowd of approximately one thousand teenagers at the Southfield High School gym in the Detroit suburb of Southfield, Michigan, on November 22, 1967, a day ahead of the big American holiday of Thanksgiving. Fan Sheldon Stern, at the time a high school sophomore, was there and remembered “being totally overwhelmed”:

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I was probably 30 feet from the stage. Keith was on fire. I remember shattered drumsticks flying 10–20 rows deep into the audience. Pete was amazing, and Roger with that spinning microphone, it was unforgettable. I remember “Magic Bus,” “Can’t Explain,” “I Can See for Miles,” “Happy Jack” and a host of others. What I remember most was the total destruction of the stage during “My Generation.” It was fantastic. I was hooked on The Who. 44

Similar happenings took place at halls, gyms, and auditoriums across the American South and Midwest and in Canada, where young fan Mike Griffiths—watching The Who perform eight songs (including “Substitute,” “Happy Jack,” and “Boris the Spider”) in Vancouver, British Columbia—walked out on the headliner act, Herman’s Hermits, because he “just couldn’t stomach them after witnessing the incredible Who!” 45 Most of The Who’s early shows were indoors, but they also played many of the outdoor festivals that seemed to encourage wild behavior by some of the young people attending. This was especially the case in Scandinavia in 1965–1966. The Who continued to play outdoor shows throughout their career, including famous festivals at Monterey, California, in 1967; Woodstock, New York, in 1969; and the Isle of Wight in England in 1970 and 1971. They also played at outdoor football stadiums across North America, England, and Europe in the 1970s and early 1980s. Reflecting the “peace and love” ethic of the day, the outdoor concerts of the late sixties and early seventies were generally more sedate than the earlier, occasionally riotous gigs in Denmark and Sweden. As the decade of the sixties was drawing to a close and as The Who were becoming a transatlantic success, the venues where they performed grew larger. The Who were one of the headliners at the Woodstock festival, held outdoors in upstate New York in August 1969, which drew about a half-million persons, and at the sprawling outdoor Isle of Wight concerts south of London the following two years. 46 Like Woodstock, the Isle of Wight concerts were multiday affairs drawing tens of thousands of fans from the United Kingdom and the continent to listen to an array of bands. In the 1970s, The Who were among the first groups to be booked into large sports stadiums in England, Canada, and the United States. These were settings that were often outdoors but sometimes included the new domed stadiums being built in the United States that could hold seventy thousand or more persons. These places

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were light-years away from the small Shepherd’s Bush clubs of 1965. Performing in settings like these, The Who became a full-fledged “arena rock” band. By and large, the individual members of The Who considered the football arenas too big and impersonal, even as they recognized that they were the best way to give their legions of fans a chance to catch a show. The long history of live performance and the shorter history of arena rock reached a nadir for The Who in December 1979, when eleven young fans rushing to their seats in a festival seating arrangement at a concert in Cincinnati, Ohio, were trampled and killed. It was in the late 1960s and early 1970s—as The Who and other bigname rock bands of the day played larger and larger venues—that a standardized arena rock performance format took hold. Where in 1965, bands such as The Who might play a set of songs—covers or singles heard on the radio—for thirty minutes or an hour, by 1970 rock concerts were lasting two hours or more. A kind of repertoire of song order evolved in these years, which Pete Townshend characterized as “tripartite”: a handful of familiar, fast-paced songs at the beginning to get the audience warmed up; a middle selection that might include slower, more difficult, or less familiar tunes that the band wanted to try out; and then a final set of hits and crowd-pleasers coming as a reward for listening to the new material. “Naked Eye,” a slower tune that built to a rousing climax, ended some of The Who shows of this period rather than “My Generation.” Eventually, audiences came to expect this repertoire and even an encore at the end of the formal set. By the 1980s, audiences were beginning to request two or more encores. Because the venues became so large and because The Who’s music needed to be played loud, over the years the band continued to seek ways to increase the volume. As the physical distance between stage and audience grew, the band sought to enhance the visual effect: The Who were one of the first bands to add laser light effects to their show. Sometimes the added technology did not work well. The band was able to work into their stage show the electronic elements of songs from the Who’s Next album (“Baba O’Riley” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again”), but when they took Quadrophenia on the road in 1973–1974, intending to play the full version as they had done successfully with Tommy, there were problems coordinating the live and recorded music. The synchronized sound effects proved cumbersome, sapping the performance of its spontaneity. Frustrated about getting the new music across as they

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wanted, they abandoned playing Quadrophenia in its entirety and incorporated just a few of the manageable tunes into their set. They did not do the full album live for the rest of the decade.

“THE SEEKER”: THE WHO IN EUROPE Success in the rock music industry meant nearly constant touring and generating lots of publicity. Given that The Who toured North America as much or more than England and Europe after 1968, the group easily developed a transatlantic lifestyle and perspective. Under the guidance of managers Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, The Who cultivated new fans in North America and smaller yet equally loyal fan bases in France, Sweden, Italy, Denmark, West Germany, and the Netherlands. The European tours on which The Who embarked in the midsixties had been blazed by other British rock bands, including the Beatles and Rolling Stones. Beginning in 1965, The Who played clubs, town halls, exposition palaces, and open-air festivals across Western and Northern Europe, as far east and north as Finland. The Cold War—which had divided Western from Eastern European nations along what former British prime minister Winston Churchill labeled an “Iron Curtain”— was not only a political and economic divide but a cultural one as well. Germany, split by the winners of the war after the defeat of the Nazi regime in 1945, had become two de facto nations—East and West—by 1950. Many West German kids, as in France or Belgium, assimilated the transatlantic rock culture. The Who visited West German cities thirty times (as well as West Berlin on three occasions) between 1966 and 1972, but they did not play in East Germany. Though Polish, Hungarian, and other East European teenagers were in fact already being exposed to rock and roll and were tentatively developing their own pop music scenes, no Western rock band would play in Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union until the 1980s. The Who would never play further east than Finland and Austria, and they have never played in Russia or the former Eastern Bloc or post-Soviet nations. Western Europe was part of the cultural Atlantic world during the Cold War, but Eastern Europe was not. The Who’s first gig outside the United Kingdom took place in Paris in 1965. The band made several appearances in France that year, with

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additional shows in Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands, establishing a reputation in Western Europe before audiences in North America really knew them: the British Invasion of rock music touched shore on the continent before it landed in the United States and Canada. To a lesser degree than British kids, young French, Italians, West Germans, Dutch, Danes, and Swedes were tuning into American blues, R&B, country, and early rock-and-roll music. Although the number of fans, clubs, record stores, and magazines was not as impressive as in Great Britain, over time—certainly by the 1970s—European kids had their own burgeoning rock sound and were even sending bands and music back to England and North America. The Dutch band Golden Earring, which formed very early (1961), had a hit in America with “Radar Love” in 1973, and the Swedish pop group ABBA became internationally popular in the seventies. Both groups released songs sung in English (indeed, “American English”), which became the international language of rock and roll. There were also local Mod movements in Europe, especially in West Germany, Sweden, and Denmark. 47 Johnny Hallyday was a homegrown French rock star in the 1960s. It would take some time for the continental rock scene to match the dimensions of Britain and North America, but there was energy and a growing youthful cohort of rock fans with a devotion to the same bands, including The Who, to match their counterparts across the Atlantic. Continental Europe was contributing to the transatlantic generation that began in the 1960s. When The Who arrived in Paris on a three-day excursion on June 1, 1965, they performed at music clubs and made television and radio appearances. The trip was arranged by managers Lambert and Stamp after being contacted by a French fan group, and it marked the beginning of the band’s popularity in France, a market that, at this early stage, had otherwise been resistant to British acts. 48 French rock and roll was still developing, and the Mod movement, viewed mostly in the abstract, still seemed exotic when in 1965 French television showed a documentary on “Les Mods” that included a segment on The Who. There was a small cohort of French rock fans who knew The Who’s reputation for loud music and onstage mayhem, and so there was much interest and a little apprehension about what the band was bringing to the local music scene. During the visit, a French television producer labeled them “’a logical expression of the bewilderment and anarchy of London’s teenagers,” and the rock music magazine Internationale des

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Rockers described the band’s style as “unsettling.” 49 The Who were enough of a novelty, and the visit generated sufficient publicity that on the second night, the audience included a handful of film stars and other celebrities. A reviewer for the French music magazine Disco Revue was impressed with the performance, describing The Who as “likely to become the triumphant group of 1966.” For this reviewer: [the] appearance of The Who seemed to evoke a strange supernatural presence. The audience understood that a new style of rock was being created, particularly with the song “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere” (marked by guitar feedback and distortion). The wild drummer was capable of a lively, forceful rhythm. . . . The singer came over as somewhat overpowering. The audience responded with ecstatic delirium. 50

The Who returned to Paris in November 1965 and March 1966. One of the latter performances was shown on the French television program Music-Hall de France. 51 Although the show ended with a loud “My Generation” and singer Roger Daltrey and drummer Keith Moon polished things off with a flourish, the band did not smash their instruments. Perhaps the setting left them uncharacteristically inhibited; when The Who went against form, it was surprising. In 1966, they performed in France for the first time outside of Paris (in Lyon) and then in several other French cities through 1974. 52 Altogether, The Who performed in France nineteen times between 1966 and 1974. In the early years, The Who’s continental European jaunts also allowed them to gain their first extensive experience playing in the outdoors. These shows often happened in Scandinavian countries (Norway, Denmark, Sweden) during the summer months when the weather was warm. Crowds at these events seemed to be dominated by young men. Rowdy scenes and a sense of the unexpected were the norm. At a concert in Aarhus, Denmark, in September 1965, a fan reported, Violence lay in the air . . . even long before The Who were to perform. . . . The thousand strong audience were tearing their chairs apart, and throwing pieces, along with bottles and trash, at the supporting groups on the stage. . . . By the time The Who got on stage, the audience had turned into a riot mob. Again, kids tried to get up on stage. [A concert promoter] . . . tried to push them back. Instead, he was pulled down into the audience where he was beaten and

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kicked. The Who only played half of one song before the situation got completely out of hand. The kids stormed the stage, took the instruments that were still there and began smashing them. The Who and their management had already escaped through the back exit, once they realized what was happening. 53

Subsequently, The Who were banned for five years from playing at Aarhus. Similar, if not quite so unruly, scenes took place elsewhere in Denmark and Sweden during the summer tour of 1966. 54 Years later, those attending these shows vividly recalled the loud music, the destruction of instruments, and the general disorder. Henning Nǿr, a fan as well as the lead guitarist for a local Danish band, remembered The Who’s performance at Alaborg, Frederikstorv, in Denmark on Sunday, September 26, 1965, partly because, having destroyed their own equipment the previous day at Aarhus, The Who had to use gear from Nǿr’s band: Roger Daltrey ruined a microphone by slinging it around in the cord, hitting the floor several times. Keith Moon ruined the bass drum, the hi-hat and a cymbal by kicking it down from the drum platform. Pete Townshend ruined my guitar by playing it with a bottle. But still—we enjoyed the concert, even if it was a bit overwhelming—and Bendix music (the company that sponsored the show) compensated for the damages. 55

By the late 1960s, the raucous outdoor concerts in Scandinavia had begun to change—with the rock music crowds in these countries, like the Mod crowds in England, having faded away or evolving into a more homogenous, somewhat more sedate Atlantic type: long-haired, fond of marijuana, “laid back” in attitude, and with more women in attendance than earlier. Outdoor concerts still happened, but by the late 1970s, both the venues and the fans in continental Europe looked more like their counterparts in England and North America.

“GOING MOBILE”: TOURING Touring has long been a part of the history of popular entertainment, and in certain elemental ways, the experience of rock bands in the

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1960s and 1970s was probably not much different from that of musical troupes in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. Performers in 1966, like those in 1766 or 1866, took the act on the road to make a living and spread their name. There was a long-standing transatlantic aspect to touring, too. American minstrel shows first traveled to England in the 1840s when the “Virginia Minstrels” played at Liverpool, Manchester, and London. Other “black troupes” followed. 56 British and European performers crisscrossed the channel between Great Britain and Europe and, eventually, the Atlantic. There were well-established routes by which European entertainers had taken the show on the road since at least the time of the troubadours in the medieval period and the Italian commedia dell’Arte of the sixteenth century. The same was true of North America. In the American South, the “Chitlin’ Circuit” was the segregated entertainment route for African-Americans that lasted from the early-twentieth century until at least the 1960s. In England, Cliff Townshend, Pete’s father, was an alto saxophonist who met Pete’s mother, Betty, a singer, while they were touring with the entertainment corps of the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. Their band played swing music and after 1945, as the “Squadronnaires,” maintained a hectic travel schedule among the British coastal resorts until the 1960s when rock and pop took over and bands like theirs became old-fashioned. Pete Townshend was familiar with the culture of “going mobile” (becoming a song of the same name on the Who’s Next album), even as a child. 57 One of the jobs of rock-and-roll managers was to arrange tours and keep the bands moving and organized, all the while continuing to generate publicity. An important difference for a band such as The Who compared with their predecessors was that instead of moving around England from one music hall or local club to another, by the late 1960s they were flying across the Atlantic, Europe, and North America and even further (to Australia, for instance, in 1968). Air travel opened up a new era of human mobility in the twentieth century, making entertainment and other activities almost instantly more global than had ever been the case. Most of the countries of the Atlantic basin had developed domestic air service before the Second World War. England and then the United States took the lead in transcontinental and transoceanic air service after 1945, with commercial jet service available beginning in the 1950s. The new mobility made possible by comfortable

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airline travel now meant that pop entertainers could go virtually anywhere. At the same time, the tours undertaken by prominent rock bands in the 1960s and 1970s required a higher degree of planning and logistical support than almost anything seen before in the history of musical entertainment. Transatlantic touring in the post-1945 era of relative economic affluence, airline travel, and an unrestrained rock music industry meant unprecedented financial rewards and a memorable—“infamous” may be the better term—legacy of hedonism. Rock tours of the sixties and seventies exaggerated and raised to scandalous levels the excesses that were long a part of entertainment life. The Who on the road were no exception. Today, a kind of legendary aura—some of it real, some of it manufactured—infuses the history of the 1960s and 1970s transatlantic tours of bands such as the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and The Who. The Who created and then felt obliged to defend a reputation for being the best live rock band around. Likewise, there was an oddly competitive spirit in the wild touring habits. For their excesses in 1967–1968, The Who were banned from performing in Fargo, North Dakota, from staying in Holiday Inn motels across the United States, and from touring again in Australia. Their rambunctiousness on the road made for media attention and for the embellishment of popular perceptions about the band. Eventually, Townshend and Daltrey grew weary of touring. But drummer Keith Moon, arguably more than any other performer, came to stand for the wild life of rock and roll on the road, so much so that by the 1970s, “Moon the loon” was lampooning his own excesses. 58 As Tom Wright, Townshend’s friend and occasional road manager for The Who, recalled, “traveling with Keith Moon was like knowing that the fuse was lit—and the clock was ticking.” 59 Moon’s joyous hedonism contributed to his early death at age thirty-two, just as the indulgences of rock-androll touring helped lead to the premature deaths of many other famous rock stars of the era—Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison as the best known, as well as many others who were not so famous. The wild life of the tour was part of the culture and mythology of rock and roll and The Who brand. Short days, long nights, endless travel, and the general disruption of personal and family life were constants of touring, whether in the 1890s or the 1960s. But there were new and distinctive elements in the age of rock and roll. For The Who, the more successful and famous they

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became, the larger the crowds and the venues grew, but also the fewer performances they had to make. In the early sixties, performances had been relatively brief, often just thirty to sixty minutes, while a full concert at the end of the 1960s could last up to three hours. In 1964, The Who could pack themselves and all their gear into a beat-up van and play before a few dozen fans in a nearby club, but after 1967, they were flying across the Atlantic and North America from one concert to another. At the start of their career, The Who carried and placed all their equipment on the stage and then, after smashing it up, replaced or repaired it themselves. But by the late 1960s they had a team of production personnel, technicians, and roadies whose job was to have everything in place so that Daltrey, Entwistle, Townshend, and Moon simply had to show up, go through the pregig sound check, and do the performance. By 1970, The Who shows had become huge, complex enterprises involving large crews, with everything focused on getting the band and their sound-producing equipment before a huge crowd of ticket-buying fans. Big sound, big crowds, big money, big distances across the Atlantic world—this was the industry that big-time rock and roll had become by the end of the 1960s.

3 “THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT” Listening to The Who, 1964–1974

A gulf between generations, between kids and their parents, opened across the Atlantic in the 1950s and 1960s. It did not happen everywhere and to all families, but certainly, to many persons living in Europe and America, the “generation gap” was a real thing. Timothy Leary, the California psychologist who became a famous advocate of the psychedelic drug LSD and who was himself of an older generation, advised youth of the sixties to “tune in, turn on, and drop out.” Many did, distancing themselves from their families and mainstream society. A generation gap was not unique to the 1960s. Writers and artists since at least the era of Romanticism in the first half of the nineteenth century had had the sensation of young people rejecting the old even as they could not really say what it was they wanted to replace it with. “Youth” as a category of analysis, as a self-conscious social entity, had itself come of age in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the Atlantic world. But what was exceptional to the 1960s generational cohort was a sense of frustration, sometimes bordering on anger, toward a world where parents and grandparents had lived through great events—the end of empire, revolution, a world depression, world wars—and left for their children a place marked by commercialism and undefined challenges. It seemed that the new generation was handed a world on a silver platter and was expected to be endlessly thankful for it. Pete Townshend felt an odd kind of resentment for belonging to a generation that 79

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did not have to suffer the hard years of the Great Depression or fight the Second World War. All the great deeds, it seemed, had been done. There were a number of sixties personalities who thought of themselves as a voice for this unsatisfied generation, and Townshend was one of these, even if sometimes a reluctant one. “I’ve never felt like anybody’s hero,” he claimed. “That part of my dream never came true. But I have felt like a lot of people’s voice.” 1 To the condition of unsatisfied youth was added the many unsettling national and international crises of the age: the Cold War’s black cloud of nuclear Armageddon—a sense of dread that the young Townshend felt acutely after the missile crisis of October 1962 brought the Soviet Union and the United States to the brink of confrontation—and in the United States, the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. The Who represented a generation whose response to this world was rock and roll played really loud. Still, despite the generation gap and the criticism and anxiety directed toward young people for their rejection of the style and values of their parents, the “kids” probably were, as The Who sang in a tune from 1965, “alright.” Over the years, as The Who and their fans grew older, matured, and themselves had kids—kids who could later rediscover the band over “classic rock” radio—the original frustration and resentment still rang true. In the meantime, the kids of the 1960s tuned out the older generation—fleeing to loud concerts, blasting the stereo in the basement or attic, slipping on the headphones. This had to do with escaping the sounds of parents’ voices, as subconsciously it may have had to do with drowning out the crises and turmoil of the decade, now broadcast in color every evening on the television news. At the same time, there was also an ultimately indescribable sensation of pleasure and pain that accompanied loud music like that of The Who. On one level, the band’s music was offensive—and meant to be so—to an older generation that already disliked rock and roll. In the long run, it was also loud enough to be damaging to the hearing of musicians and fans. And, yet, the volume was fully a part of The Who brand that was somehow deeply appealing to fans. The Who’s music—the sound of a generation, the sound of the “modern”—had to be played really loud to be listened to the right way. 2

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“JOIN TOGETHER”: LISTENING TO THE WHO The habits of listening to music that we are familiar with today mostly took shape in the first half of the nineteenth century. We know this because listening has become a topic of research for scholars across the Atlantic: who made up the audiences listening to music; which social class attended which kind of performance; where music was listened to—in private parlors, concert halls, or outdoor parks, for instance; how the music was listened to—by joining in with the performers in light opera or sitting back silently and responding with applause at the appropriate moment; and when old styles of listening faded and new ways emerged. 3 These are questions that we can also apply to the history of The Who and their fans. Particularly in the early years, The Who brought to live rock and roll not only the onstage violence of smashing their instruments but also the “aural violence” of loud drumming and electric guitars amplified through the huge speakers commissioned by Entwistle and Townshend for just this purpose. Townshend’s “screeching feedback”—the loud, distorted sound made when notes are “looped” between the pickup of an electric guitar and a speaker—was a noise that most electric guitar players had previously tried to avoid. But partly because of the success of The Who’s early singles, the “revolutionary development of feedback soon became an integral part of the sound, . . . [confirming] the direction in which rock and roll was to go onstage, increasing volume and distortion to what would hitherto have been considered painful levels.” 4 Feedback was especially part of The Who’s live act, but the group also may have been the first to purposely incorporate it into their recordings, including early hits “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere” and “My Generation.” Because high volume tends to distort the sound, loudness was not a quality that earlier songwriters and composers had typically sought for their music. The organ music of Christian churches was an occasional exception, and during the “utopian” mood of the Russian Revolutionary era of 1917–1921, Soviet musicians experimented with symphonies of factory sirens and the “noise orchestra,” which could produce a “whole word of noise which deafened the ear.” 5 But this sort of thing was exceptional. Apprehensions about loud music did not deter The Who, as individual band members all but competed against one another to be

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the loudest on stage. There are many descriptions from fans, journalists, and fellow musicians of The Who’s loudness and the odd excitement that the sound generated. Before he became a successful pop performer, Elton John remembered seeing the group (still called the High Numbers) at a London club in 1964: “They were astounding when they started out, they were so loud. . . . Nobody knew what was going to happen. That wasn’t the point; it was just sheer excitement.” 6 Nick Jones, later a journalist but who in 1964 had his own band, saw The Who at a London Mod venue that year and thought them “absolutely post-modernist deconstruction”; he recalled that “the hair stood up on the back of my neck. I remember instrumentals—‘Green Onions’—and the volume. [Other groups] only had little Vox AC30, so this stack [of amplifiers]. . . . It was immediately visual.” 7 Journalist Chris Welch from Melody Maker reported of an early gig: “There were moments during a show when I had to clutch the table for support. I felt my stomach contracting and my head spinning, but we wanted more.” 8 Twenty hours after attending the gig, Welch’s ears were still ringing. A Swedish fan attending a Who concert in Stockholm late in 1965 likewise recalled the excitement produced by the noise and mayhem: On stage there were lots of Marshall amps and speakers looking as destroyed as I’d seen from photos. We forced our way towards the stage (not very easy). People were arriving in a steady stream. Then the music started. What a sound. And what volume. What a feeling. The crowd waved back and forth, one second three metres from the stage, the next right in front of it. . . . I guess there was some kind of panic, you couldn’t do anything but follow the waves. . . . Then Pete started to smash his guitar and his speakers, and I started shivering. Somebody let off a smoke bomb. It was total chaos. Pete ended the berserk by pushing his whole Marshall stack into the audience. This was of course the heaviest life concert I had ever experienced in my life. 9

At the same time, other listeners thought that the volume was just too much. Journalist Barry Dillon wrote the following about a performance in Southampton, England, in October 1971: The Who must be regarded as the most exciting and the LOUDEST rock group in the world after attempting to pulverize the sound barrier in Southampton Guildhall last night. So intense was the noise

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that many of the 1,600 fans who swarmed into the hall had splitting headaches and numb or aching ears. During the two-hour performance the volume was so great . . . that some fans were crying. Undoubtedly, The Who proved themselves as the finest exponents of live rock music around—so why this solid wall of sound which screamed at you? Obviously rock music has to be loud to really get across but frankly this was ridiculous. It hardly seems good for the health to endure such a supersonic level. Someone sitting next to me had to leave for fear of being sick.

And yet “despite the agony of the noise,” wrote Dillon, “this was one of the best rock concerts I’ve ever attended.” 10 Listeners were amazed that so much noise could be produced by just four performers. Roy Carr, an early fan and a future writer for NME, recalled the first time he saw the band: “It was in a dance hall . . . , one of those places that was all wood and cavernous and echoed, there was a lot of echo even with two thousand people in and the band was so loud that my bass player with me stood there and was physically sick.” 11 Describing a 1967 concert in St. Petersburg, Florida, Townshend’s friend, the American Tom Wright, recalled: The music was so loud it had felt like we were standing inside a jet engine. . . . A deejay at the side of the stage, his eyes wide, ears ringing, could only mumble, “Wow, wow, wow,” over and over. The audience didn’t know if they liked it or not. They’d come to see Herman [Herman’s Hermits, the British Invasion band for whom The Who were opening on this tour], but they’d gotten bulldozed in the face by The Who. 12

The Who seemed to be louder than most bands in 1964 and 1965. Later, when their volume was measured, they were. In 1976, The Guinness Book of World Records—a popular compendium that compiled trivia of this sort—listed The Who as record holder for the loudest concert ever: more than 120 decibels, which was comparable to being within 100 yards of a jet plane taking off. 13 Dubious as some of the Guinness Book records may be, this was the kind of sought-after distinction—“loudest rock band in the world”—that would have been incomprehensible a generation earlier and yet now was a mark of distinction. The Who were not the only performers to play loud: contemporaries such as Jimi Hendrix, Cream, and Led Zeppelin played at ear-

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splitting levels, too. Later heavy metal groups Black Sabbath and Deep Purple were belligerents in the volume war. But The Who were probably the first group to give volume a special emphasis and to really attempt to make it a part of their brand. The band’s loudness came from a combination of factors. One of the early technical innovations that The Who used to increase the volume and reach of the sound was to stack a special brand of amplifiers created by Jim Marshall (a well-known London audio technician and seller of musical gear) with the idea of creating a wall of noise and feedback. 14 This was the “Marshall stack.” Later, Townshend recalled of the early years and the search for high volume of having “drifted into using bigger and bigger amps. Bigger, more powerful, more distorted, more potent.” 15 The places where The Who performed also had a role in generating the noise. Early in their career, the band mostly performed in old music halls and small London clubs, such as the Goldhawk Social Club in Shepherd’s Bush, which were spaces that contained and augmented the sound—and small enough that the buildings actually shook. 16 The outdoor concerts that they began playing in Denmark and Sweden in the mid-1960s were made loud by multiplying the speakers. Later in the decade, then especially through the 1970s, The Who would play large indoor concerts, including prestigious settings such as the Metropolitan Opera in New York and the London Coliseum, and then enormous indoor and outdoor football stadiums in North America, England, and Europe. They adjusted to the larger settings by increasing the size of the speakers. As the concerts got bigger, band members practically took it as a personal challenge to make the volume loud enough to fill whatever space they were playing. Fans came to concerts expecting a deafening roar, even oddly anxious to experience the aural pain. Negative reactions in the audiences only spurred the group on: “Because you have so many people just turn a deaf ear to what you do. It doesn’t matter how good or how bad it is. The bigger it is the more they’ll close their ears to it, so the louder you gotta’ work,” said Townshend in 1966. 17 “At this stage in our development as a band,” Townshend noted two years later, “The Who were being described as the ‘loudest band on earth,’ so much so that it became part of our identity.” 18 In the end, perhaps the thing that made The Who louder than other groups was the energy and force with which they handled their instru-

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ments. “It’s to do with attitude,” insisted Daltrey. 19 For bass guitarist Entwistle, it was also partly a function of lightning-fast fingers and not being bashful about taking the lead in songs. In most rock bands, the lead guitar was the regular electric guitarist, but for The Who, Entwistle often took up this role. Some of The Who’s best-known songs, including “My Generation,” were highlighted by Entwistle’s bass guitar solos, rare at the time in pop songs and which record producer Shel Talmy described as “the most recognizable bass solo of all time.” 20 For Moon on drums, the loudness came partly through the sheer application of force, along with his “revolutionary” additions to the standard drum kit of extra tom-toms, cymbals, and a second bass drum, all of which he “hit . . . in full force, constantly.” 21 A sign of the energy with which Moon battered his drums was that one task of roadies before concerts was to nail the drum kit to the floor so that it could not be dislodged (at least not until Moon had set explosives to it, which he sometimes did in the 1960s). John Entwistle recalled “with affection the first date Moon played with the band. [Keith] turned up with a length of rope and began lashing his base drum to two pillars. ‘I need it,’ he explained.” 22 Townshend, too, relied on force and momentum to strike the power chords that were part of his signature style. To get the right amount of energy, Townshend developed an athletic style of guitar playing that made him one of the most eye-catching stage presences in rock history. He extracted strange, rough, electronic noises from his guitar, not only by “twiddling” the amplifier knobs and striking the strings hard, but also by banging the guitar into the speakers, smashing it on the stage floor, and sweeping it across the microphone stand. Sometimes, Townshend struck the guitar against his own forehead, and sometimes he slashed the strings so violently with his trademark windmill motion that it left his right hand bloodied. 23 In Jackson, Mississippi, in 1967 when The Who were on their first North American tour as the opening act for Herman’s Hermits, Townshend sliced an index finger while windmilling, requiring a visit to a local hospital’s emergency room and several stitches. Years later in Seattle, Washington, Townshend skewered his right hand on the guitar’s “whammy bar.” On both occasions, Townshend continued play the guitar and tour. One of the bestknown images of Townshend is a 1980 color shot taken by the photographer Annie Liebovitz showing the guitarist leaning contemplatively on a bloodied right hand. 24 Alan Rogan, Townshend’s guitar tech, said that

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after performances, Townshend’s guitars (he might use several during the course of a show) would “come back with bits of blood on them. . . . It’s not just for show, it’s to get his sound. Even when he does his windmills and drops his picks, he keeps going.” 25 As the front man of the band, Daltrey had to compete with the noise from the instruments and amplifiers, and so he developed a powerful voice, producing memorable roars, with the primal scream near the end of “Won’t Get Fooled Again” (1971) one of the most recognizable in rock history. For Townshend, the noise had a purpose even beyond getting people’s attention, beyond “getting the sound right”: “We were able,” he said, “to take the rhythms of the modern world and make them as loud as the modern world, as loud as the jet plane, or louder, as thunderous as a locomotive going by.” 26

“IS IT IN MY HEAD?” LOUDNESS AND SENSATION Before Tommy and Quadrophenia had raised The Who to near the top of the rock-and-roll echelon, the thing about the band that especially drew the attention of promoters and journalists, not to mention the kids who went to their performances, was the strange effects coming from Pete Townshend and John Entwistle’s guitars, Keith Moon’s thunderous drumming, and the overall loudness and energy of the scene they generated. How, journalists wondered (no doubt, many parents, too), could this be considered music? Today, rock fans are accustomed to loud music, but in fact loudness in pop music has not always been appreciated. Bob Dylan, a contemporary of The Who, was famously booed by folk music fans when he switched from acoustic to electric guitar at the Newport (Rhode Island) Folk Festival in 1965 and then was heckled mercilessly when he and his band “went electric” during their American and British tours of 1966. 27 How did it come about that fans came to favor music that was almost unbearably loud and in which individual instrumentation and lyrics were often drowned out by the shrill high or concussive bass notes of electric guitars? Why did fans seek a sound that could make them physically ill and leave ears ringing for days afterward? Indeed, why would anyone listen to music that could actually damage one’s hearing? For the mostly working-class youths from London neighborhoods such as The Who’s own Shepherd’s

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Bush, part of the explanation was that the sound offered something that appealed specifically to them—familiar yet different from the music coming from America that they already knew and done in a way that the usual forms of entertainment could not match. The Who’s brand of rock and roll was a new style of music—maybe, as Townshend said, even a new form of art: really loud, using still-developing technology, played with great energy and somehow giving voice to the frustrations of its audience. In 1965, this still was a hard-to-grasp point that the precocious Townshend tried to convey to journalists and interviewers—and with songs like “Is It in My Head” from 1973’s Quadrophenia, to his fans. That the music could be strikingly different, that it could produce aural pain and cosmic pleasure, and that it attracted audiences naturally struck many as a novelty that would not sell many records and that had no future. But, in fact, the style worked and the music lasted. Fans and journalists attested that The Who’s loud music, whether heard live at a concert or through stereo speakers or headphones, generated a curious combination of pleasure and pain. Historical precedents for the individual or commercial appeal of this sort of thing are not common. Indeed, the desire to seek and produce really high volume is all but unique to rock and roll. Almost four decades ago, British sociologist Stanley Cohen connected the appeal of The Who’s loud, brash style to a “moral panic” brought on by clashes between Mods and Rockers in the early 1960s (though the panic he described really was more about “reaction” against a cultural norm than its “reception”). 28 It may also have been the case that The Who’s listeners were discovering something akin to a “redemptive power” coming from the inchoate aural violence and the onstage mayhem of the band. 29 It is easy to locate “inarticulacy” and a desire to get back at the world in the attitude of London Mods and in the feedback, raucous style, and belligerence of The Who songs they favored—“I Can’t Explain,” “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere,” and “My Generation.” Manager Chris Stamp, who flirted with Modism as a young adult, was speaking to the appeal for Mods when he said, “To my mind [The Who’s] act creates emotions of anger and violence, and a thousand other things I don’t really understand myself.” 30 Many early Who compositions and the volume at which they were played come across as metaphorical weapons used to assault the audience; indeed, Townshend often described the music as precisely this. The violence in early Who songs and the band’s stage performance

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also seemed to serve as an outlet for fans, whose redemption from the frustrations of everyday life came via the cathartic and revivifying experience of the live concert and in the oddly satisfying pain of listening to the band’s loud music. Another, perhaps more direct way to get at the meaning and appeal of The Who’s loud music is through the words of Pete Townshend, the group’s main songwriter and a thoughtful commentator on the aural violence of which he was the main protagonist. On one level, Townshend interpreted the noise and aggression as a reflection of his own frustrations and youthful angst. “When I get the feedback noise,” Townshend said near the start of the band’s career, “it sounds like a bomber. Then Moon can bang the drums, and the audience thinks of guns and smashing people up.” 31 Sometimes Townshend would “amp up” the sound in frustration at an unresponsive audience or else to sonically bully an obnoxious fan: My guitar is like a machine gun. When I play it, it’s like grenades going off. It silences the audience. It makes them hear me. . . . It was also a means of intimidation. This is all there is. If you’re in this room with us, all you get is us. 32

At the same time, it was for Townshend, as a biographer writes, “a major ego boost.” 33 Egging on and facilitating the pandemonium were managers Stamp and Lambert, who relished the publicity it generated and who pushed the band toward more excess and more volume. While producing loud noise and smashing instruments became a self-conscious part of The Who’s performance and was encouraged by those around them, for Townshend it was in fact more than an outlet for frustrations, more than just part of the act. Although The Who were not a political band, some of the initial inspiration for the violence came from the influence of Gustav Metzger (1926–), the Austrian-born proponent of “auto-destructive” art whose work Townshend knew from his time at Ealing Art College in the early 1960s. 34 In his 1959 manifesto on auto-destructive art, Metzger argued for a new form of public art whose purpose was to break apart the misguided and dehumanizing technologies and structures of the twentieth century. Metzger connected his ideas to specific issues of the sixties and seventies, including the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in Britain and the U.S. war in Vietnam. Townshend and the other members of The Who rarely spoke of, and

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never wrote songs directly about, episodes of the Cold War like these nor other international affairs that animated political artistes such as Metzger. Still as a young man, Townshend was much impressed with Metzger’s boldness and frequently cited his influence for the onstage destruction. In the course of interviews and writings over the years, Townshend joined his recollection of Metzger’s influence with an acute historical sensibility to the time and place where the loudness and violence began: London, circa 1964, and to the inarticulateness and search for the right words felt by Mods. In this regard, The Who belonged to a post-1945 generation of angry young men, whose songs sprang from the frustrations their generation felt toward British society and culture, delivered not via literature, poetry, or film but loudly and often angrily through rock and roll. Yet another way to get at the historical origins, the popular appeal, and the simple thrill of The Who’s music is by considering its emotional elements. “Music is remarkably good at expressing emotion and arousing emotion in its listeners—a fact,” writes Steven Mithen, “captured in the popular notion that music is the ‘language of the emotions.’” 35 In recent decades, anthropologists, musicologists, and psychologists have established “a very strong correlation between the emotion musicians sought to evoke and that which the listeners believed was being expressed.” 36 For musicians and fans, it is self-evident that the notes from a guitar and the words in songs carry emotional weight. It is not hard to locate particular sensations in the lyrics of Who songs: the frustrations and anger of “I Can’t Explain” and “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere”; the defiance in “My Generation”; or the search for community (the one “pure note”) in “Pure and Easy” from the aborted Lifehouse project of 1971. The fans for whom The Who’s loud music had such appeal seem to have felt the same kind of emotions as the band members themselves. Indeed, the search for synchronicity was what Lifehouse especially—but, really, so much of the music—was all about. It is also possible to place the emotions evoked by loud rock music in the historical long and short term. The historian William Reddy coined the term emotive to “describe the process by which emotions are managed and shaped by individuals and societies, past and present, seeking to express the inexpressible—namely how they ‘feel.’” 37 Likewise, historian Barbara Rosenwein’s idea of “emotional communities” can be applied to rock fans, whose community may be defined by the concert hall

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and the experience of listening to albums. This is a community that became transatlantic over time and one in which (to stay with the analogy) there are neighborhoods defined by particular historical developments; thus, French fans of The Who could be drawn to the group for many of the same reasons as British, American, Canadian, or Swedish fans but within a context naturally formed by their own national history. 38 A history-of-emotions framework helps to explain the appeal of The Who’s loud music across national borders, across time, and across demographic categories such as social class. There may also be a physiological explanation for the appeal of loud music. Testimony from The Who themselves and from fans speak to the “exquisite pain” produced by loud music. 39 As musicians and fans know and as researchers have shown, musical performances can produce a physical impact. The ringing in the ears, even the mild nausea of a live concert, were effects that could be strangely alluring. Scholars documenting this sensation have offered tentative explanations for the coexisting appeal of pain and pleasure. Daniel Levitin, a former musician, record producer, and now a cognitive psychologist, cites the example of a Who concert where loudness reached 126 to 130 decibels—the very “threshold of pain and damage”: Earplugs at a Who concert can minimize the risk of permanent damage by bringing down the levels that reach the ear close to 100–110 dB. . . . [But a] lot of people like really loud music. Concertgoers talk about a special state of consciousness, a sense of thrills and excitement, when the music is really loud—over 115 dB. We don’t yet know why this is so. Part of the reason may be related to the fact that loud music saturates the auditory system, causing neurons to fire at their maximum rate. When many, many neurons are maximally firing, this could cause an emergent property, a brain state qualitatively different from when they are firing at normal rates. Still, some people like loud music, and some people don’t. 40

Levitin and other researchers are still working through the explanations for the appeal of loud music. In the meantime, along with the pleasure derived from loud music, we know that listening to it over time can be harmful to one’s hearing. It would be surprising if Who fans were not aware of the damage that they were sustaining by going to live concerts or by putting on the headphones at home and turning up the volume.

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And yet, as the band continued to perform beyond Keith Moon’s death in 1978, the volume was as deafening as ever. By the 1980s, the fans and musicians who had exposed themselves to loud rock music since the 1960s were beginning to show the effects, and doctors were warning about hearing loss. 41 Although Roger Daltrey has not spoken of damage, John Entwistle suffered impaired hearing before his death in 2002. By the 1970s, Townshend had developed tinnitus. Given the hearing damage that he brought on himself, Townshend has a perhaps inevitably ironic understanding of the strange appeal of high volume. But for several years now, he has also spoken and written publicly, cautioning rock fans about the damage that can be done by loud music played live or heard through headphones. 42 The distinction between pleasure and pain in rock music, as in other human affairs, is narrow indeed and hard to explain. Loudness and the destruction of instruments were not the only characteristics of The Who brand. Indeed, if these had been all that the band had to offer, they would not have survived long in the competitive world of rock music. In fact, The Who began to promise other rewards for fans, even including—of all things—a sensitive side, which began playing out in the late 1960s with the enormous success of Tommy, the concluding song of which is the overtly tender “See Me, Feel Me, Touch Me.” Although Townshend still occasionally smashed a guitar after 1968, he did so less often as the years went by. The early, loud, auto-destructive phase of The Who’s career evolved into something more complex and yet with even greater appeal and with the promise of being sustainable.

“RELAX”: FANS BY THEMSELVES In the 1960s, technological, cultural, and social developments came together to make rock and roll a thriving commercial enterprise on both sides of the Atlantic. The Who emerged on the British scene in 1964 as popular entertainment was expanding beyond familiar settings such as theater, music halls, and cinemas and into individual homes via television and radio. The small, inexpensive transistor radios and affordable record players available after 1960 offered music in a direct format to a generation of young fans with more expendable cash than what their

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parents or grandparents ever had. And the technological advances continued: direct drive replaced belt-driven turntables in the early 1970s; home and car stereos became evermore sophisticated; and music recorded on eight-track tapes or two-sided cassettes was pushed aside by compact discs and, more recently, by music downloaded over the Internet. Headphones covering both ears and tethered to the stereo jack via a springy cord became standard gear for the rock fan, especially as stereo speakers became loud enough to wreak noise havoc throughout homes and apartments. The developments in technology, along with The Who’s success in making high-concept albums, including a rock opera, meant that fans did not have to be at a live concert to experience the thrill of the music. Rather, they could do so at home with the music turned up on stereo speakers or headphones. Headphones were an important development in rock music history, opening up, as Daniel Levitin writes, “a world of sonic colors, a palette of nuances and details that went far beyond the chords and melody, the lyrics, or a particular singer’s voice.” 43 For Who fans, the band’s music seemed to require that it be played loud, and now this could happen as easily through headphones as in the live concert experience—all one had to do was “relax” (the title of a loud, feedback-laced song from 1967’s The Who Sell Out) and turn up the volume. By the late sixties, it was no accident that the teenager alone in his or her bedroom listening to rock music on the radio or record player or through headphones had become a stock image of the era. It is likely that by the early 1970s, most Who fans, most of the time, experienced the group’s music alone and in just this way: listening to the radio or stereo in the car (more likely in the automobile-centric United States than in Europe) or at home on the record player with or without headphones. If one lived near a large city where tours tended to stop, there might be the chance to see the band play live. But in fact many—perhaps most—fans of the late sixties and seventies never went to a Who concert. As the album replaced the 45-rpm single in popularity and sales and as the individual stereo systems that could be purchased fairly inexpensively and set up in a bedroom or automobile became more common, most fans probably came to know The Who abstractly through their albums rather than through the live concert. This was an enormous change from the days when the band was playing a gig each night and building a fan base on the reputation of their live

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performance. Music, like other sensory experiences in the twentieth century, was more and more mediated by technology away from the individual. It was not a given that The Who, who had established themselves through their catchy singles and memorable live performance, might also become adept at producing long-playing albums. The Beatles, for instance, had not maintained their status in every rock-and-roll medium, having mostly stopped performing live after winning critical and commercial success recording albums. Moreover, The Who’s album narratives in The Who Sell Out, Tommy, and Quadrophenia were distinctly British and, therefore, a little exotic to fans outside of Great Britain. Nonetheless, The Who navigated the transition from pop-singles band to AOR (album-oriented rock) as successfully as any group of the 1960s. As it turned out, the rock album culture of the late 1960s and early 1970s worked in favor of bands such as The Who, who offered complex ideas in their songs and who began to include additional instruments beyond guitars and drums (brass horns, for instance, in Tommy and electronically generated sounds in Who’s Next). Changes in the radio industry were another factor advancing an album culture. The FM radio frequency was perfect for extended airplay, and radio DJs were often given the freedom to spin the songs they wanted, even devoting full shows to playing new albums in their entirety. Record clubs sprouted at American high schools. Album cover art became a distinct form, with elaborate liner notes or pamphlets included as part of the album package eagerly awaited by fans. The neighborhood or city center record store became a genuine cultural space, with tour posters decorating the walls, new songs playing on an elaborate stereo system, incense in the air, and stacks of albums waiting to be thumbed through by young customers assisted by long-haired clerks in the know. The emergent album culture of the late sixties and seventies gave The Who the opportunity to exploit the ambitious concepts of Townshend’s imagination, the musical virtuosity of Entwistle and Moon, and the confidence and new voice that Daltrey discovered from singing Tommy in concert. Almost uniquely among groups of the day, The Who, beginning with 1967’s The Who Sell Out, were able to explore in more linear form the youthful frustration and anger that had come out in energetic bursts during their days as a singles band. As The Who released albums, the music, theatrics, and hint of danger that went with belonging to a

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raucous live crowd, along with the impossibly loud noise, were qualities that fans could now sample vicariously on a radio, cassette player, or record player at home. Rock music listened to at high volume, whether at the live concert or through the headphones, seemed to produce sensory thrills that music fans could not get elsewhere. These were developments at the end of the 1960s for which The Who were perfectly positioned. For years, The Who had prided themselves on being unsurpassed as a live band, yet the solitary way of being a fan seemed only to enhance their success. As Live at Leeds (1970), one of the best-selling and most acclaimed live rock albums of all time, showed, The Who’s stage performances continued to be as charged, energetic, and loud as ever, even as the group introduced into their live set the more nuanced themes of Tommy. As it turned out, Who fans were ready to hear both sides of the band’s sound: the loud, jaunty power pop and the sophisticated, darker rock opera.

“SHAKIN’ ALL OVER”: THE WHO AND AUTHENTICITY “Rock opera. Is there a phrase in popular music more likely to bring about a total collapse of the will to live?” writes Alexis Petridis, only partly tongue-in-cheek. 44 With the success of the esoteric, emotionally complicated Tommy, The Who and their fans grappled for a time with a kind of schizophrenia over the band’s identity. Were they still the cheeky purveyors of youthful angst and feedback of “My Generation,” or were they rock and roll’s new lyricists, part of an avant-garde whose arty ambitions threatened to pull them away from their humble roots? Had Tommy undermined the authenticity, the “street cred,” of The Who? As the years went by, this was the kind of question that many bands, assisted by rock critics, grappled with. The Who asserted as determinedly as they could that the answer to this question was “no,” even as they expected more of their fans, who now had to be able to mesh the early singles phase of the band’s career with the complexities of Tommy, Who’s Next, and Quadrophenia. Pete Townshend and the rest of the band—especially Roger Daltrey, who had been closest to a real working-class hooligan during his youth—were conscious of the ways the two sides of the band’s persona

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had evolved over the years, and they were determined that as they went on, their music should combine both: Despite the intentionally ironic title of their 1967 album, The Who did not really want to sell out. One way to reestablish credibility was to release a live album, which bands could offer to fans and critics in a pop music world coming to be dominated by expertly produced (or overproduced) studio albums. It is curious that so few bands actually had good live recordings—not the Beatles, who lost their reputation as a live band, and not even the Rolling Stones, who stowed away their film Rock and Roll Circus (1968) when The Who showed them up in the live performances. In one sense, to be authentic, to not sell out, The Who would have had to be true to their words and “die before they got old”; Moon was the only one to fulfill this destiny. Rather, the credibility of The Who and their reputation as both skilled maker of albums and consummate live band was, if anything, enhanced after Tommy, which drew a new set of fans who may not have known much about the group’s original persona. The 1967–1973 period, thought Townshend, was the golden years, as the band moved away from their singles era and grew fully confident with their abilities as performers and the evolution in their music—with Townshend, Moon, and Entwistle becoming one of the great instrumental rock ensembles, while Daltrey found the voice and presence to be the front man that the band had always wanted him to be. To assert a reputation as the world’s best live rock band and set their rock credentials, soon after the release of Tommy, The Who recorded a live album. Reviewer Patrick Dean of the Yorkshire Evening Post was at the concert: The long awaited live LP by The Who has at last been recorded—at Leeds University. Students packed the refectory to see and hear The Who roar through over two hours of the best music I have heard. . . . The music of The Who comes rushing out in a solid wall of sound. They are loud, very loud, but they use volume as a catalyst for their musical effect, not like many groups as a bolster for lack of talent. Volume is an intrinsic part of The Who’s music, and always has been, but it is not abused. . . . For all those who were fortunate to be there on this memorable night, it will be a constant reminder that pop music has reached standards that five years ago would have been unthinkable. 45

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Released in 1970, Live at Leeds was the loud, feedback-laced counterpart to the rock opera Tommy. Even the album cover, which was made to resemble a bootleg recording, was intended to reassert the band’s raw performance roots. The album immediately reminded fans and critics of the power, virtuosity, and tight-knit playing of The Who, establishing a critical consensus that they were indeed the best live rock act around. Contemporary album reviewers were excited and reassured by what The Who accomplished at Leeds. An influential rock critic and longtime follower of The Who, Nik Cohn, gushed in the New York Times that “Tommy is rock’s first formal masterpiece. Live at Leeds is the definitive hard-rock holocaust. It is the best live album ever made.” 46 Looking back, John Atkins describes listening to the album as an intensely aural experience. It is a record dedicated to presenting sound in its most undiluted sense, and it communicates meaning in exclusively visceral terms, without any concessions to pop accessibility. Its purpose is to preserve the live Who sound with absolute authenticity. . . . The record is loud, brash, vibrant, thunderous, raw and immensely exciting—rock and roll in its purest form. In short, it captures almost all the best qualities of a Who performance . . . and sounds like an all-out assault on the senses with a white-hot level of energy; it’s rock music with sweat dripping from its brow and blood pumping through its veins. 47

The Who’s live set list at Leeds included the full version of Tommy, though when released, the album left these songs out in favor of a selection of early hits and more obscure numbers from their back catalogue. Later remixes of the album included the Tommy material. Covers of “Young Man Blues,” “Summertime Blues,” and “Shakin’ All Over” were given the distinctive Who treatment, and extended jams of “My Generation” and “Magic Bus” were additional highlights. The energy and the need to reestablish credibility of the Tommy period continued on the live stage as the band toured across the Atlantic. One enthusiastic American fan, Binky Phillips, recalled a show at the Filmore East in New York City soon after the release of Live at Leeds: The Who walked out onstage. Uh Oh . . . Pete was scowling, obviously furious! With obvious contempt, he spit on the stage. Pete angrily

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shouted something to a roadie and boom! Off they went into John’s [Entwistle] superb “Heaven and Hell.” . . . Now, as a true Who freak knows, you were always in for a great show if Pete was pissed off. But, he was angrier than I’d ever seen him in the 20 or so shows I’d been to before. They went into “Young Man Blues” and Pete’s solo consisted of smashing E chords . . . and nothing else! . . . He was playing the Met as if it was the Marquee Club on a shitty rainy Maximum R&B Tuesday night and no one had shown up. 48

Phillips’s hyperbole aside, this was what The Who could still bring to the stage after the change of direction represented by Tommy. Live at Leeds has since become a gold standard among live rock albums. With Tommy and Live at Leeds released in the space of a year, critics and fans now placed The Who in a pantheon of contemporary bands that included the Beatles and Rolling Stones.

“I’VE HAD ENOUGH”: THE WHO AND POLITICS The Who were not political. Nor, it seems, were their fans, even though both came of age in a famously politicized era. Political and other crises of one sort or another were especially the story for the United States, for which the sixties seemed to represent a convergence of dynamic historical movements—socially, culturally, and in foreign policy. The modern civil rights movement had its origins in the 1950s with decisive Supreme Court cases and the work of Martin Luther King and the NAACP to end decades of institutionalized, legal racial segregation. “Separate but equal” was the policy drawn from a late-nineteenth-century Supreme Court decision, but the movement split in the sixties to include the separatist approach of the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X. Civil disturbances rocked the streets of American cities, such as Los Angeles, Detroit, and Newark, New Jersey. The assassinations of King, President John Kennedy, and his brother Robert Kennedy traumatized the country. The long, terrible war that the United States brought to Southeast Asia lasted through the decade and beyond, ending only in 1975. All of these together seemed too much for any one country to endure. But the decade brought change and anxiety elsewhere, too, including Europe, where many people, mostly from the younger generation, protested American policies related to the nuclear arms race and

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the wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. In Italy, West Germany, England, and, notably, France, there were youth revolts against the status quo. In Canada, the sixties saw an independence movement of Quebecois against the rest of the country. A climax seemed to be reached for nations of the Atlantic world in 1968, with a turning point militarily in Vietnam, ongoing loss of support for the war by the American public, the assassinations of King and Robert Kennedy, strikes and student demonstrations in France and Mexico, and the Warsaw Pact’s crushing of the Prague Spring. Politically, there was more than enough for The Who and other rockers to incorporate, if they chose to do so, into their music. There were also models to follow. A number of rock and pop performers became political figures. American folkies Joan Baez and Pete Seeger (the latter mostly a performer from an earlier period) were drawn to civil rights and labor issues. Bob Dylan’s songs were turned into anthems of the American civil rights movement, even if Dylan himself was a reluctant activist. Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young—a transatlantic band composed of two Americans, a Canadian, and an Englishman—took up political issues and sang about racism in the American South and the shooting of Kent State (Ohio) University students protesting the spread of the American war into Cambodia. The Detroit hard rock band MC5 was deeply radicalized. John Lennon of the Beatles became an adamant, public peace activist who was hounded by the American domestic intelligence service, the FBI. While Lennon was pushed by many fans and journalists to be a political spokesperson, neither fans nor rock journalists urged The Who in this direction. Despite the swirl of issues in which they came of age, The Who did not delve into politics. In this regard, they were like most other rock bands of the day. The Who’s lyrics said almost nothing directly about the momentous issues that band members could read about in the newspapers. One might have expected working-class Mods to line up with England’s Labour Party, but this was not a position advanced in the lyrics of Who songs. Though their music drew heavily on African American traditions, Townshend, Daltrey, Moon, and Entwistle said almost nothing in interviews about the civil rights movement in the United States and relatively little about their black American musical forebears—unlike, for instance, the Rolling Stones or the British guitarist Eric Clapton, who

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went to pains to acknowledge their dues to the blues masters. It is not clear that The Who had much appeal across races: over the years, the audiences at Who concerts were overwhelmingly white. Nor did the band comment directly on other new social movements of the 1960s— burgeoning or second wave, such as women’s rights or gay rights—nor the assassination of American political leaders, the Cold War contest between the United States and the Soviet Union, decolonization, or neocolonialism. When Daltrey, Entwistle, and Moon spoke to journalists, it was mostly about the music, touring, and any details of their private lives that they were willing to share. Townshend spoke passionately (and later wrote in the same way) about music and art but not about Vietnam, British national health, or the troubles in Northern Ireland. Townshend would later insist, convincingly, that some of his early music reflected the sense of dread of the early Cold War years—especially the fear of nuclear war—but if there are political statements in Who songs, they are opaque and open to interpretation and even misuse. Townshend did come out in support of the British Young Communists in 1966 and, occasionally at the time (more so in later years), described himself as a socialist and “an artist of conscience.” 49 Otherwise, the loquacious guitarist mostly opted not to say anything genuinely political. Redemption through song and the rejection of politics were behind the aborted Lifehouse project. “I’ve Had Enough” from Quadrophenia (1973) might well have been directed at a variety of contemporary issues, but like the other songs in the album, the lyrics reveal it to be intensely self-centered. Rather, Townshend was careful to retain his credentials as an artist in pursuit of art for its own sake. Like other voices of the 1960s generation, Townshend instead veered into spiritualism—in his case, following the teachings of the Indian avatar Meher Baba. For Townshend, it was art—specifically, the form that he argued it took in rock and roll—that promised redemption. The Who had always presented their music as catharsis; this, not politics, was what fans expected from the band.

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“RUN, RUN, RUN”: THE WHO AND VIOLENCE IN MUSIC As Bruce Johnson and Martin Cloonan have described, music and violence have had a long and intertwined history, beginning with war songs and war cries long before the modern era. Music, they remind us, has been used time and again in human history as incitement or arousal to violence, with the years from roughly 1964 to 1974 introducing a “facile romanticization” of loud, violent music into pop culture. 50 The Who were certainly a part of this history. For Pete Townshend, especially, this tendency had to do with the times in which they were living: The Who, he thought, “were leading a revolt against the old values and order of music. Everybody was full of resentment.” 51 Particularly in the early years, the band came across onstage and in interviews as belligerent and angry. For Keith Moon, this was not hard: “We didn’t go out of our way to be nasty,” he said. “We were naturally nasty.” 52 Some of it also had to do with tensions within the group and the abuse of drugs and alcohol. From the start, Townshend thought that the personalities of the four could never mesh, and for years afterward, he recalled the horrible feelings of animosity and general ugliness of this period (ca. 1964–1966). Drugs made the “bad vibes” even worse. Of the early years, Daltrey said, “We were pillheads,” a condition that made them “the most aggressive group that ever happened in England.” 53 This was the attitude that the band brought onstage in the early years. Original Who fan “Irish” Jack Lyons remembered that at gigs in Shepherd’s Bush, “those standing in the very front would have to move back from the edge of the stage, ’cause the way Daltrey started, you’d think he was going to whack some cunt who might be standing too close. That was one thing about the Who—they fucking made you step back a bit.” 54 Fan Terry Miller watched the group perform at the Friedrich Ebert Halle in Muenster, West Germany, in 1967 and remembered “a riot. . . . When The Who started the more violent, for that time, part of their act, the audience ended up throwing chairs at the stage, and if I remember right, Pete Townshend threw some back.” 55 At Ulster Hall in Belfast, Ireland, in the same year, fan Garry Moore recalled that Townshend “smashed [his guitar] up at the end. He was just unbelievable on stage, the guy was absolutely terrifying. Afterwards we were walking out down the corridor and [The Who] were walking out the other way and we could see them leaving, just this group of big

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lanky fuckers . . . and I was shaking, like you’d been in a fight. That’s what it felt like.” 56 This was how the early shows often went. Sometimes the violent stage act came across as too much. A journalist wrote about a performance at Newcastle, England, in November 1973: The Who rock band lived up to its reputation for violence on stage with an expensive display of guitar and amplifier-smashing at the Odeon Cinema last night. . . . Tempers flared after drummer Keith Moon had trouble with headphones. . . . [Townshend] ripped out backing tapes and heaved over equipment into the side curtains. . . . [After returning] Townshend hurled his guitar against the upstanding microphone and smashed it into a score of pieces by banging it against the stage floor. He then turned on a row of piled amplifiers at the back of the stage and hurled a top one to the floor. . . . It was, in my opinion, an extremely childish publicity stunt with potentially damaging effect on the thousands of youngsters who invariably follow their idols in all they do. Otherwise, they were musically immaculate, as always. 57

Part of the abrasiveness of The Who’s live concert experience was a repertoire that included a back-and-forth dialogue between the band members onstage and the audience in front of them. Some of this was friendly or joking, and some of it was not. On occasion there seemed to be disdain or an eager willingness to challenge on the part of both performers and fans. For fans, the rock concert could offer a strange form of adulation, a space for acting out, and for which the loud music was simply a catalyst. Critics did not always grasp the dynamic, but Townshend, empathetic if not always sympathetic, recognized the way that some fans absorbed the music: It’s possible that our audiences didn’t understand the significance of auto-destruction, but they certainly seemed to experience emotional release when we broke our gear at the end of the show. Of course this did nothing to silence our detractors, critics with loud voices who looked no further than the end of their noses before decrying us as yobbos and hooligans. 58

For The Who, there was sometimes genuine frustration with fans who were not paying attention or who were there just to be obnoxious.

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At Montreal, Canada, in December 1968, fan Jim Chiholm remembered that the “audience was very chatty and noisy in the middle of the songs and Pete took offense to this . . . so Pete took off his guitar after asking if we thought it was a fucking hockey match.” 59 The lack of patience was probably strongest for Daltrey and Townshend after the band started playing the full album Tommy live without break or interruption in 1969–1970; American “Yippie” Abbie Hoffman found this out when he interrupted the band’s performance at the Woodstock concert in 1969 and was booted off the stage by Townshend. The frontier between The Who onstage and those in the audience could be rough and unpredictable, producing scenes that were a precursor to the mosh pit rowdiness, spitting, and name-calling of the punk era of the late seventies. Fans at the front of the stage typically yelled for band members to perform the routines that were part of The Who brand— Townshend windmilling and smashing the guitar and Daltrey swinging the mic. Sometimes the expectation to enact the ritual got tiresome. At a performance at New York City’s Madison Square Garden in June 1974, fans near the front of the stage repeatedly yelled for Townshend to “jump.” This was upsetting, observed the rock music critic Chris Coatsworth: For the first time, [Townshend] said later, he felt he was parodying himself, even resembling a circus act. . . . In the long term, the behavior of these fans had a profound effect on his attitude towards his work. . . . Most fans loved the band no matter what, of course, and their bland faith depressed Pete even further. 60

Some listeners, including other professional musicians, were disgusted by the trashing of perfectly good instruments, but this seemed only to heighten the perverse joy that Townshend derived from the auto-destruction. Looking back, Townshend was prone to interpret the anger in The Who’s music and performance as a sign of the times in which they were living—specifically, the threat of nuclear war, which hung over the heads of his Cold War generation: I wasn’t trying to play beautiful music, I was confronting my audience with the awful, visceral sound of what we all knew was the single absolute of our frail existence—one day an aeroplane would

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carry the bomb that would destroy us all in a flash. It could happen at any time. The Cuban Missile Crisis . . . had proved that. On stage I stood on the tips of my toes, arms outstretched, swooping like a plane. As I raised the stuttering guitar above my head, I felt like I was holding up the bloodied standard of endless centuries of mindless war. Explosions. Trenches. Bodies. 61

Still, while there was a good bit of frustration and anger evoked at Who shows, the smashing of guitars, the loud music, and the smoke bombs always contained a theatrical element. Most fans knew this and played along because it was all very exciting. Indeed, the physical violence used by The Who by and large remained onstage and more often than not was accompanied by joking and laughter. Smashing guitars and drum kits became an act designed to stimulate rather than incite. Aside from the pushing and shoving at the concerts in Denmark and Sweden in 1965–1966 and the Cincinnati disaster of 1979—mainly the result of the promoter’s plan for festival seating and which occurred before the concert had begun—violence, as a rule, did not spread from the stage to the audience. In this regard, Who concerts were very much like other rock concert audiences of the day. Looking back on it all in 2000, Pete Townshend was tongue-in-cheek about the damage that the band had inflicted, for instance, on the helpless motels in which they stayed while on the road: It’s important to say that when we say we often “hated” hotels, because they were a cold component in our lonely lives, we also appreciated their comfort, the clean sheets, the maids who cleaned, the people who brought food to our rooms, who prepared it, the people who made sure we had rooms in the first place. We’re not stupid or ignorant. We were too young and spoiled to know any better at the time, so sometimes we made trouble. It was the people I’ve just mentioned who suffered. I’d like to apologize to them now, and tell them that whenever I see a Holiday Inn sign [for a time, The Who were banned from this chain of hotels] I feel WARM . . . there must be a solid piece of American travelling salesman in me. I suppose that’s what we were, travelling salesmen. 62

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“MY GENERATION”: STUTTERING ACROSS THE ATLANTIC Most Who fans were probably no more politicized than their favorite band nor inclined to attend a concert to act out a violent urge. What fans across the Atlantic world expected and got from the band were sensations and messages that resonated in their own lives. There was also the emotional excitement and release provided by the music. These elements were all captured in the aural stimulation of the songs, the physical shock of the live performances, and, surprisingly—“sublimely” one might have said a century earlier—in the stuttering words of “My Generation,” which became a nonpolitical anthem for the Atlantic generation and the most representative song of The Who brand. Typical of the disposable pop culture of the period, the origins of a signature feature from one of the best-known rock-and-roll songs of the 1960s, the stutter in “My Generation,” is only vaguely recollected. The tune’s composer, Pete Townshend, may have been influenced by bluesman John Lee Hooker’s stuttering style of singing, though Townshend remembered that “the idea for the character to stutter came from Kit Lambert. . . . Keith Moon [said that] Roger Daltrey had never seen [the words] before, so when he read them the first time, he stuttered. . . . Kit said, ‘Leave in the stuttering.’ When we realized what had happened, it knocked us all sideways.” Subsequently, according to the record’s producer Shel Talmy, “the BBC banned the record, because it was detrimental to the stutterers of the world, which helped immensely.” 63 Another account of the origins comes from Richard Barnes, the longtime friend and chronicler of the group who was perhaps the quickest to see how the song, the stutter, and the loud, violent finale of “My Generation” represented something really striking and new: The Who turned . . . My Generation into this splittingly caustic anthem of youth with lines like “Hope I die before I get old.” . . . It was the stuttering statements of a pilled-up mod telling the older generation to “fuck-off.” . . . My Generation was recorded first without stuttering, but the third version with the stuttering lyrics was released and entered the . . . charts. . . . My Generation became . . . the climax of a powerful, loud, uncompromising set and it was at the end of My Generation that Pete would start hitting his Rickenbacker

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[guitar] on the floor to get strange electronic noises and effects from it. 64

Heard on the radio or played live, “My Generation” could startle, annoy, or enthrall. Odd and shocking as it seemed in 1965, it is possible to make sense of the generational anthem’s loudness, brashness, and distortion, along with the curiously stuttering voice of the singer and the violent smashing of instruments that ended the group’s live performance of the song, as the product of long- and short-term historical developments. This may be done by comparing “My Generation” with something that, on the surface, seems completely removed from the age of rock and roll: the short story “Billy Budd” by the nineteenthcentury American novelist Herman Melville. “Billy Budd” was written in the mid-1880s, but its author set the story almost a century earlier in 1797 when the title character, a young sailor, is impressed from the merchant ship Rights of Man onto the British warship Bellipotent. Aged twenty-one in the story—and thus born in 1776, the year of the American Revolution—Billy is illiterate, with an obscure background and a personality devoid of duplicity or hypocrisy. Melville also bestows on his central character the curious feature of “an occasional liability to a vocal defect.” 65 Because of his skills as a seaman and his friendly, good nature, Billy becomes a favorite of the crew—excepting for the malevolent figure Claggart, the ship’s master-at-arms. As the story develops, Claggart falsely accuses Billy of conspiracy to mutiny in the presence of the ship’s captain, Vere. Billy, angered, in disbelief at the slander and unable to speak because of his incapacitating stutter, strikes and kills Claggart. Vere witnesses the deed and puts Billy on trial before the ship’s officers. Because the incident happened at sea during time of war and despite the intense misgivings of those involved, the drumhead court imposes the ultimate sentence. The novella ends with Billy hanged and Captain Vere tormented by the moral dilemma in which he has found himself. What is the connection between “Billy Budd” and The Who? In recent years, Townshend described himself as a fan of Melville and “Billy Budd,” although he apparently did not know of the latter when he wrote “My Generation.” A curious coincidence is that the actor Terence Stamp, who starred in the title role of the 1962 film version of “Billy Budd,” is the brother of Who manager Chris Stamp. More to the point,

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“My Generation” and “Billy Budd,” written eight decades apart and on different sides of the Atlantic, share consistent historical themes that help explain the surprising elements of stuttering and violence they share. These parallels also speak to broader developments in Atlantic history. Some of the similarities are obvious, although they are no less important for being so: “Billy Budd” and “My Generation” are both products of the English-speaking North Atlantic of the last two centuries, and in broad terms of the dramatic events, including the Atlantic revolutions (1776–1830), that gave shape to it. The two works are quintessentially transatlantic: Melville was an American novelist who set his story on a British ship sailing the Atlantic Ocean; The Who’s “My Generation” gave American rock music a British twist before sending it across the Atlantic. Both highlight stuttering youths who stand against the status quo. Both introduce into staid British society infectious and novel challenges: the Rights of Man from “Billy Budd” and American blues-inspired electric rock and roll from The Who. The violence of the two shocks because it goes against norms, though at some level—certainly in the enthusiasm of The Who’s fans—it strikes an emotional chord. In so doing, the two works justify inarticulateness against articulateness: ironically, of course, since Townshend was among the more talkative musicians of his generation and Melville was a master of the written word. For both, words obfuscate, while action—Budd’s striking Claggart, Townshend’s smashing a guitar—is direct and honest. Both works emerged in periods that gave voice to the aspirations, impatience, and resentments of youth and that had counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic: Melville’s “Billy Budd” following the Romantic era and The Who’s “My Generation” on the heels of the entry of the “angry young man” into twentieth-century literature and film. Each explores a sexual subtext, with Billy the androgynous counterpart to The Who’s frustrated male teenager. The violence of each is unrestrained, “naturalistic,” and yet oddly choreographed. Each finds an audience that identifies with the rebel. Billy Budd is not religious; he boards the Bellipotent a barbarian and remains so, his moral compass deriving from someplace other than belief in God. Similarly, although The Who did not shy away from an appeal to hooliganism, they constructed their stage behavior as a form of primal release, while abiding by the Mod code of “clean living under difficult circumstances.” If young Budd makes an essentially moral choice in acquiescing to his sacrifice, his serenity in

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the face of death is paralleled by The Who’s auto-destructive pretention and by their “hope [they] die before [they] get old.” Of course, the most striking and novel correspondence between “Billy Budd” and “My Generation” is the stuttering youth who lashes out in violence. 66 Even if modern speech pathologists have not done so, the two works pose in the mind of the reader or listener a relationship between stuttering and violence. The stammer in “My Generation” differs from that in “Billy Budd” partly because the authorship and intent in the song’s peculiar style is harder to make out; the violence of “My Generation,” unlike Melville’s abstractions, also has a genuine physical dimension to it since The Who punctuated their stage set with the smashing of guitars, amplifiers, and drums. Like “My Generation,” a fumbling for words and a reflex for violence mark the story of Melville’s famous young sailor. As with The Who, Melville, a biographer writes, had a “preoccupation” with “atavistic violence.” 67 Still, the stuttering of The Who’s “My Generation” is voiced by a more ambiguous persona than “Billy Budd”: the modern young punk, at once brazen in attitude and stance yet deeply unsure of himself; the stammer of a “pilled-up” Mod (as Richard Barnes put it); and the voice of a young man whose self-confidence is more apparent than real. And, of course, the violence of “My Generation” came not with a physical blow but with the distortion and feedback of the guitar and, in the live act, the destruction of musical instruments. In an interview in April 2009, Townshend mentioned that he had recently noticed the similarities between his musical history of the Mods, Quadrophenia and “Billy Budd.” 68 Similarly, The Who’s “My Generation,” created and performed by the group unaware of the larger historical narrative, belongs to a broader transatlantic story—with the surprising similarities of “Billy Budd” and “My Generation” signs of a distinctly modern receptiveness to violence and redemption, the roots of which can be traced to the historical era in which “Billy Budd” is set: the French Revolution of the late-eighteenth century. Indeed, the analogy can be extended to other literary and historical examples. Inarticulacy, combined with a sense of the “redemptive power of violence,” is there not only in “My Generation” and “Billy Budd” but also in the midnineteenth-century writings of Thomas Carlyle, Karl Marx, and Charles Dickens. 69 In the worldviews of these latter three, there are some of the same themes to be found in “My Generation” and “Billy

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Budd”: the discovery of a modern form of popular violence; a desire for revenge by the underclasses against the institutions and mores of the old regime; and an inarticulacy among the working masses that finds an outlet in violence. It is not hard to locate the theme of redemptive violence in other spheres of nineteenth-century thought and art, particularly from the Romantic period, as well as in the words of articulate nineteenth-century proletarians—predecessors, one can argue, of the Mods and Rockers—who left memoirs, recollections, and other written works. 70 Strange, artistic creations that initially struck contemporaries as oddities, “My Generation” and “Billy Budd” are not cultural islands but rather parallel products separated across the years in a transatlantic world of pop music and literature.

“A QUICK ONE WHILE HE’S AWAY”: THE WORDS IN THE SONGS The appeal of The Who for their fans had to do in part with the words in their songs, most of which were written by Pete Townshend. Unlike the song-writing duos of Lennon–McCartney for the Beatles and Jagger–Richards for the Rolling Stones, Townshend wrote songs on his own, creating “demos” at a home studio that he then handed to the band to give the final touch. From the band’s first releases, the lyrics that Townshend presented to Roger Daltrey were unlike most of what was heard on pop radio: ironic, skeptical, humorous, conscious of social class; Who songs were rarely love songs. Much of the material seemed to come straight out of the frustrations of the generation of young working-class males in postwar England for whom Townshend saw himself as a voice. In 1964–1965, he was writing songs that illustrated the emotional isolation and struggle of the average nineteen-year-old Mod stuck in a dead-end job and feeling alienated from the larger society. This became, for Townshend, his Shepherd’s Bush manifesto: I feel my first audience back in the Mod days commissioned me to say what they felt disinclined or unable to say for whatever reason. For my first Who recording, I wrote some lyrics—“I Can’t Explain”—and our fans found themselves in those lyrics, they each came and told me their own story. They asked me how I could have

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known how they felt and what they had experienced. How could I have explained what they could not explain, that they could not explain anything at all? This discovery was an accident. People who liked my songs were able to put themselves inside them and find their own stories. And so rock music differs from all other art and entertainment forms, I think. Usually, the conventional writer, composer or dramatist has a story to tell. A rock composer has to create a tangible and useful hole to be filled. The listener jumps into the music and it is only then that the real story begins. 71

Who songs differed from the radio-friendly melodies or Dylan-inspired wordplay of the Beatles or the flights of fantasy and thinly veiled sexual escapades in the lyrics of Led Zeppelin. On occasion, John Entwistle’s work found its way onto albums, and his songs, like Townshend’s, were rarely about girls or love: “Boris the Spider,” a ditty about stomping on a spider; “Cousin Kevin,” the sexual predator from Tommy; and a lament about spousal cheating in “My Wife,” from the Who’s Next album. Who songs, even when the characters they described and the stories they set out were funny, came from an inner voice that was conscious of the effect of larger things—society, the near past, the human condition—on the individual. But Townshend’s songs also had to fit the personality of front man Daltrey, who was most comfortable with bluesy, sometimes bombastic lines. The first singles—“I Can’t Explain,” “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere,” “My Generation,” “Substitute,” “I Can See for Miles”—were songs of frustration and rejection set to the power pop format that was The Who’s early signature musical style. As the group matured, the music kept to many of the original themes but now also explored, in opaque imagery suitable for the radio, the timeless sexual tensions of youth: male identity in “I’m a Boy,” masturbation in “Pictures of Lily,” illicit sex in “A Quick One While He’s Away.” In the last, a complex song made up of separate narratives and melodies (a “mini-opera,” as Townshend started calling it), there is betrayal, loss, confession, and redemption. “A Quick One” concludes with Townshend and Entwistle exchanging the refrain—the latter in angelic falsetto—“You are forgiven” and, when done live, with Townshend smiling mischievously at the audience and sharing the good news: “We are all forgiven.” “I Can See for Miles” (1967) was the song that Townshend thought was the best he had ever written, the one that would reach the top of

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the pop charts and really make The Who famous. But the song did not make it to number one, disappointing Townshend and sending the band in the direction of the rock opera Tommy two years later. Otherwise, the song was of a piece with the stories in other Who songs: “I know you’ve deceived me, now here’s a surprise. . . . I can see for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles.” The emphasis on youthful frustration began to fade from the lyrics by the late 1960s so that by the time Townshend returned to the story of the band’s beginnings with Quadrophenia in 1973, the feeling was nostalgic: less than ten years after The Who began playing at clubs in Shepherd’s Bush, their early Mod roots seemed like the distant past. By the time of Quadrophenia, the four members of the group were enough of a unit, a single voice, that the characters in “The Punk Meets the Godfather” might have been any of them or their fans. The song also includes a kind of confession from Townshend: “I have to be careful not to preach. . . . And yet I’ve lived your future out / By pounding stages like a clown.” After Tommy, the personal ambitions of band members found outlets in solo albums produced with other musicians. Solo albums were a fairly common midcareer diversion within rock groups that had been together for some years, particularly for individuals who felt that their voices or musical interests had been stifled. Bassist John Entwistle was frustrated that so few of his compositions ended up on the band’s albums, and he was the first to release his own album, Smash Your Head against the Wall (1971). Keith Moon enlisted the help of well-known musicians, including Ringo Starr of the Beatles and the American guitar player Joe Walsh, to support his own limited singing and songwriting abilities to record Two Sides of the Moon (1975). Townshend’s solo albums may have been the least Who-like of these projects, as he explored spiritual interests stemming from his devotion to Meher Baba (Who Came First, 1972) and collaborated with another British rocker, Ronnie Lane, on an album that had American country-and-western influences (Rough Mix, 1977). In his own work, Townshend could write for his voice, not Daltrey’s. Daltrey, like Townshend, had interests outside The Who, recording solo albums but also becoming an actor on television, stage, and movies, playing the title role in the film version of Tommy (1975) and producing and starring in McVicar (1980), a biopic about a famous British bank robber.

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In whatever form the music took over the years—singles, albums, double albums, solo albums, or live performances—The Who self-consciously retained a group persona as part of their brand, never disowning the frustration and anger that had launched their careers as teenagers in 1964–1965. Even as Townshend, Daltrey, Entwistle, and Moon got older, they kept “My Generation” as the closer to the band’s live performances—with Daltrey continuing to sing “Hope I die before I get old,” perhaps more out of irony than conviction, but with energy nonetheless. This was an accommodation that, as the years rolled by, Who fans accepted.

4 “THE REAL ME” Fans across the Atlantic, 1964–1974

“Irish” Jack Lyons was one of the earliest fans of The Who. Decades later, he still is. On Lyons’s website, where he relives the early days of the band in image and text, the author describes himself “back in the day” as “speed-freak skinny. . . . The original Mod from The Who’s power base at the Goldhawk Social Club.” 1 As an Irish immigrant— West London and the Shepherd’s Bush district, where The Who began, had many immigrants from Ireland and areas of the former British Empire—Lyons first saw The Who in 1962 when they were still called the Detours. His nickname was given to him by Kit Lambert, one of the band’s managers. “Irish” Jack became an inspiration for the character “Jimmy,” whose story of teenage angst is at the core of The Who’s double album Quadrophenia from 1973. For “Irish” Jack, as for other London Mods, the early sixties was the formative time of his life. Judging by his website and his desire to retell that chapter of The Who’s history, “Irish” Jack has never fully left those days. For fans and for The Who themselves, including the two surviving members of the band— Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend—the early Mod moment set the tone for everything to come. Yet the Mods faded and The Who moved on. Not long after “Irish” Jack was listening to The Who at the Goldhawk Social Club and Mods and Rockers were clashing at Brighton Beach, the band began to change its look and appeal—abandoning the Mod “uniform” to move, 113

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briefly, to a pop art phase and, from there, to a psychedelic, proto“glitter” stage and subsequently to other styles. By the time they performed at Woodstock in 1969, Daltrey had the long, golden locks and a fringe vest exposing a bare chest which was his look for several years, while Townshend was dressed in the white jump suit and Doc Martens boots that the “droogs” wore a year later in Stanley Kubrick’s film version of A Clockwork Orange. Who fans began to look different, too. By 1967, it is likely that few American, Canadian, French, West German, or Swedish fans hardly remembered—even if they ever much knew—what it meant to be a Mod. A new cohort of fans was already signing on, drawn by the esoteric themes of the rock opera Tommy and perhaps not terribly familiar with the band’s back catalog. As the look changed and the attitude evolved, the band tested original fans’ loyalties by lacing the guitar power chords and rumbling drums of the early years with synthesized music and songs about a dystopian world (the Lifehouse project) or, for their non-British fans, returning in Quadrophenia to the no less unfamiliar world of Mod-era London. Even so, many things about The Who and their music remained as they had been from the start, binding cohorts of fans across the years and distances. As it turned out, Who fans expanded and diversified easily beyond “Irish” Jack and the Mods.

“BARGAIN”: THE POST-1945 ATLANTIC WORLD The Who found fans in those corners of the Atlantic world where postwar developments in technology, business, and youth culture created an audience receptive to rock and roll. This was an Atlantic world that, beginning in 1945, witnessed the end of the long era of European dominance that had begun around 1500 and, with it, the shift to a new bipolar world dominated by two extra-European powers: the United States and the Soviet Union, the latter of whose influence was to end with the collapse of the Soviet experiment in 1991. This was the new postwar world order—the trente glorieuses, as the French called it— that inspired an early generation of Atlantic histories, such as those of R. R. Palmer and Jacques Godechot. British, French, and other Europeans adapted relatively quickly (in hindsight, one might even say happily) to postimperial life, rebuilding from the devastation of the Second

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World War in a generation or less and mostly making amends with former colonies. West Europeans, as it turned out, could be relatively content, healthy, wealthy, and peaceful even as the strategic national interests that they had imagined necessary for two centuries and more were reined in. As Europeans mostly relinquished Cold War military oversight to the United States and its nuclear umbrella (England and France maintained small nuclear arsenals of their own), wealth and productivity were shifted to infrastructure, social services, and retooled industry and technology, with much of the latter directed toward satisfying the growing consumer market. Open economic borders across the Atlantic, which had flourished from the last half of the nineteenth century to the First World War and before the autarkic interwar years, were resuscitated after 1944 with the Bretton Woods agreement, which was the Anglo-American economic plan to implement free trade in those corners of the world where Soviet and Chinese versions of communism were not likely to be contained. The Atlantic world economy pushed by the United States was reinforced after 1948 with Marshall Plan aid requiring that European recipients abide by free trade arrangements benefiting American interests as they primed European economies for new growth and rebuilding from the war years. Having gone through nearly a half-century (1914–1945) of intermittent and terrible continental civil war, West European nations after 1945 mostly sought ways to cooperate—with former rivals France and West Germany joining their steel- and coal-making capacities into a supranational effort in the early 1950s and then taking the lead in founding a European Economic Community that sought to end trade borders, spread prosperity, and make economies mutually dependent. The result, after a few years of austerity, was rising prosperity in England and Western Europe, including West Germany, whose cities had only recently been in rubble. England, still attached to U.S. interests after 1945, was at first a reluctant partner in the larger European enterprise. It was and probably still is harder for a Briton to be European than it is for a German or Dutch. This was one reason why English and American rock music meshed so easily. But by 1973, England, too, had joined the European Common Market, even as it was the main conduit for American pop culture into the rest of Europe. The younger generation’s reward for Europe’s relinquishing of power and empire was guaranteed work, education, and a broad range of social services. This was not a bad bargain

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compared to the lives of earlier generations that included The Who’s parents and grandparents. 2 European economic integration begat European political integration. This meant thinking in terms of a “United States of Europe” that could compete with the United States and with the Soviet-dominated Eastern Bloc and, perhaps more important, inhibit the tensions that had brought so much grief to the continent in the first half of the century. Part of the postimperial thinking meant that West European nations signed on to essentially the same plan of modernization—encouraging new technology and consumer production and building a social safety net that included generous benefits for workers, the elderly, mothers, and children. The twentieth-century European idea also entailed the creation of national health systems. Quality of life—including the pursuit of entertainment—became goals of European life in ways that they had not before the Second World War. Culturally, European borders were breached, as we have seen, by American pop— music, movies, television, fashion, and fast food. These changes were yet to fully affect Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. By the mid1950s, there existed a real and ideological divide—an Iron Curtain— separating East from West in Europe. The NATO defensive treaty, organized under American auspices in 1949, was the strategic form of this separation. From East Germany and Czechoslovakia eastward, another form of modernization modeled on the Soviet Union prevailed until the 1980s. But elsewhere across most of Western and Central Europe, by about 1965 to be a “European” implied certain things: political and civil rights in a republic, parliamentary democracy or constitutional monarchy; acquiescence to American military power and the presence of American military forces; a modern economy directed toward consumer markets and the building of new technology; statesupported health care and education; guaranteed work and social benefits; open borders; a level of affluence not known to earlier generations; and the sense of being a European as much as French, Italian, or Belgian. The same broad modernizing trends were there in North America, too, although Canada’s approach to society, economy, and politics was closer to the European (really the global) style than that of the United States. Even more than in Europe, postwar affluence in the United States and Canada became a fact of life and an expectation for each new

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generation. The postwar American Dream implied an abundance of material goods and the expectation that children—including the huge numbers of the baby boom generation—would do better than their parents. Social protections guaranteeing a minimum wage and length of work day and work week, all of which had their start across the Atlantic world in the late-nineteenth century, were now joined to an expectation of old-age pensions, guaranteed vacation, subsidized housing, and support for families. Even in the United States where a faith in laissezfaire—the idea that economic and political relations among people worked out naturally for the greater good—was rarely challenged, there were a variety of New Deal social security programs dating from the crisis of capitalism during the Great Depression of the 1930s that protected the aged and infirm. More social support was added through President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty and Great Society programs of the 1960s, which sought to provide for the sick and the elderly and to integrate black Americans more effectively into politics and society (though, as we have seen, black American culture had already begun to enter the mainstream). Open borders meant open airwaves, and so Canadian kids could listen to rock and roll on their transistors or watch it on the television just like American kids.

THE WHO SELL OUT: THE WHO IN AMERICA Both The Who and the Mods, which provided the group their original following, were products of the postimperial Atlantic era of youth and relative affluence. The first Mods were a London phenomenon and very British, and The Who were a self-consciously British band. Indeed, “The Who were British made and played,” wrote one observer, “a bloody nose for the establishment and quintessential British rock band of the Sixties.” 3 While the band’s attitude was not jingoistic or patriotic, they possessed British cheek in abundance. Some of this simply had to do with marketing themselves to European and North American fans as the latest, post-Beatles, post–Rolling Stones surge of the British Invasion. Some of it was youthful tongue-in-cheek fun. Some of it came from the knowledge that the special form of rock and roll that they played, even if its origins were in the United States, was British. And some of it had to do with—as the British punk band the Clash sang a

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few years later—just being “sick of the USA.” For British rockers, America could both attract and repel. The response of The Who was to wear their Britishness on their sleeves—sometimes literally, with Pete Townshend and John Entwistle periodically donning jackets cut from a British Union Jack flag and, in 1968, with the whole band posing for a photograph showing them at Morningside Park in New York City literally draped in the flag. For The Who, it was not hard to remain British and transatlantic at the same time. And so it was that The Who, following in the footsteps of the Kinks, another notably “British” group, shifted from being a successful London pop band to a transatlantic phenomenon with devoted fans across both North America and Europe. Under the guidance of managers Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, The Who looked to cultivate audiences where a great deal of money was to be made, and this meant visits to North America, especially the United States. The creation of an American fan base began with tours in 1967–1968. David Brooks writes that the “structured mental communities that help [rock music fans] understand the wider world was cultivated not in a country but in a concert hall,” and indeed, this is what happened for The Who at venues across America, as it had happened earlier at the Goldhawk Social Club and Marquee in London. 4 Whether in Toronto, Ontario, Los Angeles, California, or Jackson, Mississippi, North American fans could learn about The Who through promotions on the radio or newspapers, fan magazines, and big commercial publications such as Rolling Stone. Managers Lambert and Stamp worked hard to generate loyal fans in America as they had in England. Stamp remembered recruiting kids during The Who’s first appearance in New York City in a manner reminiscent of London fans a few years earlier: If you went in for the first show, the 10 o’clock ticket, you could stay for the rest of the day. Not too many people want to see a show that early. So every day I was shoving these kids, the Who freaks, right in the front. . . . It was the same thing as the 100 [Mod] faces at the [London] Marquee, they became the fanatics and they were there every day. 5

The Who’s tours of the United States and Canada in 1967–1968 launched a special relationship with a developing North American fan base that came to border on cult status in cities such as Detroit, Cleve-

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land, Chicago, Toronto, and New York. 6 With the exception of a quick concert tour to Australia and New Zealand in 1968, there were no visits outside the Atlantic basin during this period. Where in 1964 the band had started their “residency” at the Marquee Club with about thirty persons in the audience and where, for instance, a typical European show at The Hague, Netherlands, in 1965, drew around 450 fans, a decade later the story was radically different: 75,962 tickets sold for The Who’s appearance at the opening of the Silverdome football stadium in Detroit, Michigan (a record for its day). In some ways, the crowds in these places were the American counterpart to those of Shepherd’s Bush in 1964–1965. During the 1967–1968 American tours, The Who played local clubs, concert halls, high school gymnasiums, and outdoor amphitheaters or fair grounds. In 1967, when they were the opening act for British band Herman’s Hermits, many of the kids in the American audiences were teen or preteen girls who had come to see Hermits heartthrob Peter Noone. Because The Who were not exactly cute (they were, in fact, writes Dave Marsh, “ugly”) 7 and they played a very different kind of rock music from the Hermits, they were a shock to these audiences. But by the time The Who returned to the United States and Canada on two tours the following year, they were playing to a fan base composed mostly of teenage and young adult males who were familiar with their songs from albums, radio, and word-of-mouth. Detroit and its Grande Ballroom were an early special place for the band, but similar bonds developed in other American cities with an industrial past, working-class populations, and young males who were being drafted into the military or who might have been the first of their generation to aspire to college. Some of these kids were probably fans of the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, too; years later, their own kids may have followed Bruce Springsteen. The Who were attracting fans from the North American suburbs, as well. Meanwhile, fans along the East and West coasts in cities such as San Francisco and New York could appreciate The Who’s avant-garde outsider status after the release of The Who Sell Out and then especially with the “prog rock” themes of Tommy. These later fans, writes Dave Marsh, found The Who “exotic as well as devastating.” 8 As they became hugely successful by the early seventies, The Who extended their range and itinerary: in the Western United States—Seattle, Los Angeles, and Denver; in the South—Dallas, Houston, Jacksonville, and Atlanta; in the East—Baltimore and Charlotte; in the Mid-

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west—St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Minneapolis. The Who were popular in Canada, where the band always included shows on their trips across the Atlantic. Toronto was a favored location, and The Who consistently played Montreal in Québec, as well as Vancouver along the West Coast, and Saskatoon, Winnipeg, and Calgary in the Prairie Provinces. By the 1960s, when The Who and their managers wanted to make money by selling albums and concert tickets, it was especially the North American market they targeted. North America breathed new life into the band, and much about the American tours and experience was good for the group. While the story behind Tommy was definitively set in England, the impetus for its creation came from the new energy that the band gained in North America. Tom Wright, Townshend’s American friend, remembered of the connection: “By 1969, Pete had given birth to a monumental project, the first musical work to be dubbed a ‘rock opera.’ He called it, simply, Tommy. The Grande [in Detroit, Michigan] was the logical place for Tommy’s American premiere [and] the club’s audience was the best the Who’d ever played for—anywhere.” 9 Still, Townshend lamented the ways in which the success that Tommy achieved in the United States eventually changed things for the band: [Up to Tommy] . . . we really had been our own bosses, and then we weren’t anymore. Tommy and America, the great consumer nation, that took us over and said, “There are 50 million kids that wanna see you perform; what are you gonna do about it. . . .” So you get your arse over there and you get involved in the standing ovation and interviews, the 19-page Rolling Stone articles . . . blah, blah, blah and that all takes two years to get out of the way. 10

Even with their success in North America, the band members did not lose ties with England and London. The individual outlook of band members remained in some degree, like the Mods, parochial: in the end for The Who, it was easier to take the boy out of Shepherd’s Bush than Shepherd’s Bush out of the boy. Except for Keith Moon’s sojourn in Southern California near the end of his life, all the band members made their permanent homes and had families in Britain. In individual interviews, in the settings of most of their songs, and in the narratives of their rock operas, The Who were an unabashedly British band that made remarkably little effort to tailor themselves to the increasingly

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non-British audiences buying their albums and concert tickets. And yet, fans in North America and continental Europe were drawn to the band and even to the brand of Britishness that they stood for and exploited commercially. As the members of The Who mostly stuck to their cultural roots, non-British fans were willing to look beyond, often even ready to embrace, the British worldview that the band sang about in songs such as “Happy Jack” and “A Quick One” and in the album Quadrophenia. The unifying ingredient across borders was the The Who brand and the music.

“SUMMERTIME BLUES”: THE WHO IN EUROPE Rock and roll music and the bands making the music moved easily back and forth across the Atlantic in the 1960s. Many bands and individual performers had a foot, so to speak, on each side of the Atlantic. There are numerous examples of performers and rock enthusiasts shifting between England and the United States, Canada, Ireland, and Western Europe in the sixties and seventies. These included the American Chrissie Hynde, the Irish pop performer Van Morrison, and the Irish band U2. Patti Smith, an American poet and spoken-word performer, who became the best-known and most influential female punk performer of the late 1970s, was a transatlantic rock personality, performing in England and Western Europe from the start of her career while seeking inspiration from the nineteenth-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud during visits to Paris. As the history—legendary and real—of rock music accrued, fans and rock performer wannabes could even make pilgrimages to revered locations in the United States or England: the Delta region of Mississippi, where the blues were born; Nashville, the home of country music; the famous recording studies of Sun Records in Memphis and Chess in Chicago; Strawberry Field, the suburban Liverpool inspiration for the Beatles song; and, for Who fans, Shepherd’s Bush and the Marquee Club in London or the Brighton Beach settings that were part of the story of Quadrophenia. Continental European kids, like those in North America, though in lesser numbers, also began to sign on to The Who brand during the sixties. When The Who toured Western Europe in 1965–1966, Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp worked with local promoters to advertise the

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group and persuade French, Swedish, West German, and other European DJs to give the group’s singles radio airtime. One can get a sense of the band’s expansion to the European continent in the years 1964–66 by reviewing the following numbers:

THE WHO BY NUMBERS: EUROPEAN GIGS, 1964–1966 1965: 234 performances, with 221 of these in England, Scotland, and Wales and with their first appearances outside of England—their first show in Paris on Tuesday, June 1, 1965, with 5 appearances altogether in France in 1965; 4 in Denmark; 2 in Sweden; 2 in the Netherlands 1966: 208 performances—178 of these in the United Kingdom; 3 in France; 5 in Denmark; 14 in Sweden; 1 in the Netherlands; 7 in West Germany—the group’s first appearance in this country 1964–1966: total number of European gigs, 623—580 in the United Kingdom, 8 in France, 16 in Sweden, 9 in Denmark, 3 in the Netherlands, 7 in West Germany Some of the continental venues in which The Who played were different from what they were used to in England, and occasionally there was a mismatch between physical space and the physicality of their act. On one of the few instances when The Who played in Norway (Olso, May 1967), “Pete finished the whole gig,” recalled a fan, “throwing his guitar against the roof lighting rig—effectively leaving the whole room in almost complete darkness. . . . There was total panic in the darkness, the Norwegian newspapers went crazy the following day.” 11 In Paris in 1965, The Who played the Olympia, a famous club for French entertainers where other British Invasion bands had already performed. The Olympia was on the Right Bank of the Seine River and dated from the late 1880s, although it had been rebuilt and updated in the 1950s. Seating about two thousand persons, over the decades it served as music hall, cinema, and club, hosting, among others, the famous French pop singer Edith Piaf before bringing in rock-and-roll acts in the sixties. The Who also played at Paris’ Le Golf Drouot, a newer building originally designed as a miniature golf attraction (thus “Le Golf”), which was to become the city’s premier “discotheque” and “temple du rock” of the 1960s. Like the Olympia, Le Golf Drouot was

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situated in the ninth arrondissement just north of the city center. Built in 1951, it fully became a music venue ten years later. Le Golf was on an upper story and had a small stage, with a low ceiling and walls that were soon covered in graffiti and images of Elvis Presley and other famous rockers. The stage was raised a couple of feet off the dance floor, with fans pressed up against it. In its heyday, one band followed another. Le Golf Drouot was a French rock-and-roll club hardly distinguishable from those in which The Who played in London. The Who also played in French cities outside Paris, where the technology of the day allowed the music to reach fans in locations no less remote from the French cultural center of Paris than, say, Sudbury was from London or Waterloo from Toronto, Ontario. Fan loyalties were just as intense, too. One fan attending his first Who gig at the Lyon Sport Palais in September 1972 recalled the experience as a revelation: “After a deafening bass solo the audience was left with ears ringing. What followed can’t be rationally explained. It was a cross between being abducted by a UFO and a born again experience.” 12 French fans, if somewhat fewer in number, were as enthusiastic as those in England and North America. During the early years as The Who were introducing themselves to European teenagers, the outdoor summer concerts they played in Denmark and Sweden brought a rambunctious crowd attracted by the group’s reputation for onstage destruction. Swedish fan Ludwig Rasmussen recalled a May 1967 concert in Stockholm: The Who started out with their speakers on full power trying their best to surprise the audience, which was successful at first. But after a while the concert turned lame. . . . The indispensible final number “My Generation” became the most destructive The Who had presented in Stockholm. Roger swung his microphone into the drums. Pete hit his guitar into another microphone so it broke. Keith pushed out his entire set of drums. Speakers and amps fell, Townshend’s guitar was smashed to pieces. Luckily, the finale was chaotic, otherwise the audience probably would have been disappointed. 13

Five years later at Stockholm’s Tennishallen, Swedish fan Bjorn Lanner remembered The Who playing “very loud and in a very fast tempo, which seemed to increase from the very beginning. . . . It all ended with smoke and thunder, the way it should. We left Tennishallen with a memory for life.” 14 On occasion, the band members got fed up

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with the restiveness of the European crowds. In Essen, West Germany, in 1972, Daltrey and Townshend took turns getting angry at the audience, with Townshend yelling over the microphone, “All right, well let’s keep it cool, then eh? Don’t stick two fingers up at me, you, I saw what you were fucking doing. Just keep it cool, otherwise we’ll just fuck off out. . . . You’ll take on all of us, will you? All of us? Come on. . . . You stupid git.” 15 A repertoire of interaction between band and fans—sometimes expected, sometimes spontaneous—happened in Europe as it did in England and North America. By the late sixties and early seventies, the audiences at Stockholm, Essen, Lyon, and Paris looked, behaved, and came from social circumstances very much like their counterparts in Great Britain and North America. A style of life, including dress, an attachment to rock music, and a disdain for their parents’ generation had seized a youthful cohort on both sides of the Atlantic. This Atlantic generation was drawn to rock bands including The Who, Beatles, Rolling Stones, Crosby, Still, Nash, and Young, and others for whom national borders were almost irrelevant, tying sensibilities with the tenuous but nonetheless real connection of music—a “brotherhood,” writes Dave Marsh, “bonded permanently through rock ’n’ roll.” 16

LIFEHOUSE: WHO FANS AT THE CONCERT The logistics of attending a Who concert for the ordinary fan changed over the years as the band became more popular and as they performed in different countries before ever larger crowds and venues. In 1964, when the group was still experimenting with different names—shifting from the Detours to The Who to the High Numbers and back to The Who—fans could find their performance schedule listed with other bands on posters and handbills placed around Shepherd’s Bush and nearby neighborhoods. London-area clubs often hosted one or more bands during an evening and sometimes had groups play every night for a week or more at a time. In the early years, news of gigs spread by word of mouth. Promotion picked up when managers Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp signed on. The new team was tireless in publicizing its charges. At this early stage, tickets could be bought at the venue door, or sometimes the new managers would distribute free tickets just to

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build up the audience. New songs were publicized by distributing copies of 45s to local record shops. After 1965, when the success of The Who’s singles spread the band’s name across England, fans could follow them through appearances on television, in fan magazines, and by listening to the offshore pirate radio stations that had sprung up in response to BBC’s control of the British airwaves. 17 The North American venues also changed as The Who became better known. When the band toured the United States and Canada in 1967–1968, they played at outdoor festivals, high school gymnasiums, state fairs, and county concert halls. A year later, The Who concert experience had already begun to take on some of the grandiose and professional form that would mark tours of the 1970s. With the critical and commercial success of Tommy in 1969, The Who were booked into not only larger venues but sometimes more prestigious ones befitting the pretentions of the rock opera they were now performing. They also played many of the famous outdoor concerts of the era, including the Woodstock festival in upstate New York in 1969 and concerts at the Isle of Wight, located just off the southern coast of England, in 1970 and 1971. It was during these years that The Who became part of what might be called the founding generation of rock-and-roll warriors: bands whose transatlantic tours became the stuff of legend for the music, for the hedonistic lifestyle of the road, and for the complicated logistics and great expense necessary to keep everything going. Shows now adopted the full retinue of the rock concert experience: venues capable of holding huge crowds, oversized amplifiers, long shows, and innovations such as laser light displays, along with all the extras that promoters used to generate revenue, including the sale of T-shirts, posters, and other paraphernalia. After 1969, Who fans paid high prices for hard-to-get tickets, sometimes waiting hours in line. At this time, festival seating was practiced at many rock concerts. Festival seating meant selling tickets at a single price, opening the doors at a set hour, and letting the fans flood in to choose whatever spot on the floor or stands they wanted. Promoters liked festival seating because it promised the sell of tickets and reduced venue costs. The approach also seemed to fit the free-spirited 1960s. But as fans grew more fanatical about their favorite bands and as tickets became harder to get, festival seating seemed a disaster waiting to happen—and happen it did: at a Who concert in Cincinnati, Ohio, in De-

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cember 1979 when eleven young people were killed in an opening-door crush. The tragedy at Cincinnati signaled the beginning of the end of festival seating for The Who and for all rock-and-roll concerts. 18 Attending the first rock concert to see bands like The Who became a rite of passage for youthful fans across the Atlantic in the 1960s and 1970s. The thrill and sense of the unexpected that went with joining a crowd of young people, the loud music, even the presence of police and security, could be exciting. The concert experience joined with the spiritual vibe of the day to open up unexplored, seemingly transcendent possibilities for audience and performers alike. For some, drugs contributed to the headiness of the experience. The smell of marijuana became as much a part of the concert as the loud music. Hints of the ostensible psychic possibilities seemed to be present at Monterey, Woodstock, and the Isle of Wight. But negative vibes could happen, too, as at the 1969 Altamont, California, concert headlined by the Rolling Stones a few months after Woodstock. 19 Although the individual members of The Who mostly disliked their experience at the huge outdoor concert of Woodstock, Townshend remained deeply interested in the spiritual possibilities of the live concert experience. This was some of the impetus for his Lifehouse project of 1971, which was intended to be both an album and a film. Coming soon after Tommy, Townshend also felt pressure “to produce rock-operas or something equally impudent almost as often as he had once produced singles in [The Who’s] early days.” 20 Townshend’s idea was to explore the connectedness between band and fans, and the venue selected for the experiment was the Young Vic Theater in London. As Townshend finished writing songs for Lifehouse, the band performed them live before small audiences at the theater. This, Townshend believed, would be the first truly “interactive rock show.” 21 At the time, he hoped that “something” would happen: I don’t mean that I seriously expect people to leave their bodies but I think we might go further than rock concerts have gone before. I know that when live rock is at its best, which often means with The Who, it stops being just a band playing up front and the audience sitting there like dummies. It’s an interaction which goes beyond performance. We aren’t like superstars, we’re only reflective surfaces. We might catch an energy and transmit it, but the audience doesn’t take more from us than we take from them, not when the gig

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really works. That’s what we want to take further at the Young Vic: we want to see how far the interaction can be taken. . . . By the end of six months, anything might happen. 22

Looking back in 1985, he added about the Lifehouse experiment: We were most passionate about the audience and the audience’s role, particularly in concerts, that a good audience has to be one in which everybody loses themselves. You don’t go onstage to find something, you go onstage to lose something. You don’t go to a concert in order to be given something, you go to a concert in order to become abandoned, to lose yourself. 23

“What Lifehouse was about, at its root,” Townshend wrote, “was to reaffirm that what’s important is that music reflects its audience as absolutely and completely as possible.” 24 But in 1971, no one except Townshend seemed to fully grasp the idea behind Lifehouse, nor could the other members of the group work up a belief that its lofty goals were genuinely within reach. Daltrey, Moon, and Entwistle—all raised in humble surroundings and not exactly resistant to the notion of selling out for fame and fortune—were less susceptible than Townshend to the utopian dreams of the sixties. As the experiment foundered and as Townshend himself went through a difficult personal stretch, Lifehouse was aborted.

“WE’RE NOT GONNA’ TAKE IT”: WHO CONCERT CROWDS Much of the thrill that went with going to a rock concert had to do with the loudness of the music, and The Who were expert at providing this element. But the excitement also had to do with being part of a crowd. Belonging to an ephemeral thing such as a crowd, of temporarily losing one’s individuality in a larger collection of persons, can produce a special sensation. There are all sorts of crowds that can be identified historically and in contemporary society, each of which probably created its own peculiar kind of exhilaration. Still, as many fans thought, there was something special about the rock-and-roll crowd.

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Historians, sociologists, and anthropologists have written a great deal about crowds, past and present, including studies of crowds attending rock-and-roll concerts. Early scholars of the crowd were especially interested in the collective action of rebellious and political crowds of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The modern history of the crowd began in the 1950s and 1960s with scholars such as George Rudé, Georges Lefebvre, and Charles Tilly writing about the French revolutions of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Since then, a generation of scholars has produced a body of literature on European and American crowds involved in insurrections, revolutions, and strikes. These analyses have been marked by the accumulation and study of social and political data about age, gender, trade, political party, or group affiliation. These data have been assessed statistically and compared with certain variables—for instance, the timing and location of incidents of crowd activity. 25 By the 1980s, the scholarly definition of the crowd had expanded to include not only groups acting out of political or economic motives but also those identified by cultural activities. Today, scholars study cultural crowds that, for instance, promenade in parks and thoroughfares or attend opera, theater, movies, or rock concerts. Despite the obvious differences between, say, a mostly bourgeois or working-class crowd at a Paris theater in 1850 and a crowd of young rock fans at a Who concert in Detroit in 1970, a way of understanding has developed that can be used to evaluate both. As we have seen, the kids who made up the crowds at early Who concerts in London’s Shepherd’s Bush were mostly Mods. The Mods were not the only youth subculture of early 1960s England to assemble and act collectively. Another, often rival group to the Mods were Rockers, themselves cultural descendants of the 1950s Teddy Boys. All were products of the working-class neighborhoods of London. 26 The sociologist Stanley Cohen, who made a famous study of the era, described Rockers as lumpen, a term taken from Karl Marx’s analysis of nineteenth-century crowds and by which Marx had meant disaffected, impoverished young males easily swayed by fads or charismatic figures. Politically for Marx, lumpen were as likely to be “reactionary” as they were to be “revolutionary.” 27 For Cohen, some of these qualities could be found in the Rockers, whose rivalry with Mods was an important marker of identity for both groups:

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“Mod” meant effeminate, stuck-up, emulating the middle classes, aspiring to a competitive sophistication, snobbish, phony. “Rocker” meant hopelessly naïve, loutish, scruffy and above all betraying: for the [Mods] . . . wanted a good image for the rebel group, the polished sharp image that would offset the adult patronization by which this increasingly self-aware world of the adolescent might be disarmed. 28

In 1964–1965, being a part of the Mod crowd also meant conforming to a defined look—virtually a uniform, succinctly described in The Who’s “I’ve Had Enough” from Quadrophenia where Jimmy’s jacket is “cut and slim” with a “touch of seersucker and an open neck.” He rides a scooter (GS brand in his case) with his “hair cut neat.” Rockers likewise had a uniform: jeans, leather jacket, and greased-back hair à la Elvis Presley or the young American film actor James Dean. Mods rode scooters; Rockers rode motorcycles. Where Mods favored Motown music from the United States and local bands such as The Who and Small Faces, Rockers liked Elvis Presley, Gene Vincent, and Chuck Berry. A young Roger Daltrey still had a Rocker look as he was putting together the Detours in 1962. Crowds of Mods or Rockers in London or Brighton Beach circa 1964 could be large. Fan and writer Mick Farren, attending a Who gig at the Marquee Club in November 1964, remembered the “spectacle of nearly a thousand speeding (that is, on pills) Mods watching transfixed, packed shoulder to shoulder, bopping and gum chewing, as at deafening volume The Who go through their act to the culmination in an orgasmic ritual of frantic destruction.” 29 Crowds of Mods and Rockers sometimes could threaten or engage in collective violence. 30 Indeed, the language that Pete Townshend sometimes used in remembering the phenomenon was not “crowd” but “gang.” The lingering threat of violence between Mods and Rockers was played out most famously in running brawls on the streets and beaches of Brighton during the Bank Holidays of 1964–1965, a happening that shows up in Quadrophenia. Looking back in 1973 as the album was released, Townshend recalled one particularly unpleasant episode from the period: [The Who] were playing at Brighton Aquarium [in April 1965] and I saw about two thousand Mod kids and there were three Rockers up against a wall. They’d obviously just come in thinking that they were

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going to a party and they really were scared as hell, and the Mods were just throwing bottles at them. I mean there’s no sort of hero in my eyes in something like that. 31

The Mods, Mod culture, and the threat of crowd violence were formative factors in the early history of The Who. But Modism soon faded. Whereas at the start of their career band members might encounter crowds of Mods at their shows and in the streets of West London or Brighton, after 1966 the audiences at their gigs were changing. By 1967, The Who were exploring other ways of fitting in with the changing styles. In 1969’s Tommy, the devoted throngs who followed the title character eventually renounce their messiah, proclaiming “We’re Not Gonna’ Take It.” Looking back, the Mods come across as distinctly British and parochial, while the subsequent sixties styles of dress in London and England were more likely to be shared by young populations on both sides of the Atlantic. When The Who first started playing in the United States in 1967, few Americans knew them, but by the time they returned for cross-country tours a year later, an American fan base was taking shape. The American tour manager in 1968 was Tom Wright, the American with whom Townshend shared an apartment in London in the early 1960s (Wright left Townshend his collection of blues and R&B masters when he was forced out of England on drug charges). He particularly remembered a crowd at Detroit’s Grande Theater, one of the iconic physical spaces in American rock history: The stage was about chest high. People rested their elbows on it. No cops, no security. Just wall-to-wall humanity waiting to rock. A loud cackle came from Pete’s guitar as he jammed the lead into the amp socket. Like a machine gun, they kicked off “Substitute.” Wow. . . I shouted. “They’re singing with the band. They know the song!” This had never happened in the States. The crowd was pulsing like a welltrained combat unit. Guys were banging their heads and hands on the stage. The band looked at each other. This was the audience they’d worked their whole lives to find, and halfway into the first song they knew it for sure. 32

By the late 1960s, as The Who moved away from the Mod scene and for the first time toured across the Atlantic, a new kind of protocol

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evolved: a new repertoire of rock concertgoing and a new kind of crowd behavior. This could be seen at huge outdoor concerts such as Woodstock and Altamont in the United States and the Isle of Wight in England, as well as at the growing number of concerts held in outdoor football stadiums and, later, the domed stadiums built in the United States. By 1970, The Who and other big-name rock bands were performing for enormous gatherings mostly at concerts, with fewer and fewer gigs for smaller crowds. Some of the shift toward larger concerts and crowds was driven by the desire to feed the ever-growing business side of rock and roll—that is, to sell tickets and albums. But it was also a new development in the history of the crowd—in the case of rock music, now defined especially by cultural, rather than economic or political, qualities. Mods had formed crowds, inside or outside the concert hall in 1964 and 1965—audiences increasingly were what The Who performed to after 1966.

“CUT MY HAIR”: WHO FANS AND HIPPIES After the Mods came the hippies: first in the United States, then elsewhere. Where the Mods were mostly local and British, hippies became transatlantic. The Who and most of their fans were fairly adamant that they were not hippies. Hippies were a sixties subculture with roots and greatest attraction in the United States, although by the end of the decade, the hippie lifestyle had spread throughout the countries of the Atlantic basin and even beyond. At the time, casual observers might uncritically associate all rock-and-roll fandom with hippies, but fans knew the difference. Who fans, like many rock music fans, could be picayune in favoring one group, one lifestyle, one look over another. There was a kind of unspoken code: being a fan of a band might imply a certain attitude or style of dress, which itself might entail something as simple as wearing the right concert T-shirt. But the loyalty that fans showed to their favorite band also sprang from practical limitations: given that most young rock fans did not have unlimited money to spend, choices had to be made about dress, albums, and concert tickets. Who fans on either side of the Atlantic probably had more affinities with each other than they did with hippies in their own country.

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As Mods looked to The Who in 1964–1965, hippies in the sixties and early seventies gravitated toward particular bands. The San Francisco–based Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane were favorites in the United States, and the Moody Blues, Traffic, and Pink Floyd appealed to a British style of hippie in England. The Who and their fans, if not openly confrontational toward hippies, could come across as dismissive. Some of this had to do with musical tastes and drug culture that pervaded the hippie lifestyle; some of it had to do with the laid-back persona that hippies cultivated, which contrasted with the arguably more pragmatic or cynical worldview of Mods and their successors among Who fans; and some of it may have had to do with social background. It is difficult to assess precisely, but Who fans were probably more likely to come from a working- or lower-middle-class background that left them uncomfortable with hippie aspirations and otherworldliness. “Clean living under difficult circumstances,” as Mod and former Who manager Pete Meaden said of the Mod code of life, was probably a fair assessment of the outlook of the average Who fan. This was an ethic that contrasted with the relaxed demeanor and tie-dye-and-sandal mode of hippies. The individual members of The Who, though certainly agreeable to some aspects of the hippie lifestyle (Townshend in particular), were never fully won over. Who songs were written for the kind of working-class kids that the band had been themselves, not for hippies. The gap between The Who and their fans on one hand and the hippie world of the sixties on the other was never more apparent than during the band’s performances at the two most important American music events of the era: the Monterey International Pop Music Festival in 1967 and Woodstock in 1969. The Who went to Monterey, California, eagerly hoping to spark their career in the lucrative American market. Yet the band’s explosive performance, displayed with a special vigor seemingly intended for the benefit of the uninitiated, was a shock to a West Coast audience settled in for an evening of peace and love. The furious music and the destruction on the stage at the end of The Who’s set sent an unmistakable message, intentional or not, that the band was not fully in tune with the hippie worldview and really had no qualms about being out of step with America’s Summer of Love. Despite their roots in American pop music, there was a gap between The Who and the counterculture rock music scene in North America. The Who’s performance at Woodstock in August 1969 was not quite the provoca-

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tion of Monterey, partly because it included the full set from Tommy, some of whose themes meshed with hippie ideals. Moreover, the band had toured North America enough in the previous two years to have developed some affinity for what was happening among American youth. Still, the band made no pretense to fit in with everyone in the huge crowd in rural upstate New York. Townshend, who initially refused the invitation to play at Woodstock, was afterward openly critical. When asked by interviewer Melvin Bragg on a British television program, “What did [Woodstock] change, what was different afterward?” Townshend shot back: “It changed me, I hated it.” 33 The Who nonetheless had performed a memorable set at Woodstock, finishing with a flourish just as the sun was rising. But there was also tension. Onstage, a bad moment came when the American political activist and Yippie Abbie Hoffman appeared during The Who’s set. Roger Daltrey remembered: In the middle of my singing Tommy, Abbie Hoffman came up on stage and started doing this big political speech about John Sinclair (an American political activist who had been sentenced to jail for possession of marijuana). Pete just kicked him up the arse, kicked him off the stage, I think quite rightly. If you want to make political speeches, go to a political rally or do it in between the bands, don’t do it while the band’s on stage. We’ve got our agenda. 34

But years later, Townshend lamented what had happened: Abbie Hoffman said on the stage of Woodstock that John Sinclair was in jail for one lousy joint, and I kicked him off the stage. I deeply regret that. If I was given the opportunity again, I would stop the show. Because I don’t think rock ’n’ roll is that important. Then I did. The show had to go on. 35

“MAXIMUM R&B”: A PROFILE OF THE WHO FAN Homology is the term that scholars use to describe the set of beliefs or values held by a particular group of people, while subculture comprises the qualities adhered to by that group—style of dress or use of certain slang words, for instance. 36 Did Who fans possess a homology? Were

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they a subculture? In the ways that scholars use the term, it is hard to make the case that Who fans, across the years and across the Atlantic, were a distinct subculture possessing a homology—not, for instance, in the way that sociologist Stanley Cohen described the Mods—and, though, as we have seen, many Mods projected some of their own values onto The Who—nor in the way of hippies or, years later, punks and skinheads. From a historical perspective, it seems best to say that Who fans of the 1960s and 1970s belonged to an evolving body of rockand-roll “fandom”: broader in composition and outlook than a subculture but possessing similar interests and values and, in this case, reflecting parallel historical developments on both sides of the Atlantic. From the outside looking in, rock fans of the late 1960s and 1970s probably seemed more alike than different, whether English, Canadian, American, Swedish, or French. They tended to be young (teenagers or in their twenties), mostly male and white, probably sporting longish hair, from a working- or lower-middle-class background, and with an exaggerated fondness for after-work recreation—the dream of “sex, drugs, and rock and roll.” Most were followers not just of a single group but of many groups so that being a Who fan did not preclude one from liking the Beatles or Cream or the Doors. The variety of music that one was likely to find in any rock fan’s album collection during these years is evidence of the range of interests. Still, it is possible to identify characteristics that joined Who fans across borders and even though the social makeup shifted somewhat through the years. As we have seen, at the start, Mods gravitated to the band. Stanley Cohen described Mods as “working-class adolescents.” 37 Sharp dressing was a clue to being a Mod, as opposed to the lumpen Teds, who were fond of blue jeans and leather jackets. 38 Although male Mods were the more numerous, females were also part of the group. Interestingly, there was some intentional effeminacy in the style and pose of the Mods. This was probably done more to set them off from the cultivated machismo of Rockers than to signal a genuine affinity with women. There were also distinctions among Mods—hard and smooth categories, for instance. “Faces” or “ace faces” were Mod style leaders, and “numbers” were their lieutenants; “tickets” were the Mod “faces in the crowd.” (The term “face” shows up often in Who songs.) Mods, writes Cohen, had “no real conviction about the rationality of the division between work and play, production and consumption. . . . The

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clothes, the pubs and above all the music were actively used by the kids as catalysts, and modes of expression.” 39 They adopted a “pop existentialist” outlook on life that left them aware, sometimes in an exaggerated way, of the “absurdity of their problems and their solution.” 40 With their scooters, dress, and attitude, Mods put on a public show, and businesses soon began to cater to the phenomenon. So, too, did the British media: Mod magazines sprouted, and the popular television program Ready, Steady, Go was directed at them. Meantime, rock groups—including the Rolling Stones and Small Faces but especially The Who—were quickly given the “job,” as Townshend put it, of expressing the “arrogance,” “aggression and frustration,” “narcissism,” and “cynicism” of their Mod fans. 41 So far as Mod listeners of rock and roll were concerned, wrote Cohen, The Who were pure and complete Mod. They came straight out of Shepherd’s Bush . . . and they were unambiguously and uncomplicatedly representative of the new customers. Although they were eventually managed and staged by entrepreneurs of the swinging London scene, who invariably were middle class, they explicitly stood for, sang about and understood (a gift nearly non-existent in the pop world) their origins. 42

“Modism,” at least in this first formulation, was born to a time and place: England, circa 1964. But after the Mod moment had faded, the social makeup of Who concert audiences expanded as, at the same time, they became more or less homogenous. In North America, whether Canada or the United States, the fans tended to be male white workingor middle-class teens. Coming too were college students, older teenagers ready to go to college, and in the United States, young males subject to the military draft. More young women were joining the mix by the late sixties. These young people were not an American version of the London Mod but a postproletarian mélange of social types. Many came from the American suburb, a mostly postwar development in urban planning and development. Suburbs in North America were extensive areas hosting middle- and upper-middle-class populations, where the automobile was the necessary mode of transportation and where consensus values and the American Dream took root. In the United States after 1945, many cities now became inner cities abandoned to poorer, often African American or immigrant populations. The suburbs of the

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United States represented an urban de facto segregation in the postwar world. In European cities, something similar was happening, though the trajectory was the opposite from North America—with middle- and upper-middle-class residents occupying the center and with poorer, often immigrant (or second-generation immigrant) families pushed to the urban periphery—the banlieue, as it was called in France. Being a Who fan in Canada, the United States, or France after 1967 was about attitude, musical taste, and social class, but it was also about place. Still, whether suburban American teenager or Shepherd’s Bush Mod, there was universal youthful angst and frustration to appeal to, and The Who drew fans on both sides of the Atlantic for this reason. They brought together, for instance, two persons who surely would otherwise never have come to know each other: original Who fan and Mod “Irish” Jack Lyons and American fan Joe McMichael, an employee at a Los Angeles airport, who joined together to write an exhaustive compilation of concert performances (The Who Concert File, 1997). “Irish” Jack and Joe McMichael were a compelling example of the transatlantic quality and social type of Who fandom. By 1969 or 1970, there was emerging a transatlantic type of Who fan, one that, with a careful eye, could be distinguished from other rock-and-roll fans. Who fans were probably more akin to those of the Rolling Stones than the Beatles and at greater variance from the Deadheads and hippies who followed the Grateful Dead. To the uninformed, the sound of The Who and Led Zeppelin—another British group that began in the late sixties—probably sounded similar, but Who fans saw Zep as a latecomer, no doubt composed of fine musicians but whose songs lacked the depth and back story of their favorites. While The Who were successful and growing in popularity, their fans nonetheless probably thought of the band as a niche favorite compared with the overwhelming success—“hype,” they might say—surrounding the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin. Indeed, despite their popularity, there was always a hint of the outsider status to The Who. For many fans on either side of the Atlantic, what made The Who and their music special was that it represented release, catharsis, and a spur to coming out of the adolescent cocoon and done with an attitude that the music of other bands simply could not generate. When British fan Dave Goodman saw them for the first time at London’s Marquee Club in November 1964, the experience was revelatory:

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The first time I came out of my shell was when I saw The Who at the Marquee. I’d never seen anything like it. I couldn’t imagine that people could do such things. I went straight out and broke a window, I was that impressed. It broke down so many barriers for me, just that one evening of seeing The Who. The set was so fucking violent and the music so heady that it hit you in the head as well as the guts, it did things to you. You’d never heard anything like it. “Maximum R&B” said the poster . . . and fuck me, it was! 43

Something similar happened to kids on the other side of the Atlantic. American fan Binky Philips saw The Who as a teenager in New York in March 1967 when they performed at a show organized by Murray the K. The Who were on the bill with other well-known bands, including another British invader, Cream, but for Philips, The Who stole the show. They only had to smash everything up and everybody was on their feet. . . . I’ve never seen anything so loud and brutal. They were the absolute epitome of flash. Townshend dressed in white. With pants up to his chest, Daltrey’s hair was all puffed up—they were gorgeous. Townshend would throw his Stratocaster 20 feet up into the air and catch it. When he was tired, he would let it slam on the floor. Such a gas. 44

Townshend’s close friend, the American Tom Wright, recalled the growing recognition for the band and the emergence of an American type of fan as The Who toured the United States in 1968. He thought a crescendo was reached at Detroit’s Grand Ballroom in September of that year: The Who had built what felt like a big following in England and were becoming something exciting in Europe, but on their own in the U.S., it was a hard sell. They weren’t sexy, not exactly cute, and they didn’t match. They were four guys from different planets playing songs that sounded like plane crashes or audio crossword puzzles. . . . On the road this time around, the Who were attracting older, rougher crowds definitely not into cute. These kids were into raising hell, and word was that the Who were a wild band that busted up equipment. . . . Once inside [the Grande], we couldn’t believe what we saw. The place was packed, people jammed so close together it looked like they were stuck to the walls. The smell of pot just about knocked you over. Everybody was friendly, and they knew the band

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immediately. The guys freaked; they weren’t used to being recognized. . . . The guys got their second wind from the roar of the crowd and went full blast. For the Who, it was the perfect set. The next day they would sell a zillion records in Detroit, disc jockeys raving. 45

It is complicated to identify a self-consciously transatlantic perspective among Who fans or among rock fans in general. Fans sampled the viewpoints of their transatlantic counterparts vicariously by, for instance, picking up a copy of NME or Rolling Stone but especially through the shared experience of listening to the same music, such as that of The Who. Although direct links between fans on either side of the Atlantic were few and they could not really know each other outside of being fans of The Who, thanks to the music, a transatlantic generation developed in the 1960s.

“I’M A BOY”: THE WHO, GENDER, AND SEXUAL COMING OF AGE At first glance, one is left with a remarkably sexist picture of The Who and their fans. In the loudness and energy of their music and performances, in the themes and lyrics of their songs, and sometimes in their individual personalities, The Who seemed to direct more messages to males than to females. From the start and through the years, most Who fans were males. The Who were not the only sixties band to have this kind of appeal. Some bands and performers—some genres of rock music, even—were designed, intentionally or not, to appeal either to males or to females. The bands themselves, along with promoters and others in the rock industry, figured out the gender tendencies quickly enough. 46 Virtually all of The Who’s managers, producers, and crew were males. The lyrics of their songs were sometimes about females, but even so, the themes typically had to do with rejection or betrayal. The rock operas Tommy and Quadrophenia have narratives in which adolescent males are the main characters. Likewise, the popular literature and films on The Who are dominated by male writers and filmmakers and the testimonies of male fans. When women show up in popular histories or depictions of The Who, they tend to do so as the wives of band members whose husbands cheated on them while on tour or as the groupies who followed the band. Pete Townshend was unabashed

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in writing from his own viewpoint and experiences and those of his mostly male fans. Townshend wrote the songs that his audience wanted to hear, and his audience was mostly male. Unlike Elvis Presley or his British counterparts, the individual members of The Who did not especially project sexual vibes (with Daltrey perhaps an exception) or make girls in the audience squeal or swoon. The Who did not project a boyish or psychedelic appeal like the Beatles or the sexual heat of the Rolling Stones. Townshend thought that this had to do with the way they looked: “If there was one major obstacle I confronted in my life,” he said, “it was the physical ugliness thrown in the Who’s face in the early days. People use to come to see us and say ‘Jesus Christ, they’re ugly!’” 47 Moreover, in the first years, the aggressiveness of The Who’s brand attracted young men looking for a physical outlet, and this may have kept young women away, too. In their relationship to issues of gender, The Who were a small reflection of a long history. Among the notable gaps between the promises of the Enlightenment and everyday life in the Atlantic world in the last two centuries were women’s rights. The “woman question,” as it was referred to in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, had to do with women gaining the right to vote, hold political office, and control property, all of which were mostly unavailable to females until the twentieth century. Such desires were a logical extension of the universalism and idea of human rights formulated during the Enlightenment and French Revolution. “Human rights” is a powerful principle that has played a tremendous role in world history. The struggle for women’s rights gained momentum in the Atlantic world in the second half of the nineteenth century, at which time advocates for the right to vote for women—suffragists—were particularly active in England and the United States. The tactics used by suffragists to press their case included public demonstrations, rallies, petitions, letter-writing campaigns, and occasional acts of desperation designed to dramatize the issue. Women on both sides of the Atlantic would begin to gain the vote just as the First World War ended in 1918. The sacrifices of the war years, when many women had gone to work in factories, along with the decades of effort by suffragists and, over the long term, the universalistic logic of the Enlightenment, were factors in the victory. Yet, to some, gaining the vote seemed almost anticlimatic. Twentieth-century advocates of women’s rights, such as Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) from France

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and Betty Friedan (1921–2006) from the United States, argued that paternal control of society ran deep and, although it was good for women to have the right to vote, real progress could happen only if it was accompanied by cultural changes—and cultural change did happen. Similar to the story of African Americans in the United States, women made advances in music before they gained the political and legal rights that most of us now take for granted. The early rock personalities were mostly male, but women performers featured prominently in sixties R& B and in Motown groups such as the Supremes. But it was harder for women to take the stage with rock bands. For much of the sixties, the rock world seemed to consign females to the role of fan, groupie, or backup singer. There was a handful of breakthrough or near-breakthrough performers, such as blues singer Janis Joplin and Grace Slick, who fronted the San Francisco band Jefferson Airplane. More opportunities for women rockers emerged in the seventies. 48 Although female fans were slow to warm to The Who, over time there were more of them. During the band’s pop art phase of 1965–1967, when managers Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp were shifting the group’s image away from the fading Mod moment to something approximating the appeal of the Beatles, teenage girls followed the group. During this period, the band dressed in clothing decorated with pop art symbols and performed publicity stunts designed to get their name and photos in the entertainment sections of the newspapers and magazines that teenage girls might read. Pete Townshend concludes his autobiography with a touching fan letter written by a teenage girl from this period. 49 At the same time, the boyish Keith Moon and blonde Roger Daltrey were placed front and center. But while Moon had an impish appeal (at least at the start), Daltrey’s scowl (which he could not really hide), Entwistle’s quiet oddness, and Townshend’s prominent nose (emphasized by some photographers in early photos) meant that The Who could not be rendered cute like the early Beatles, Herman’s Hermits, or the Monkees. While there was, by today’s standards, a strident maleness to much of The Who’s music, given their irony and tongue-in-cheek take on the world, it is not surprising that there was also a reverse side to the group’s outward machismo. This was a twist that they may have taken from the Mods, who, as we have seen, had a somewhat complicated relationship with women and gender. Distinct from Rockers and similar

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to a later generation of punks, Mods downplayed the “sex” in “sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll.” “Irish” Jack recalled having no problems with the ambiguity of Mod attitudes. Mods, he thought, were “effeminate, in a way girls became more masculine. If you were a trendsetting Mod you had to have an amount of effeminacy.” 50 If the members of The Who were not shy about pursuing girlfriends and extramarital relationships, there was nonetheless some of the Mod ambivalence about women in the lifestyle and outlook of Townshend. The Who’s dualistic attitude about men and women is apparent in the wealth of conflicted emotions in the lyrics of their songs, which leave one with a picture of a group of young men as frustrated and insecure about gender as one was likely to find in any sixties rock band or, for that matter, street corner or classroom. “I’m a Boy” (1966) is a Who song about the imposition of gender roles on children: “One girl was called Jean Marie / Another little girl was Felicity. . . . The other was me, and I’m a boy.” The Who’s “Pictures of Lily” (1967), with a notso-veiled reference to masturbation, is about a father’s attempt to address his teenage son’s longings: “Pictures of Lily made my life so wonderful / Pictures of Lily let me sleep at night.” The rock opera Tommy is loaded with provocative psychosexual images of men, women, and children. The central character, the young boy Tommy, is traumatized (turned “blind, deaf, and dumb”) when he happens upon a violent act involving his father—just returned from the Second World War—and his mother and her lover. Later as a young boy, Tommy is molested by his Uncle Ernie and then treated in sadistic fashion by Cousin Kevin. Further in the story, the adolescent Tommy is given over to a prostitute (The Gypsy). Later in life, Pete Townshend would speak and write at length about traumas he had suffered as a child that surfaced in Tommy and other compositions. It is debatable whether most fans listening to the songs picked up all the sexual nuances in the words. Ordinary fans on either side of the Atlantic took the messages that they wanted from Who songs and applied them as they liked to their own lives. This was how fans listened to rock music. Band members recognized, often with bemusement, the different sides of the band’s personality and the conflicted messages they sent about gender. Keith Moon was an extrovert who, when given the opportunity, followed in the British music hall tradition of donning female attire, even as the habit seemed at odds with his

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bellicose drum playing. Likewise, Townshend was comfortable keeping a rough edge to his compositions, his guitar playing, and his personal relationships with other band members at the same time that he became a “Baba lover.” After the breakup of The Who in the early 1980s, Townshend said that he thought that he had always been bisexual. Roger Daltrey, with his curly locks and fringe jackets, could project an angelic image, even though he admitted to having been a hoodlum in his youth and, early in The Who’s career, often punctuated his arguments with band members with his fists. The mixed messages about gender, sexual orientation, and coming-of-age did not overly trouble the individual band members. After Tommy and as The Who’s mostly male fan base began to move away from the Mods and the British working class to include more college students and North American suburban types, the band began to acquire its share of a new female rock audience that was drawn to the music for the same reasons as young men. Where the pop music preferences of young people had often seemed separated along gender lines in 1965 or 1966, a few years later there was a blurring of the divide. Some female fans liked the power chords and hard rock of The Who, disdaining the “bubble gum” style pushed by fan magazines and 1960s television programs such as The Monkees. Women could be just as frustrated or angry as men and, for these reasons, could find appeal in The Who. Future female rockers Chrissie Hynde, Suzi Quatro, Joan Jett, Patti Smith, and Sheryl Crow were all fans of The Who. By being a fan, women could assert a rebelliousness against the dominant tropes of female fandom. An asexual or androgynous component also surfaced in rock music in the 1970s, and this worked in favor of the Tommy-era Who. By the time of Quadrophenia (1973), females were joining males in the crowds at Who concerts, and the gender divisions were fading. Although the majority of fans remained males and although The Who’s brand remained basically unchanged over the years, being a fan more and more transcended gender.

WHO’S NEXT: THE WHO LOOK BACK TO THEIR ORIGINS With the release of well-received concept albums The Who Sell Out (1967) and especially Tommy (1969), The Who began to take on, of all

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things (considering their “singles band” origins), an aura of sophistication—a quality that did not readily apply to the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, or most other popular bands of the day. Some older fans protested the move away from the power pop of the early years, but most seemed to understand and accept the change. From the start, many Who fans had taken Pete Townshend at his word, seizing on The Who’s onstage antics as an expression of “high art.” The complex, sensitive themes of Tommy drew many new fans, surprised that the band that played “Happy Jack” had this in them. The musical remains of Lifehouse were released in The Who’s successful album of 1971, Who’s Next, the best-known songs of which (“Baba O’Riley,” “Behind Blue Eyes,” “Won’t Get Fooled Again”) seemed a perfect mix of old and new. Subsequently, the production of yet another sophisticated concept album, Quadrophenia (1973), cemented the band’s reputation as a step above their peers in smartness and ambition. Pretension was a quality that Townshend cherished. Likewise, many Who fans probably took some pride in the fact that the band had evolved from the pop period and toward a quasi-cultish following closer to that of Bob Dylan than the Rolling Stones. Townshend and others understood that being a fan of The Who, whether in Europe or America, felt almost like belonging to a gang. The success that The Who achieved in North America in the late 1960s resuscitated the band at a moment when it looked like they had run their course at home. By the late 1960s, like many of their rockand-roll peers of the British Invasion, they had become an Atlantic band, touring both sides of the ocean, drawing fans across North America, England, and Europe, but with the greatest profits made from album sales and concert tours in the United States. After the Monterey festival and the North American tours of 1967 and 1968 and with the success of Tommy in 1969, The Who became more popular and more successful financially in the United States and Canada than in England. For many British fans, The Who had been defined by their early years as a Mod band that had produced some catchy singles. The Mod fan typified by “Irish” Jack Lyons had become a thing of the past even before Tommy. Although The Who’s later albums sold well in England, they did not sell as well as those of the Beatles and Rolling Stones. Still after 1969, The Who picked up a new cohort of British and European fans: no longer the Mods of 1964–1965 or the teenyboppers of

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1966–1967 with a crush on Keith Moon but more like the Americans who greeted the band at Detroit in 1968 and took them seriously from the start. The individual members of the band kept their homes in England, though for part of the 1970s, Keith Moon lived in Southern California, the home of the surf music he dearly loved. In 1971, Roger Daltrey married an American: Heather Taylor, to whom he is still married. Pete Townshend likewise continued to have his home and a growing array of outside, non-Who musical and commercial interests in England, although he also spent time with friends and fellow Baba lovers at Meher Baba retreats in California and South Carolina. The nature of the job meant that British Invasion rockers (The Who, Beatles, Rolling Stones, Kinks) and some of their North American counterparts (Bob Dylan, the Byrds, and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young) easily developed transatlantic perspectives. If there was a rock musician’s homology distinct from that of fans, it came out of these experiences. Although his ambitious Lifehouse project of 1971 had failed, Pete Townshend did not give up on the idea of another concept album. Quadrophenia (1973), like Tommy, was a kind of rock opera. It was also the story of The Who themselves and their early Mod fans. Like Tommy, Quadrophenia was a double album, meaning that the package bought at the record store included two vinyl records and liner notes— in this case, a pamphlet with photos and text written by Townshend. While double albums cost the buyer more than a single album, they were still within the purchasing power of the ordinary fan. Musicians and fans approached the double album as a kind of bonus—a “gift” of sorts from musicians to their fans. Double albums also had the reputation of being a little pretentious, since they seemed to say that the band had too much music to contain in a single record and probably required more effort from the listener. This was something that The Who were comfortable with. Indeed, the group did have a lot of music to offer and, with Quadrophenia, an authentic and compelling story to tell and one that set them off from the Beatles or Led Zeppelin. Although Townshend described Quadrophenia as a “kind of distorted dreamview,” it was also the most linear of Who albums. 51 Where the narrative of Tommy was difficult to piece together without the background provided by Townshend in interviews or in spoken transitions during live performance, Quadrophenia is the more straightforward tale of a couple of days in the life of the character Jimmy, whose four shades of

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personality (“quadrophenia,” as opposed to schizophrenia) is emblematic of the four personalities in the band. Jimmy is a young Shepherd’s Bush Mod making his way in London at a transitional moment: the austerity of the post–Second World War years, having been replaced by a revived commercial and financial sector. While the British Empire, with London as its center, has faded, a generation of entrepreneurs with eyes on America, Europe, and a native youth market is setting out on a new course, away from the decades of war and colonialism. The hipster London of Soho and Carnaby Street is on the horizon as Jimmy and his generation of urban Mods are looking for a way to fit in. Quadrophenia—the latest long-form music project devised by Pete Townshend and which he came to regard as the band’s “triumph”—was meant to return to and reassert the British roots of The Who, even if, as Townshend knew, it would be difficult for North American or European fans of the early 1970s to really grasp who the Mods were. But it was a history that Townshend felt he had to tell. 52 Quadrophenia offered the best expression yet of The Who’s individual life stories, the group’s musical talents, and the historical setting that produced them.

5 “WON’T GET FOOLED AGAIN” The Atlantic Generation Comes of Age

One of the ways that historians organize the past is to “periodize” it by defining categories of time, such as eras (early modern or revolutionary and Napoleonic, for instance) or centuries bookended by watershed events such as wars or revolutions (sometimes historians cheat: the long nineteenth century, for instance, begins with the French Revolution of 1789 and ends with the start of the First World War in 1914). It is probably rarer for a decade to receive its own celebrity: the gay nineties and roaring twenties are two that may be remembered from American history. The sixties is another decade that has come to stand on its own, conjuring images of crowds of protesters, civil strife, and the American war in Southeast Asia; hip clothing shops along London’s Carnaby Street; or French students building barricades on the Left Bank streets of Paris. In the Atlantic world, many of the images associated with the sixties have to do with cultural artifacts that come from television shows, films, or rock and roll: the Beatles and their mop-top haircuts; Annie Liebowitz’s iconic photos of Doors singer Jim Morrison; throngs of muddy, happy hippies at Woodstock; and Pete Townshend smashing his guitar. Looking back at the history of the Atlantic world, we can say that the decade reached a culmination, chronologically and symbolically, in 1968–1969. A great deal of history—perhaps too much history from the point of view of those involved—seemed to happen at the close of the 147

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decade. Protestors and activists went to the streets and demonstrated on the college campuses of Canada, West Germany, and the United States. In France, 1968 saw a near revolution as workers joined students to demand a revision of the postwar status quo, pushing Charles de Gaulle, president of France’s Fifth Republic and a stalwart figure of the twentieth century, out of power. Late in 1968, a new and, as it turned out, fated American president, Richard Nixon, was elected, promising to bring order to riotous streets and with a plan to end the war in Vietnam. Student demonstrators were shot by soldiers in Mexico and France. By the end of the decade, the civil rights movement in the United States had acquired a revolutionary wing in the form of the Black Panthers as an alternative to Martin Luther King’s nonviolent strategy. King was assassinated in 1968 and presidential candidate Robert Kennedy the next year. Men were landed on the moon, and British troops were deployed to Northern Ireland. An international oil crisis was on the horizon, complicated by periodic war between Israel and its neighbors, the most recent in 1967. A terrible civil war, partly a function of colonial legacies, commenced in the new nation of Nigeria in 1967. It is a cliché to put it this way, but during the 1960s, societies were “on the move” on both sides of the Atlantic, and much of what was occurring in England, Europe, and North America appeared connected: “feedback” in 1968–1969 could refer not only to the distorted sounds coming from rock-and-roll guitars but to the intertwined history of nations across the Atlantic. The Who’s Tommy—both the album and their performance of the rock opera at venues on both sides of the Atlantic, including the memorable show at the Woodstock music festival in 1969—was part of this fin de décenni. The album was a turning point for The Who as a band, too. Townshend later recalled, “Making Tommy saved The Who. In 1967 we had been a singles band, running out of hits, faced with the arrival of LSD, Cream, Jimi Hendrix and audiences who suddenly wanted ‘serious’ music that engaged them from more deeply. . . . Having saved us, Tommy became a problem for us. It became almost bigger than we were.” 1 As the Atlantic world reached a kind of reckoning at the end of the sixties, so did The Who. The response by many on either side of the Atlantic in the next decade was a turning away, almost a willful effort to

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forget the most searing moments of the sixties. For The Who, the response was to look back and remember their origins.

QUADROPHENIA: A STORY OF THE WHO AND THEIR FANS Looking back at the start of The Who, we can easily see that the arc of the band’s career—from 1964 until Quadrophenia was released in 1973 and then as the band took the album on tour through 1974—was intertwined with the larger history of the Atlantic world. Eventually, there would be a great deal of nostalgia generated about the 1960s, with the more memorable songs of the era going on to achieve classic status. Yet for many people and for many societies, it had been a decade to lament: for those injured or who lost property in the collective violence of the period; for the victims of political assassination; and for those— Americans but especially Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians—who were casualties of the long war in Southeast Asia. By these standards, the members of a big-name rock-and-roll band such as The Who survived the decade with little to complain about, leading lives of comfort and intermittent decadence. Still, it had been an amazing journey for the band. One of the “problems” created by Tommy was that it raised expectations among fans, critics, and record producers for The Who and particularly for Townshend, who now felt pressed to continue writing rock operas. This was part of the impetus for the Lifehouse project of 1971 and for the emotional breakdown suffered by Townshend when that project failed. Soon after, Townshend moved on to yet another long-form work, originally conceived with the working title of “Long Live Rock” but which became Quadrophenia. The album brought The Who back to their roots and signaled the end of the sixties mood for the band. Having gone through so much, The Who now became nostalgic, looking back at their origins, partly with fondness but mostly with a sense that they and their fans had come a long way. After Tommy and Lifehouse, they were now ready to remember the band’s roots in Mod-era London. Quadrophenia was The Who’s memoir of the early days of the band and, like Tommy, a rock opera. The story was set around “two or three days in the life of Jimmy the Mod” and his experiencing a “nervous

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breakdown.” 2 Jimmy is a typical Mod of postwar and postausterity England—a teenage boy still living with his parents and working a dead-end job. Life, even at this young age, holds few happy prospects. He has friends and an intense interest in music. Rockers are the rivals. Jimmy is obsessed with The Who and goes to their shows whenever he can. His day spirals downward when he wrecks his cherished motor scooter, has an argument with his parents, and is fired from his job. He takes the train to the Brighton Beach resort, south of London, where he misses out on a chance with the “girl he loves,” witnesses the humiliation of a Mod idol (the “ace face”), and gets caught up in a Mod–Rocker “beach fight.” The story and the album end with Jimmy, lonely and forlorn, taking a rowboat to a rock off the shore and disappearing—whether drowned, washed away, or ready to resurface back in dreary London, the choice is left to the listener. Pete Townshend, the author of all the songs on the album, saw Jimmy on one level as a composite of the Mod characters whom he had known in the Shepherd’s Bush clubs of 1964, with original Who fan “Irish” Jack Lyons prevalent in the mix. On another level, the album represented the four (quite distinct, from Townshend’s point of view) personalities in the band: “quadrophenia” (a neologism) as opposed to schizophrenia. 3 Interviewed just before its release, Townshend described the album’s core idea: Quadrophenia was actually a simple idea made complicated. It was my addressing the original Who audience. I felt that when I came to Quadrophenia, I had to get back on track, go back to the original brief. The continuum of The Who had been that we carried a group of people with us, they’d grown with us and we’d grown with them, and somehow, in the American experience that accompanied Tommy, and the subsequent growth of the band on the road . . . , we’d actually lost our English roots. Quadrophenia was a story about a boy who has been abandoned by everybody—his parents, his girlfriend, his hero and his favourite pop band. It’s a simple story about a mod and his relationship to his group, who go off into celestial territory, and yet take with them the four mirrors, if you like, of his character; they take with them his very soul, they steal him, and leave him with an empty husk. So it’s also about . . . what happens to the world of rock celebrity as opposed to any other kind of celebrity. A celebrity in rock is charged with a function, like “You stand there and we will

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know ourselves,” not “You stand there and we will pay you loads of money to keep us entertained while we eat oysters.” . . . It’s also “When we’re finished with you, you can go and we’ll replace you with somebody else.” 4

Jimmy’s story, along with the album’s music—perhaps the best song cycle that Townshend ever wrote—appealed to fans, including those in North America and Europe for whom the world of the Mods, long gone by 1973, really was a foreign land. Where the setting was quintessentially British and thus a little exotic to listeners outside of England, the music was old school Who: power chords from Townshend and Entwistle, power drumming from Moon, power singing from Daltrey. “As musicians,” wrote Townshend, “The Who never played better than on this record. As the producer, I only required each member to perform within his clichéd area of experience. This was truly a return to ‘Maximum R&B.’” 5 At the same time, joked Entwistle, Quadrophenia was “the best thing Wagner ever wrote.” 6 The narrative was stronger and more down-to-earth than Tommy, with lyrics that struck directly at the universal anxiety of youth. Quadrophenia ends with a disillusioned Jimmy seeming to contemplate the unthinkable. But Townshend leaves Jimmy’s fate up to the listener: The angst of those teenage years, in which all of us feel misunderstood, is easy to make fun of but it is real and brings my hero, Jimmy to consider suicide. As the composer and author of the story, I realized that I had no right to decide whether or not Jimmy ended his own life. As a jaded rock star without any rights to the travails of youth in the ’70s and as an always nostalgic ex-Mod, I had a duty to let Jimmy decide for himself. 7

Listeners across the Atlantic were deeply affected by Quadrophenia at its release in 1973 and for years after. Eddie Vedder, later a member of the popular American rock band Pearl Jam, and Noel Gallagher, of the British band Oasis, were examples of musicians from the next generation of rock and rollers who, as teenagers, latched on to the music, the lyrics, and the images that came with the pamphlet included with the album. Later in the seventies, the release of a film version of Quadrophenia (1979, directed by Franc Roddam) would inspire another bout of nostalgia about the past and a Mod revival that, this time, had out-

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posts away from England. In 1964–1965, Mods had thrived mostly around London and in scattered locales across England and the continent, but from 1979 through the early 1980s, Mod revivalists could be found in England, across continental Europe, Southern California, Canada, and even Mexico. Over time and as Townshend had hoped, “Jimmy became less of a boy in his own right and more of an emblem, a cipher for the universal Mod.” 8 Aside from its appeal for fans across the Atlantic and across the years, Quadrophenia is also a source for historians wanting to know more about the time and place—Mod-era London—in which the album is set. The story is filled with period details about dress, drugs, and scooters, as well as something more difficult to get at: the mentalité, or mind-set, of a time. 9 On one level, Quadrophenia is especially about the Mods as social class and subculture: Mod as a way of life. The Mods were postproletarian, young, and ironic; they were captivated by drugs, rock music, and the threat, if not always the reality, of violence. They were one product of the largesse of the postwar British welfare state, dissatisfied with the status quo, and neither working nor middle class, even if, as they got older, many of them probably grew into one of these social categories. Some Mods, like Townshend, spent time in college. They were not quite the working-class “lads” that their dads and granddads had been nor the revolutionary proletariat that Marx had prophesied—nor the lumpenproletariat that Marx had also written about (and the term that the sociologist Stanley Cohen used in describing the rival Rockers). At the time, there was no clear social or cultural counterpart to the Mods in North America or continental Europe. Caught between the past and the future, specific to a time and place—a bit like the “gilded youth” of postterror revolutionary France—the Mods were eyecatching and ephemeral. The Mods also gave The Who their first brief from which to write songs and perfect a style of performance. This, if not Modism itself, proved enduring and even laid the groundwork for the band to attract another, more lasting and larger demographic group: the urban and suburban male high school and college-age fan in North America. If the appeal of African American blues and R&B to British working-class youth seemed surprising in the 1950s and 1960s, so too did that of a rock opera about London Mods a decade later to young fans in North America.

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It was an Atlantic generation of rock fans that saw The Who perform Quadrophenia when they took it on the road in 1973–1974. Initially, the band’s idea was to play the full album live, beginning to end, as they had done with Tommy. But the need to coordinate the onstage performance with the album’s synthesizer components on backing tapes proved difficult and deeply frustrating, especially to Townshend and Daltrey, who argued (and sometimes fought) during this period. The start of the Quadrophenia tour in England in October 1973 went badly. At a show in Newcastle, England, Townshend “flipped out completely when the tape synch came in 15 seconds slow” on the song “5:15,” “yanking out wires, demolishing many of the pre-recorded tapes it had taken so many weeks to piece together,” and all but assaulting the band’s road manager. 10 Following similar fiascos, the band stopped playing the entire album and incorporated just a few songs into a revised stage set. (They would not perform the full Quadrophenia live again for decades.) After this, things went better, and The Who got good reviews as they toured American and Canadian cities in late 1973. A November 1973 reviewer for the Chicago Tribune likened the band’s energy to the current oil crisis brought on by the October 1973 war between Israel and neighboring Middle Eastern states: “With [The Who] it’s all energy transcending the music, transcending the scene. Harness ’em up, and they could probably transcend the energy crisis as well. . . . They are, in the final analysis, pure, raw energy—which is, after all, what rock n’ roll’s always been about.” 11 The Who continued the tour in England with intimate shows at smaller venues north of London that pleased Townshend because they “broke down the barriers between performers and audience. I felt like a member of the ’oo an’ all that . . . but I also felt like one of the crowd.” 12 However, as things wound down in late 1973 and early 1974, signs of ongoing problems surfaced, particularly Keith Moon’s continuing physical decline due to alcohol and drug abuse. At San Francisco’s Cow Palace music venue in November 1973, Moon slumped over his drum kit and had to be carried out unconscious, as Townshend asked for a volunteer from the audience to play the drums for the last few numbers. The old onstage energy later returned, but there were also moments of tension between band members and audiences. Playing in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, in December 1973, Townshend drew on images of the past to explain the song “I’m One” from Quadrophenia:

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It’s all about—shut up for a minute and I’ll tell you what it’s all about—the song is all about a kid who gets to that part of his life when he feels he’s just not worth a dime. . . . It’s like the fucking French Revolution. That’s what they said in Chicago. They were crazier than you in Chicago. And after the show someone said to me “That was like the French Revolution.” 13

Following the Montreal show, there was an episode of hotel room destruction, and Townshend, Moon, and other members of the tour were briefly jailed. On a second American leg of the tour during the summer of 1974, the mood again seemed to change for the worse. When The Who got to New York City’s Madison Square Garden, Townshend became upset when fans in the front row repeatedly yelled for him to “jump.” “For the first time,” journalist Chris Coatsworth reported, “[Townshend] felt he was parodying himself, even resembling a circus act. . . . In the long term, the behavior of these fans had a profound effect on his attitude towards his work. . . . Most fans loved the band no matter what, of course, and their blind faith depressed Pete even further.” 14

“THE PUNK AND THE GODFATHER”: A NEW ROCK-ANDROLL GENERATION The Who’s career reached a peak in 1973–1974 with their musical take on the history that they had helped to make: the album Quadrophenia and subsequent tour across the Atlantic. By this time, the Mods were gone, and so, too, was the mood of the sixties that had been fueled in part by the British Invasion of continental Europe and North America by rock bands such as The Who. In the new decade, British groups continued to make the transatlantic tour—Led Zeppelin now a rival to The Who and Rolling Stones and with newcomers such as Queen and heavy metal groups such as Black Sabbath and Deep Purple joining the mix. The hedonistic life of the rock tour reached new levels of excess with Led Zeppelin and the heavy metal bands. 15 Even more so than in the 1960s, transatlantic rock and roll now became a full-fledged industry, generating enormous amounts of money through the production and sale of all the paraphernalia—albums, magazines, T-shirts, and

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more—associated with the “sex, drugs, and rock and roll” lifestyle of the Atlantic generation. By 1974, Pete Townshend and the other members of The Who were feeling the weight of the years and the post-1960s slump. The effort and energy to get Quadrophenia and the accompanying tour going left Townshend drained and relations among band members strained. Keith Moon remained difficult to handle, and Townshend slipped easily into depression and alcohol abuse as a result of the difficulties of Quadrophenia and the expectations of fans like those in New York City who had ordered him to jump. Townshend’s natural ambivalence about fans came to the forefront easier now than in the past. A few years later when asked by an interviewer, he admitted, “‘I don’t like fans really. But that’s because they’re my employer—I don’t like the boss. . . . [Fans] are fanatics, obsessives. In a Freudian sense, there is something very strange about them, a degree of obsession, and neither of you really know what the transaction is about. . . . You keep an eye on what it is that you think that you represent to people.” 16 By the time Quadrophenia was released in 1973, there was a general feeling, even beyond Townshend’s misgivings, that rock and roll had lost some of its purpose. For much of the sixties, there was a utopian sense of the possibilities of rock and roll. But the illusions had faded by the start of the next decade. In an interview on British television in 1973, Townshend was fatalistic in summing up the meaning of rock and roll and his place in that world: I am accused of letting the side down as it were often by our fans. You can’t stop doing this, you can’t stop doing what you do because you let down all these people. It’s not just people saying you’ll disappoint your fans. It’s not that the show must go on, otherwise all those people will be so upset. It’s “You’ve gotta” go on man, otherwise all those kids they’ll be finished, they’ll have nothing to live for.

That, he summed it up, almost in despair, is “rock and roll.” 17 At the same time, other markers of the 1960s were reaching their nadirs. After years of secret incursions across the border from Vietnam, in 1970 the United States openly expanded the war in Southeast Asia into Cambodia and then two years later, under the policy of “Vietnamization,” began to withdraw American soldiers and turn over the fighting to the South Vietnamese army. In 1975, North Vietnam and its southern allies won the long national struggle, defeating the South Viet-

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namese army, taking Saigon, and driving out the remaining Americans. Richard Nixon, reelected in 1972, was forced to resign the presidency in 1974 for illegal behavior and under the threat of impeachment. The era of Cold War brinskmanship took a break with the détente (relaxation) of the late 1960s and 1970s between the United States and the Soviet Union, providing an opening for the Eastern politics of West German chancellor Willy Brandt and a hint of the dramatic political changes to come to Eastern Europe in the late 1980s. The Atlantic world was confronted with its addiction to Middle East oil during the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, as the southern flank of NATO was weakened when its two partners—Turkey and Greece—nearly went to war after the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974. In Britain in 1970, as the days of empire were fully winding down, the Conservative Party won a surprising victory against the Labour Party. Even so, Edward Heath, the new prime minister, like his Labour Party predecessors, continued the movement toward integration with continental Europe, and in 1973 England joined the Common Market. Keynesian economic policies persisted on both sides of the Atlantic, though accompanied by inflation that ate away at wages. Midseventies England was beset by an economic malaise that contributed to a social reaction, of which punk rock was one ingredient. 18 The sense of indirection across the Atlantic, as the failure of American policy in Vietnam and the corruption of the Nixon presidency became manifest and as England approached the jubilee year of 1977 in economic doldrums, was matched in the world of rock and roll by a turning away from the utopianism, the “good vibrations” of the 1960s. This shift affected The Who and other big-name rock bands, such as the Rolling Stones (the Beatles had broken up at the start of the decade), who now became for some younger fans “dinosaurs,” “old farts,” and establishment figures from an earlier era. Where The Who had successfully negotiated the transition from singles band to album-oriented rock in the late sixties, they now struggled with the generational shift. From its birth in the 1950s, rock and roll had been deemed a “young man’s” game and especially so for a band that sang they “hoped to die” before they got old. Inevitably, too, the music was changing. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, rock music was branching in the direction of heavy metal and punk, both of which could point to early connections with The Who. Younger performers, such as Iggy Pop in the United States,

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were rejecting the glitter of the early seventies music industry, harkening to what they saw as a grittier, more authentic form of rock music. The 1970s rejection of big-time bands and the emergence of alternative forms of music—a new stream of rock and roll—at first happened in the shadows and in scattered locations, even as The Who’s release of Quadrophenia was accompanied by a great wave of publicity. Beginning in 1974, New York City bands Television, the New York Dolls, and the Patti Smith Group generated a purposefully unpolished energy and contrarian worldview in music clubs in Lower Manhattan, the most famous of which became CBGB. Their songs tended toward simple construction: three minutes, three or four chords, played very fast and very loud, with neither musicianship nor a good voice a prerequisite. This was punk music, and just about anyone with the right attitude could play it. The quintessential American punk band was the Ramones, who came out of New York in 1976, plugging away with attitude, leather jackets, and concise, loud, and very fast songs about the characters and places that they had grown up with and in. Punk began in New York City, but it quickly migrated to England, where it flourished, and then to the continent. This was a reverse transatlantic flow from the British Invasion a decade earlier. In England, the arrival of punk coincided perfectly with the Silver Jubilee (the twenty-fifth year since accession to the throne) of Queen Elizabeth II in 1977, which punk seized on as a target of scorn. The most famous (or infamous) of the British punk bands was the Sex Pistols, who adopted a special glee in thumbing their noses at British society, tradition, and, in this celebration year, the queen herself. But punk rockers also were scathing in their criticism of the older bands and of the rock-and-roll industry, even though the Sex Pistols themselves had begun as the market ploy of Malcolm McLauren, a London shop owner and entrepreneur. In some ways, the Pistols were no less a creation than the older, successful bands they mocked. Still, there was a good deal of intuition behind the sneering observation of Sex Pistol Johnny Rotten: “We [the punks] have got to fight the entire super band system. Groups like The Who and the Stones are revolting. They have nothing to offer the kids anymore.” 19 Like the Mods and hippies before them, punk was a subculture with a fairly distinct homology. What did the arrival of punk mean for The Who? “Punk rock was a tsunami,” Pete Townshend wrote in his autobiography, “that threatened to drown us all in 1977. You could see it in

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the streets, hear it in the clubs and even smell it in the air.” 20 For The Who, the Rolling Stones and other well-established bands, there was a great deal of irony in the emergence of punk, since they had themselves “copped attitudes” at the start of their own careers: they had all certainly been “punks” in their own day. Still, punk music was especially a challenge for The Who because if any of the big bands of the British Invasion had been a precursor to the phenomenon, it was The Who. Punk thus came as a rebuke that The Who had lost their way, that they had genuinely “sold out,” as the band had only teased in their album of 1967. Townshend and the other band members recognized the changing of the guard and fretted about it, at least at the start. Townshend was only half-joking when he said, “We were frightened. It was like the French Revolution. It could have ended up with the Beatles, the Stones and The Who being beheaded in public.” 21 In 1978, Townshend actually accosted two members of the Sex Pistols after encountering them at a music club. Inebriated, Townshend, [told them] about the shit I’d been through and The Who were . . . finished and rock ’n’ roll was finished. . . . [The Sex Pistols] were the only band that had a chance. And that they had to fuckin’ pick up the banner. . . . I stormed out of the place and the next thing I knew I was being woken up in a doorway in Soho. 22

For fans, there was discomfort, too, some of which came from the realization that The Who had been a proto-punk band: their brand a slightly older version of what the younger generation of punks now stood for, with the punk “moment” itself seemingly as distinct (and ephemeral) as the Mod moment had been in the early sixties. Townshend had even seemed to foretell the arrival of the punk “young Turks” in one of the songs from Quadrophenia, “The Punk and the Godfather,” in which, presciently, he cast The Who in the role of “godfather.” Some Who fans now shifted their loyalty to either punk or heavy metal. In fact, many of the new punk bands acknowledged a debt to The Who. This was especially true of two of the best new bands: the Clash and the Jam, the latter of whose style and music helped stir the Mod revival of the late seventies. 23 And it was not long before Townshend— who, even before the challenge of punk, had become deeply troubled by the enormity of the enterprise surrounding The Who—actually came

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to welcome the paradigmatic shift. Ten years after the Sex Pistols arrived on the scene, Townshend could confess to Rolling Stone, “[Punk] freed me. It allowed me to be myself. It dignified me, in a way, to be cast to one side. I felt very uneasy with the way The Who were inevitably on the road to mega-stardom. I believed that the punk movement would free me from that. It did. It freed me.” 24 Some of the Who’s angst during these years was captured on film. Late in the 1970s, a young, inexperienced, but very enthusiastic American documentary filmmaker, Jeff Stein from Queens, New York, persuaded The Who and their managers to let him produce a retrospective of the band’s career. Stein was a big fan of the band, whom he had first seen as a teenager at San Francisco’s Fillmore East. He had been very much affected by that performance, which he remembered as “incredible. Townshend totally airborne. Theatrical. Feedback merchants. I had never seen anything like it before.” 25 Many young American fans like Stein attached their loyalty to certain bands, and The Who became “his band.” Aware of the challenge of punk and the relative decline of The Who, Stein was determined to capture the band’s story before their time had run out. The result was a documentary-style movie: a “rockumentary,” about which The Who were both supportive and leery. Early in the production, Townshend warned Stein about the dissonance he was likely to feel once he met band members face-toface; the great love he had for the band, Townshend warned, might not survive getting to know them personally. Indeed, Stein quickly witnessed the character flaws, the tribal nature of The Who and their managers and entourage, and the wear and tear brought on over the years: Townshend was suffering hearing loss by this point, and Moon was in terrible physical condition. Still for Stein, the emergence of punk and the general turmoil across England during the jubilee year made it feel like this really was the moment to capture what was left of The Who brand. By the time that Stein’s film The Kids Are Alright was released in 1979, he felt that he had done his job. Stein was also pleased that he had “survived” the filming, even as he had occasionally “felt like the monument on the cover of ‘Who’s Next,’” which showed the four members of the band urinating on an edifice (the photo was a takeoff of one of the iconic scenes from the 1967 film 2001: A Space Odyssey). 26 Soon after the debut of The Kids Are Alright, director Franc Roddam released the film Quadrophenia, which drew heavily on the album

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and featured the actor Phil Daniels as Jimmy. To get Jimmy right, Roddam spent time interviewing original Who fan “Irish” Jack Lyons. The film spurred a renewed interest in the album and a Mod revival in England, Western Europe, and North America. The movie also reminded some in punk music, including a “second wave” headed by Paul Weller of the Jam, that fifteen years earlier The Who had been very much like punks themselves. The film remains well known and, as much as the album, a testament to the history of the Mod moment. For a moment, from 1979 to the early 1980s, Mods and punks—the first having given The Who their original brief and the latter having helped usher their exit from the rock world—could be seen together on the streets and in the music clubs of London, Boston, Manchester, and Los Angeles. From Quadrophenia the album to Quadrophenia the film, the decade seemed like a retrospective of the Mod origins of The Who. Capturing the moment, too, when punk was supplanting The Who, was a December 1977 concert by the band at the Gaumont State Theater in the Kilburn section of London. The concert was the idea of Stein as part of his The Kids Are Alright film project. Stein convinced The Who to play songs for which he did not have good film footage, despite the reluctance of band members, who thought that they were too rusty for not having played together for some months. The band’s show at Kilburn was filmed but not released for thirty-one years (2008). Viewing The Who: Live at Gaumont today reveals The Who showing their age in 1977, Keith Moon bloated and no longer youthful (he would be dead in less than a year), and the band uneasy with the audience and their performance. At one point, an annoyed, belligerent Townshend challenged some punks in the rowdy audience: “There’s a guitar up here, if any big mouthed little git wants to come up and fucking take it off me.” 27 But the 1977 Kilburn performance, ragged as it is, also shows other things: the old energy and a lot of defiance, now directed at anyone, including punks, who thought the band had lost it and could not stand up to the challenge of the new generation. The Kilburn film was shelved because the band deemed their performance “appalling,” but a fresh viewing shows an aging group still with a lot of the old attitude. 28 Prodded by the challenge of punk and shifting their belligerence from youthful frustration to middle-aged cantankerousness, The Who brand retained some of the original inimitable qualities even as the end was within sight.

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“THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT”: WHO FANS TODAY AND CLASSIC ROCK Within a year of the Kilburn concert, Keith Moon was dead from an overdose of a drug that he was using to ease the symptoms of withdrawal from alcohol. He was replaced by Kenney Jones, a drummer who had gotten his start in the Small Faces, a rival London Mod band from the midsixties. With Jones, The Who released two more albums and continued to tour. But Quadrophenia and the years 1973–1974 saw the band reach a peak. Looking back, the remaining members of The Who recognized this. The death of Moon in 1978 and the Cincinnati disaster a year later were turning points. The Who made an overhyped sold-out “final tour” in 1982 and called it quits. By the start of the 1980s, Townshend later recalled in his memoir, The Who’s audience “of working-class men had dispersed.” 29 The fans who went to see The Who on the final tour of 1982 were probably mostly those who had begun following them in the sixties and seventies, from the same postproletarian social demographic groups and now, like Townshend, Daltrey, and Entwistle, well past the age of thirty. In 1974, as The Who were completing the Quadrophenia tour, American music writer Jon Landau proclaimed the New Jersey–born Bruce Springsteen “the future” of rock and roll. 30 Townshend was keenly aware of the changes taking place: The Who had lost “contact with our base. . . . Springsteen seemed to have swept up our old crowd, and the Clash threatened to challenge him if only they could survive long enough.” 31 In fact, the Clash opened for The Who on some of their final North American dates, which may have brought some younger people into the audience. It was hard for a band like The Who, now identified with the “dinosaurs” and “godfathers” of sixties rock, to pick up the teenage fans who were drawn to punk and, by the early 1980s, New Wave, or who were shifting musical genres and loyalties to disco—yet another new music and subculture. On the 1982 tour, The Who played in large stadiums before huge audiences, including shows of eighty-five thousand in Buffalo, New York, and seventy-two thousand at New York City’s Shea Stadium, before wrapping things up at a somewhat smaller venue in Toronto, Ontario. Like the British Invasion bands themselves, the megaconcerts and giant outdoor festivals of 1969–1974 were becoming rar-

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er, and like The Who and their peer groups of the early sixties, the punk and New Wave sounds of the early 1980s worked best in more intimate settings and with smaller crowds. As fans of The Who and other big name bands grew older, it probably seemed easier just to buy the record or tape and listen to the music at home or on the car stereo. Since the 1950s, rock music had been associated with youth. Here, in the late 1970s and early eighties, the transition from teen years and twenties to the ripe old age of thirty and beyond was unchartered territory for performers and fans alike. But as it turned out, rock and roll had life beyond age thirty. In fact, neither The Who nor their music nor Who “fandom” came to an end. The ease of adjustment to the passage of time for a band that had disdained old age early in its career probably had something to do with the death of Keith Moon at a relatively young age. It seemed apparent from early on that, as one of his handlers had discovered, “Keef” was “not built to grow old.” After 1982, the remaining members of the band stayed active as musicians and participants in the rock industry. They grew conscious of aging but also comfortable talking about the topic with journalists. The individual members of the band continued to make albums and perform on their own. Daltrey pursued his acting career. Entwistle put together bands and toured, playing small venues in England, Europe, and North America. Townshend went to work as an editor for Faber and Faber publishers in London, oversaw the production of Tommy into a stage play that had great success on Broadway in New York City, and made solo albums. Periodically, the band was persuaded to come back for one-off performances and then, in 1989, to regroup (minus drummer Kenney Jones) for a transatlantic tour to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Tommy. The Who’s “final tour” of 1982 was not really final, and in their professional lives, the band members remained both transatlantic and connected to one another and to the brand. Nor did fans relinquish an interest in the band. Part of the continuing devotion was nostalgic. Those who had lived through the tumultuous sixties seemed mostly to remember the good things. The multitude of recollections—shared experiences at rock concerts, waiting for the arrival of the next album, reading about favored bands in Rolling Stone or NME—could still be conjured as fans got older, partly because The Who found ways to keep the brand alive and the revenue streaming

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in—retaining a company to produce and market an endless succession of rereleases and remixes of old albums, songs that had been recorded but never put out, Townshend’s own demos, and compilations of one sort or another. The development of the CD breathed new life into the recording industry, benefiting both new bands and old ones such as The Who. From the 1980s through the present, Who songs have been used to endorse commercial products or as background music for movies and television shows. Film documentaries featuring The Who showed up on television and then were put on sale as CDs and DVDs. Tommy the stage play was widely performed by local theater groups and in American high schools. Who fans across the Atlantic thus had countless opportunities to purchase and hear “new” products from the band even after they seemed to part ways in 1982. Rock music, performers, and fans not only survived getting older but thrived. It was not just the ongoing commercialization of the brand and the nostalgia of older fans that kept The Who alive. New, younger fans signed on, too, partly because of the easy availability of all the old and the “renewed” Who music on CDs but also through the emergence of “classic rock.” Classic rock is a music format that had its start in the 1980s on American FM radio stations playing songs from the 1950s and early 1960s. By the 1990s, the chronology had moved forward, with an emphasis on what came to be called hard rock songs from the 1960s and 1970s. Music from the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, the Doors, Cream, Led Zeppelin, and other hugely successful groups from an earlier era was heard over and over; The Who were one of the bands whose songs now became staples of classic rock radio. The demographic groups targeted by the stations were both the original, older fans and younger age groups. “Classic,” a term previously applied to genres of European music from the sixteenth through early-twentieth centuries, now became attached to music that once seemed its antithesis. Who songs became part of the stock of oldies and more and more the object of nostalgia about the “good old days” of the 1960s. The boundaries between the history and the memory of the British Invasion and sixties rock were clouded as the decade was “reified” in popular culture on both sides of the Atlantic, with the memory of rock music becoming virtually the property of a classic rock music industry. “Roll over Beethoven,” Chuck Berry had written tongue-in-cheek in 1956, but by the

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last decade of the millennium, it seemed that rock and roll had fully become a part of the corpus of Western—now Atlantic—music. What happens as fans age? Through the perpetuation of the music over classic rock radio, the release of “new” music recorded decades earlier, and the reification of the era in television, film, and other outlets for pop culture, the 1960s and 1970s live on across the Atlantic world. The Atlantic generation of rock-and-roll music fans—Who fans included—is still with us. The music and experiences of those years can be accessed by original fans and now by their children and grandchildren. The remaining members of The Who—Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend, joined by new, younger band partners—tour even today. They do so across the Atlantic in the same places where they performed in the era of classic rock, though typically to smaller audiences and to two or more generations of old and new fans. Today when Daltrey and Townshend perform “The Kids Are Alright,” they are no longer singing about themselves but about their grandchildren.

“MAGIC BUS”: ROCK AND ROLL BEYOND THE ATLANTIC In early September 1972, just before the release of Quadrophenia and when they were still one of the biggest draws in the rock music industry, The Who played before an enormous crowd of four hundred thousand fans at Paris’s annual Fête de l’Humanité (“Fête de l’Huma”), held in the working-class suburb of La Courneuve. This was the biggest crowd the band had ever played to, and though the setting seemed too big and impersonal, the band gave a memorable performance. A journalist who was there wrote, Mid-set, The Who reached their peak with “Won’t Get Fooled Again” and “Magic Bus,” Townshend vacillating hideously between a resigned poker face and an evil grimace. “Get on board. . . . Come on,” he urged, and then lurched to the front of the stage, dripping with perspiration, and went through the motions of taking the stalk (of a rose thrown onto the stage) between his teeth and hurling a grenade into the crowd gesticulating a mighty explosion. It was a positive allusion to the large Vietnam banner that hung over the fete and a clear mnemonic of Pete Townshend revolutionary. 32

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Townshend, of course, was not a real “revolutionary,” even if, when he talked about politics, he placed himself on the left of the political spectrum. Later when told that the concert was sponsored by the French Communist Party (PCF), Townshend joked, “Actually, I didn’t know it was for the Communists until we got there. Well, it’s our first chance to exploit the Communists, eh?” 33 The Fête de l’Huma was an end-of-summer event that had been put on since 1930 by the PCF (the concert’s name derived from the party newspaper, L’Humanité). In the 1930s, the idea had been to show party members and the French public that the PCF could be both political and fun. As the PCF and other “Eurocommunist” movements began to chart a course away from the Soviet model in the 1960s, the organizers of the Fête sought to attract young people by scheduling events such as rock-and-roll concerts, even though rock music had been mostly criticized by Soviet and East European communists as “bourgeois” and decadent. Indeed, rock and roll was decadent to Soviet and East European societies, as earlier it had been to the postwar Atlantic world. Looking back, we can see that rock and roll was an ingredient—not the most important but an ingredient nonetheless—undermining the Stalinist systems in the postwar Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. Rock and roll helped to expose divisions within global communism, which in any event had never been the “monolith” imagined by “cold warriors” of the Atlantic world. 34 The twentieth-century communist experiments in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were significant developments in European and world history, yet by 1991 they had failed. As the communist idea and its plan for modernization were pushed aside, the void was partly filled in Russia, Eastern Europe, and other parts of the world by nationalism, resuscitated churches, and religious movements, themselves no less universal in their ambitions and sometimes prepared—as in the September 11 attacks by Muslim radicals on the United States— to use extreme means to achieve ends. Nationalism and religion—Orthodoxy in Russia, Protestant sects in Ukraine, Catholicism in Poland (energized there by a native-born pope who played a role in undermining Stalinism)—found a renewed place in societies that a few years earlier had officially frowned upon both. 35 The contrarian instinct in rock and roll—which had blossomed into a critique of America under Eisenhower in the 1950s and the Soviet Union under Brezhnev in the 1970s—could find new idols to attack in the postcommunist world:

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Pussy Riot, the all-female Russian punk rock band, chose one of Moscow’s most prominent Orthodox churches as the place to stage a protest in 2011 that eventually sent band members to jail. 36 A factor in the spread of rock music was the conclusion of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. For some decades after the end of the Second World War, the Atlantic stood as an economic, diplomatic, and cultural bloc, headed by the United States, against an Eastern Bloc, headed by the Soviet Union. The end of that global contest came with a series of reformist and revolutionary developments across Eastern Europe in the 1980s, culminating in 1989 with a wave of revolutions affecting Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Bulgaria, followed by the collapse of latter-day Stalinist states in Rumania and East Germany. The coming down—physically and figuratively—of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 was one of the historic moments of the twentieth century, signaling not only the movement of people across former borders but also the movement of cultural things, such as books, movies, and music. In fact, rock music and culture had already penetrated the Soviet Union, partly through samizdat rock magazines, serving there, as it had initially in the Atlantic world, as a subversive ingredient. 37 Soviet and East European leaders criticized rock music as a product of a decadent and bourgeois West, and in this regard, their reaction was not much different from the initial reaction of parents and cultural leaders in England, North America, and Western Europe. Glasnost in Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet Union allowed for a cultural opening, and one of the things that arrived in the 1980s was rock music’s habit of mocking the establishment. Historians now can say that rock music had an incrementally destabilizing effect in the communist world, contributing culturally to the structural economic and political failures that undermined the Soviet experiment in the latter years of the Cold War. 38 Pete Townshend’s lyric “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss” had as much meaning, it turned out, for Hungarian and Ukrainian teenagers as it did for teenagers in France and Canada. As the story of Pussy Riot in Russia in 2011 shows, rock and roll— and its inclination to provoke—is no longer mostly transatlantic but rather global. Rock music and rock music culture penetrated Southeast Asia, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan in the 1960s and 1970s and, since the 1980s, China. 39 As in England and Western Europe earlier, some of the success that rock and roll found in Asia had to do with the spread of

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American military and economic influence after the Second World War, even as these societies in Asia, like England or the Netherlands in the 1950s and 1960s, developed their own national styles. More important in the diffusion of rock and roll was the endless new technology and ease with which music could be transferred. Technology continues to make music evermore accessible, transferable, mobile, and global. When The Who—Roger Daltrey, Pete Townshend, and John Entwistle (until the latter’s death in 2002)—resumed periodic touring in the 1990s and 2000s, they visited not only the old venues and haunts in England, Europe, and North America but also places where they had never before been or where they had rarely toured, including Australia, New Zealand, Spain, Finland, Ireland, and Japan. The Who have never played in Eastern Europe or Russia. Since the height of the punk movement in the late 1970s and the East European–Soviet revolutions of 1989–1991, rock and roll has lost some of its subversive tinge. Today, it is itself sometimes part of the establishment. Even conservative politicians on both sides of the Atlantic, whose ideological forebears were critics, now can quote rock music lyrics in their speeches or name-drop bands without seeming hypocritical. On the occasions when rock music is used to challenge or instigate, it can even be used for reactionary, as opposed to revolutionary, ends. As nationalism and economic liberalism migrated from the political left to the political right in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, so too did cultural movements sometimes shift across the spectrum. In the 1970s, parallel with the emergence of punk, avowed racists and neofascists across the Atlantic—typically, white male youths—came together as skinheads, favoring the heavy metal variety of rock music and adding lyrics that espoused extreme ideas. 40 The adoption of rock music by elements of the radical right in the United States, Canada, England, Australia, and Germany came as a bit of a surprise, since in the 1960s, rock and roll, despite its often apolitical ethic, seemed mostly situated on the progressive ledger of things. The inclination toward violence in rock music that Bruce Johnson and Martin Cloonan write about is easy to see in the skinhead and racist rock movement. 41 When the older generation of British Invasion rockers commented on the swing in rock music’s political orientation, they almost always spoke against the fascist and racist elements, sometimes through projects such as “Rock against Racism.” Nonetheless, the original seditious, yet forward-looking part

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of rock and roll remains available to be called on and certainly in places where the music still feels a little new, like Pussy Riot’s challenge to the Orthodox church and the government of Vladimir Putin in Russia. Still, in the latter case, the young rockers paid a heavy price: jail time, a penalty that Western rock bands of the 1960s—despite all the trashed hotel rooms, destroyed televisions, and other provocations—had hardly ever faced. Rock music, from its origins in the 1950s through our own day, has also been tamed and institutionalized by becoming the subject of academic scholarship and by being introduced to the college classroom. Given its populist origins and contrarian streak, this development is no less surprising than rock music’s acceptance by conservative politicians. For some, including rock musicians, the danger of making rock and roll the subject of research and scholarly digression is that it seems to go against the music’s disposable pop ethic and its rudeness toward authority. But rock and roll has become so pervasive, so universal, indeed such an economic and financial force across much of the world that for scholars to ignore it would be like ignoring the spread of electricity, the nation-state, or the world religions—all have a history, an underlying structure, and an impact that begs for understanding. There is the fact, too, that many scholars are rock fans. And, so, rock music has become an object of study by historians, musicologists, sociologists, and specialists in literary and cultural theory. Papers, books, and articles are now written on subjects such as “punk rock subculture and the rhetoric of class” or “urban spaces and working-class expressions across the black Atlantic,” while colleges offer courses on Elvis, Dylan, and the Sex Pistols. 42 The Who, too, have become the stuff of scholarly investigation.

“LONG LIVE ROCK”: ROCK AND ROLL’S POWER TO REVITALIZE Even as The Who carried on for a few years after Keith Moon’s death in 1978, it was evident to band members, fans, and critics that a peak had been reached. That The Who and other rock bands—perhaps even rock-and-roll music itself—had a natural life span was part of the cultural discourse of the last quarter of the twentieth century. And so it was

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that a general accounting of The Who and their history seemed in order as the band made their “farewell tour” in 1982. Rock journalist Dave Marsh’s thorough history of the band, Before I Get Old, came out in 1983. Rock critic and longtime fan Nik Cohn was another of those who felt the urge to place the band in its time and place, writing at the time: The Who have now worked together longer and harder than any other major group; have played to more people on more nights in more places under more pressure than anyone, until they have come to encapsulate almost all of Rock, past, present and future, within themselves. So if one catches their development, that isn’t simply a story about four kids growing up and getting rich. Partly, yes, but it also becomes a metaphor for Rock in general—their public, and their context, and their time. 43

Today, as scholars study the band’s history, present conference papers, and write articles and books on the meaning of their music, as the old songs are recycled on classic radio, and as the background music for television commercials or crime dramas, Who fans—old and young—continue to pull the band back to the stage to perform, even though there has been little new music from the group in the last two decades. John Entwistle died in a Las Vegas hotel room while on tour in 2002, and Daltrey and Townshend came together with younger musicians in 2006 to record Endless Wire, the first new album since It’s Hard in 1982. Going back on the road has been a challenge for Townshend and Daltrey, partly because of age: as of the most recent tour of 2012–2013, Daltrey is sixty-eight years old and Townshend is sixtyseven. Damaged hearing from all the years of performing and from using headphones in the studio is a problem for Townshend. While researchers still seek to fully understand the appeal of loud music for musicians and fans, it is clear, as Townshend has come to know, that listening to loud music over time can be harmful to one’s hearing. It would be surprising, too, if most fans were not aware of the damage that they were sustaining by going to live concerts or by putting on headphones and turning up the volume. Yet, as The Who continued to perform beyond Keith Moon’s death in 1978 and through the farewell tour in 1982, the volume was as great as ever. By the 1980s, rock musicians and fans were showing the effects of listening to loud music, and doctors were beginning to issue public warnings about hearing loss

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related to excessive volume. 44 Although Daltrey has not spoken of damage, Entwistle seemed to have suffered impaired hearing before his death. Townshend had developed severe tinnitus by the 1970s and for several years now has written and spoken publicly, cautioning rock fans about the damage that can be done by loud music played live or heard through headphones. Really loud music—a crucial element of the original Who brand—has come to haunt band members and fans. Now, finally, when The Who perform, the volume is turned down, and Townshend uses protective devices to filter the sound. Pete Townshend long agonized over the commercialization of rock music, even as he appreciated the irony that he and the rest of the band had gone along with the project to create and sell The Who brand and then made fortunes off the product. Daltrey, along with Moon and Entwistle when they were living, was less troubled by the quandary of balancing commercial success and artistic mission that seems to be at the heart of so many creative endeavors, rock music among them. Today, Townshend, Daltrey, and the rest of their production team have embraced The Who in the world of contemporary and classic rock. They are aware of their role in the history that they helped make and, in public comments, are grateful for what the band achieved. They recognize the loyalty of their fans across the Atlantic and elsewhere and now seem motivated to carry on the act more for the enjoyment of fans than for any inner artistic drive. Survivors from the 1960s rock world like Daltrey and Townshend seem to have emerged from the travails and personal losses more appreciative than bitter. Although the two sometimes describe their weariness with touring, they carry on. The Who long ago made a career in the music industry, but rock and roll— possessed of revitalizing and cathartic qualities since its start—has kept the two survivors young at heart and periodically drawn them back to the studio and stage. Recently, Townshend told a journalist that “it’s a blessing that after all we’ve been through, we [Daltrey and I] are always glad to see each other, and we love each other. We really didn’t in the old days.” 45 Indeed, on occasion, the remaining members of The Who are still able to summon up the old brand and the power of rock and roll to revitalize. One such occasion occurred in October 2001, following the attack on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City by extremists associated with the Islamic fundamentalist group al-

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Qaeda. This is another moment when we can see the history of The Who intersecting with larger developments. Much of the Middle East and areas of North Africa had witnessed intermittent turmoil since the emergence of nationalist, secular, and religious independence movements following the end of the First World War (1918). After the Treaty of Versailles (1919), which brought the war to a formal conclusion, the imperialist powers on the winning side—England and France—carved out interests and borders that were often inconsistent with the religious and ethnic divides of the defeated Ottoman Empire, whose territories were seized and turned into mandates. The consequence of reshaping borders in places that became the modern nations of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Kuwait, Egypt, and Yemen, as well as decades later the intrusion of outside powers such as the United States (which directed wars against Iraq in 1991 and 2003), remains with us today. Complicating divisions in the Middle East are its oil reserves prized by the outside world, religious divides that have revived since the end of the Cold War, the winding down of secular nationalism, the creation of the independent state of Israel in 1947 supported by Europe and the United States, and the corresponding Palestinian diaspora. As a young songwriter, Pete Townshend had touched on the intersection of Cold War crises and unsettled politics in the Middle East in the long and uncharacteristically foreboding “Rael” from The Who Sell Out album of 1967. In the 2001 attack on New York City and Washington, DC, and the crash of a hijacked airplane in the state of Pennsylvania, almost three thousand persons were killed. The targets of terrorists originating in the Middle East (Saudi Arabia produced the majority of the attackers) were not only physical structures such as the World Trade Center but also the many threads of Western imperialism, commercialism, and culture that had penetrated the Middle East, North Africa, and other sections of the Islamic world in the previous century—rock-and-roll music among them. The rock music world and industry responded to September 11 with the Concert for New York City—a benefit for victims and first responders but also a chance to assert the place of rock and roll as part of the Western/Atlantic canon and to summon the power of the music to revitalize the spiritually wounded city. In fact, New York City had always been a special place for The Who, beginning as teenagers when they were absorbing the myriad musical

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influences coming from the United States. The American South may have been the home for many of the songs that young Europeans liked, but New York City stood as an emblem in the European imagination for New World progress and opportunity. It was the place where, in 1967, The Who first played in the United States and, in the following years, they would return time and again. Townshend described the special relationship among the band, the city, and its fans in his memoir of 2012: The Who’s New York fan base was being built from human kindness and affection never equaled anywhere else on earth. If I set up a mattress on Fifth Avenue today, I could live for the rest of my life on the beneficence of our New York fans. I still know at least twenty of those RKO [the theater where The Who had first played] kids by name. I know at least a hundred faces. I know the names of some of their parents. Several kids have come to work for me at various times over the years, and some have written books or made movies about us. Some simply watched, grew up and did everything they went on to do with the same dedicated, compulsive lunacy they saw in us as we performed. We advanced a new concept: destruction is art when set to music. We set a standard: we fall down; we get back up again. New Yorkers love that, and New York fans carried that standard along with us for many years, until we ourselves were no longer able to measure up. 46

For The Who, the concert was “full of defiance, but also sadness and camaraderie. 47 Like many others in the Atlantic world of rock music, Townshend, Daltrey, and Entwistle felt a need to respond after the attacks of September 11. The October 2001 Concert for New York City was held at Madison Square Garden, a venue The Who had played many times. Celebrities from the entertainment world and a handful of politicians signed on as hosts. The event was recorded for release on DVD and CD and was televised live to a national audience. Nearly sixty well-known transatlantic bands and individual artists, including former British Invaders Paul McCartney, David Bowie, Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger, and Keith Richards performed. But it was The Who—Townshend, Daltrey, and Entwistle, along with new band members—who stole the show and left the most vivid memories. Police and firefighters who had taken part in the

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rescue efforts of September 2001, many of whom no doubt had grown up fans of The Who and had seen them perform before in the Garden, were prominent in the audience; it was their response to the band’s opening number (“Who Are You”) that produced the loudest roar of the evening. Bill Curbishley, who had been the manager of the band since the 1970s and had seen them perform hundreds of times, thought that he “had never seen anything like [it].” 48 The Who played only four songs, but the energized burst of rock and roll provided just the right spark for catharsis and revival—a moment, not to forget what had happened a month earlier, but rather to briefly put aside the fears and trauma of September 11. As The Who coursed energetically through their set of songs, a screen behind them projected the British and American flags side by side as a sign of solidarity in this moment of crisis and sadness but implicitly, too, as a reminder of the transatlantic history of The Who and the back-and-forth history of rock and roll. Other performers watching with the audience or behind the stage recognized the power of The Who’s performance. Edge, from the hugely popular Irish band U2, “could not believe the way they owned that event. So much more powerful than anyone else who was on the bill that night.” 49 For Eddie Vedder, from the American rock band Pearl Jam, the show in New York was simply “one of the best illustrations of the power of music.” 50 A few years later, a British journalist reflected on The Who’s performance: “Moments like the 9/11 concert, where you put the music and the audience together in the midst of tragedy, and suddenly we have the palliative, pure way of conveying empathy, solidarity, love, with no possibility of solution—that is what rock is about.” 51 Even though the band had long since reached its peak and although they had grown older (John Entwistle would be dead within months of the show), their performance in New York in October 2001 showed the power of the music to revive, the staying power of The Who brand, and the solidarity of a transatlantic generation. Pete Townshend was just twelve years old in 1957 when British prime minister Harold Macmillan informed British youth that they had “never had it so good.” Townshend, the Mods, and others of their generation took this as a supremely unsatisfying dictum. But looking back on that moment, not long after which The Who came together as a band and his generation of British rockers had launched their cultural

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invasion of North America, Townshend remembered becoming infused with a kind of mission: For the first time in history a whole generation had the economic and educational opportunity to turn their backs on the dead-end factory jobs of their parents, who, traumatized by two world wars, had responded by creating a safety blanket of conformity. In this surge of hope and optimism, The Who set out to articulate the joy and rage of a generation struggling for life and freedom. That had been our job. And most of the time we pulled it off. 52

Townshend was writing about his generation of young British males, but he could have been speaking for their counterparts across Europe and North America. The Atlantic world had its origins in a convergence of historical relationships—imperial, economic, political, and cultural— among Europe, West Africa, and America. Some of these relationships had been built on a foundation of great tragedy, such as the centurieslong transatlantic slave trade. Sometimes the relationships provoked a reaction: the September 11 attacks in the eastern United States demonstrated the divide between one worldview embedded in the Middle East and another in the Atlantic world. Although The Who would develop fans in places outside Europe and America, the Concert for New York in 2001 was a reminder that the rock-and-roll band was the product of a distinct place—the Atlantic world of the modern era. The Who brand eventually attracted fans beyond the Atlantic, and rock and roll has become a global phenomenon. But whether the deep relationships—the feedback—forged by rock and roll among England, North America, and Western Europe in the second half of the twentieth century can be duplicated in other places remains to be seen. For the four members of The Who and for countless others of their generation, the connections across the Atlantic ran deep. Wrote Townshend: From dance music designed as a romantic salve for the walking wounded of various wars, we moved to the irritant teenaged codes of ’60s pop. This new music was partly aimed at that same scarred older generation and suggested that their postwar trauma, horror, and shame—hitherto denied and untreated—had somehow echoed down to us. R&B, mainly performed by American black musicians . . . was what underpinned British pop music of the ’60s new

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wave. The combination of complaint, confrontation, and self-healing that was wrapped up in the average R&B song—usually sung by a disgruntled but sanguine older black American—was the right model for my white middle- and working-class British generation too. 53

The idea of Atlantic history had its origins after 1945 among intellectuals and elites identifying and forging a consensus in a world recently at war between fascist states and their opponents. Operating on a parallel plane was a cultural diffusion of rock and roll, back and forth across the Atlantic, aided by skillful entrepreneurs and the technology of the day, as powerful as diplomacy and politics—an Atlantic generation joined together through music.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1. Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980), 159. 2. Geoffrey Giuliano, Behind Blue Eyes: The Life of Pete Townshend (New York: Plume, 1996), 65. 3. Pete Townshend, Who I Am: A Memoir (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), 514. 4. Simon Garfield, “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” Intelligent Life (summer 2011). 5. Richard Barnes, The Who, Maximum R&B (London: Plexus, 1996), 40–41. 6. Amazing Journey: The Story of The Who, two-film DVD box set (2007). 7. Roland Kelts, “Pete Townshend’s War,” The New Yorker (October 9, 2012). 8. Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 9. Bailyn, Atlantic History, 111.

1. “MY GENERATION” 1. Carlo Ginzburg, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi, “Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It,” Critical Inquiry 20 (autumn 1993): 10–35. 177

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2. The account is from New Musical Express writer Keith Altham; quoted in Mark Wilkerson, Who Are You: The Life of Pete Townshend (London: Omnibus Press, 2008), 36. 3. Fan Lars Dahlberg, from Johnny Black, Eyewitness The Who (London: Carlton Books, 2001), 86. 4. James A. Winders, European Culture since 1848: From Modern to Postmodern and Beyond (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 155. 5. Phillip H. Ennis, The Seventh Steam: The Emergence of Rock ’n’ Roll in American Popular Music (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University, 1992). 6. Richard Crocker and David Hiley, eds., The Early Middle Ages to 1300, vol. 2 of The New Oxford History of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), and Mark Everist, The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 7. Everist, Cambridge Companion. 8. Suzanne Lord, Music in the Middle Ages: A Reference Guide (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008), 97. 9. Amazing Journey: The Story of The Who, two-film DVD box set (2007); Townshend, Who I Am: A Memoir (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), 33. 10. Bernard Zelechow, “The Opera: The Meeting of Popular and Elite Culture in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Popular Culture 25 (fall 1991), 93; Egon Wellesz, The Age of Enlightenment, 1745–1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 58. 11. Peter Gay, Mozart: A Life (New York: Penguin, 2006). 12. Jeffrey Ravel, The Contested Parterre: Public Theatre and French Political Culture: 1680–1791 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). 13. Gordon Thompson, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 227. 14. Zelechow, “The Opera.” 15. Gay, Mozart. 16. Derek B. Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis: The 19th-Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 17. Daniel Cavicchi, “Living Music: Listener, Entertainments, and the Origins of Music Fandom in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, ed. Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandross, and C. Lee Harrington (New York: NYU Press, 2007), 238; Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis. 18. Zelechow, “The Opera,” 91; Gray, Sandross, and Harrington, Fandom, 238. 19. David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

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20. Gilbert Chase, America’s Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000). 21. James N. Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Ennis, Seventh Stream, 72ff. 22. Robert Palmer, Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History of the Mississippi Delta (New York: Penguin, 1982). 23. Tom Wright, Roadwork: Rock and Roll Turned Inside Out (New York: Hal Leonard, 2007); Roberta Schwartz, How Britain Got the Blues: The Transmission and Reception of American Blues Style in the United Kingdom (London: Ashgate, 2007). 24. Townshend, Who I Am, 56–57. 25. Amazing Journey. 26. Amazing Journey. 27. Amazing Journey. 28. R. R. Palmer, Age of the Democratic Revolution, vol. 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969); Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: Norton, 2008). 29. Joyce Appleby, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (New York: Norton, 2008). 30. Charles Fairchild, Pop Idols and Pirates: Mechanisms of Consumption and the Global Circulation of Popular Music (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008). 31. Scott, Metropolis; Peter Bailey, Music Hall: The Business of Pleasure (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1986); Jeffrey H. Jackson, “Music-Halls and the Assimilation of Jazz in 1920s Paris,” Journal of Popular Culture 34, no. 2 (2000): 69–82. 32. Scott, Metropolis. 33. Bailey, Music Hall. 34. Steve Cannon, Popular Music in France from Chanson to Techno: Culture, Identity, and Society (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003). 35. Scott, Metropolis. 36. Bryan Randolph Gilliam, Music and Performance During the Weimar Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 37. Townshend, Who I Am, 164. 38. Peter Bailey, “Fats Waller Meets Harry Chapin: Americanization, National Identity and Sexual Politics in Inter-war British Music Hall,” Cultural and Social History 4 (December 2007): 495–509; Peter Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 39. Hans-Joachim Braun, ed., Music and Technology in the Twentieth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).

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40. Amanda Bayley, Recorded Music: Performance, Culture and Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 41. Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York: Picador, 2007). 42. Ray Davies, X-ray: The Unauthorized Autobiography (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1994). 43. Ennis, Seventh Stream. 44. Ennis, Seventh Stream. 45. Joseph Heathcott, “Urban Spaces and Working-Class Expressions across the Black Atlantic: Tracing the Routes of Ska,” Radical History Review 87 (fall 2003): 183–206. 46. Wright, Roadwork, x–xi. 47. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005), 351. 48. Judt, Postwar, 351. 49. Joe McMichael and “Irish” Jack Lyons, The Who Concert File (London: Omnibus Press, 1997), 14; Roberta Freund Schwartz, How Britain Got the Blues: The Transmission and Reception of the Blues Style in the United Kingdom (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2007). 50. David Simonelli, Working Class Heroes Rock Music and British Society in the 1960s and 1970s (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 20ff. 51. Marsh, Before I Get Old, 22. 52. Wilkerson, Who Are You, 9–10. 53. Alan B. Spitzer, “The Historical Problem of Generations,” American Historical Review 78 (December 1973): 1353–86; Allen T. Lambert, “Generations and Change: Toward a Theory of Generations as a Force in Historical Process,” Youth and Society 4 (September 1972): 21–45. 54. David Knyaston, Austerity England, 1945–1951 (New York: Wilker, 2008); Judt, Postwar. 55. Townshend, Who I Am, 4. 56. Kymaston, Austerity Britain. 57. Geoffrey Giuliano, Behind Blue Eyes: The Life of Pete Townshend (New York: Plume, 1996), 65. 58. Marsh, Before I Get Old. 59. On the Mods, see Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980). There are also relevant chapters in Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin, eds., On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word (New York: Pantheon, 1990). A popular treatment of the Mods is Terry Rawlings, Clean Living under Difficult Circumstances: Mod, a Very British Phenomenon (London: Omnibus Press, 2000).

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60. John Atkins, The Who on Record: A Critical History, 1963–1998 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000), 52. 61. Richard S. Grayson, “Mods, Rockers and Juvenile Delinquency in 1964: The Government Response,” Contemporary British History 12 (1998): 19–47; Wilkerson, Who Are You, 24. 62. Amazing Journey. 63. Amazing Journey. 64. To Eddie Vedder of the band Pearl Jam, for instance; Wilkerson, Who Are You, 463ff. 65. On the reception of “My Generation,” see Atkins, The Who on Record, 52–53, and Larry David Smith, Pete Townshend: The Minstrel’s Dilemma (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999), 47–49. 66. Giuliano, Behind Blue Eyes, 54. 67. Wilkerson, Who Are You, 56. 68. Quoted in Wilkerson, Who Are You, 45. 69. Giuliano, Pete Townshend, 53. 70. Giuliano, Pete Townshend, 64–65. 71. Steve Clarke, ed., The Who in Their Own Words (New York: Quick Fox, 1979), 32. 72. Black, Eyewitness The Who, 47. 73. Marsh, Before I Get Old, 176. 74. Marsh, Before I Get Old, 187. 75. Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concepts and Contours (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Laura M. Stevens, “Trans-Atlanticism Now,” American Literary History 16, no. 1 (2004): 3–4; Alison Games, “AHR Forum: Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities,” American Historical Review (June 2006): 741–57; Donna Gabaccio, “A Long Atlantic in a Wider World,” Atlantic Studies 1 (2004): 1–27.

2. “RELAY” 1. Michael Talbot, The Business of Music (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002). 2. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005). 3. Peter N. Stearns, The Industrial Revolution in World History (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2012). 4. Victor Coelho, The Cambridge Companion to the Guitar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); André Millard, The Electrical Guitar: A

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History of an American Icon (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.) 5. Mark Wilkerson, Who Are You: The Life of Pete Townshend (London: Omnibus Press, 2008). 6. Amazing Journey: The Story of The Who, two-film DVD box set (2007). 7. Robert Palmer, Deep Blues (New York: Penguin, 1982). 8. Steve Carraway and Tom Wheeler, Guitar Player (November 1977). 9. Dave Marsh, Before I Get Old: The Story of The Who (London: Plexus, 1983), 182. 10. Amazing Journey. 11. Tim Quirk and Jason Toynbee, “Going through the Motions: Popular Music Performance in Journalism and in Academic Discourse,” Popular Music 24 (2005): 399–413. 12. Joyce Appleby, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (New York: Norton, 2008); Gordon Thompson, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 13. Russell Sanjek, 1790 to 1909, vol. 2 of American Popular Music and Its Business (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 32–33. 14. Keith Negus, Producing Pop: Culture and Conflict in the Popular Music Industry (London: Arnold, 1992), 10–11; David P. Szatmary, Rockin’ in Time: A Social History of Rock-and-Roll, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1991), 222–23. 15. Quoted in Terry Rawlings, Mod: A Very British Phenomenon (London: Omnibus Press, 2000), 92–93. 16. Marsh, Before I Get Old, 104ff. 17. Judt, Postwar. 18. Amazing Journey. 19. Marsh, Before I Get Old, 105. 20. Wilkerson, Who Are You, 30. 21. Quoting Nik Cohn in Marsh, Before I Get Old, 105. 22. Joe McMichael and “Irish” Jack Lyons, The Who Concert File (London: Omnibus Press, 1997), 21–22. 23. Robert Chapman, Selling the Sixties: The Pirates and Pop Music Radio (London: Routledge, 1992). 24. Geoffrey Giuliano, Behind Blue Eyes: The Life of Pete Townshend (New York: Plume, 1996), 65. 25. Giuliano, Behind Blue Eyes, 65. 26. Wilkerson, Who Are You, 323–24. 27. Daniel Cavicchi, “Loving Music: Listeners, Entertainments, and the Origins of Music Fandom in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, ed. Jonathan Gray, Cornell Sand-

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voss, and C. Lee Hamington (New York: NYU Press, 2007), 238, 240. See also Cavicchi, Tramps like Us: Music and Meaning among Springsteen Fans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), and R. Butsch, The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television, 1750–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 28. Cavicchi, “Loving Music,” 240. 29. Cavicchi, “Loving Music,” 245. 30. Cavicchi, “Loving Music,” 247. 31. Jon Savage, Teenage: The Prehistory of Youth Culture, 1875–1945 (New York: Penguin, 2008). 32. Marsh, Before I Get Old, 170–71. 33. Ian McFarlane, The Encyclopedia of Australian Rock and Pop (St. Leonards, Australia: Allen & Unwin, 1999). 34. Ryan Edwardson, Canuck Rock: A History of Canadian Popular Music (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009). 35. Steve Cannon, Popular Music in France from Chanson to Techno: Culture, Identity, and Society (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003); Barbara Lebrun, Protest Music in France: Production, Identity and Performance (London: Ashgate, 2009). 36. Nikos Kotsopoulis, ed., Krautrock: Cosmic Rock and Its Legacy (London: Black Dog, 2010). 37. Quadrophenia: Director’s Cut, “Two Stormy Summers.” 38. Marsh, Before I Get Old, 3. 39. “‘Irish’ Jack,” http://www.thewho.net/irishjack/. 40. McMichael and Lyons, The Who Concert File, 12–52. 41. Wilkerson, Who Are You, 128. 42. McMichael and Lyons, The Who Concert File. 43. Marsh, Before I Get Old, 246–47. 44. “The Who Concert Guide,” http://www.thewho.net/concertguide/. 45. “The Who Concert Guide.” 46. David Simonelli, Working Class Heroes: Rock Music and British Society in the 1960s and 1970s (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 152–53. 47. Christine Feldman, “We Are the Mods!” A Transnational History of a Youth Subculture (New York: Lang, 2009). 48. Andy Neill and Matt Kent, Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere: The Complete Chronicle of The Who, 1958–1978 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2002), 57. 49. Richard Barnes, The Who: Maximum R&B (London: Plexus, 1996), 40. 50. McMichael and Lyons, The Who Concert File, 27. 51. Neill and Kent, Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere, 80. At this show, The Who played “Substitute,” “Dancing in the Street,” “Man without Money,” “Barbara Ann,” and “My Generation.”

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52. Along with Paris and Lyon, during these years The Who performed in Lille, Nancy, Poitiers, and Tours. 53. McMichael and Lyons, The Who Concert File, 31. 54. Neill and Kent, Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere, 43–44. 55. “The Who Concert Guide.” 56. Derek B. Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis: The Nineteenth-Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 57. Wilkerson, Who Are You, 1. 58. Tony Fletcher, Moon: The Life and Death of a Rock Legend (New York: Harper, 1999). 59. Tom Wright, Roadwork: Rock ’n’ Roll Turned Inside Out (New York: Hal Leonard Books, 2007), 73.

3. “THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT” 1. Dave Marsh, Before I Get Old: The Story of The Who (London: Plexus, 1983), 188. 2. Bruce Johnson and Martin Cloonan, Dark Side of the Tune: Popular Music and Violence (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009). 3. James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 4. John Atkins, The Who on Record: A Critical History, 1963–1998 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000), 15–16. 5. Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 160. 6. Geoffrey Giuliano, Behind Blue Eyes: The Life of Pete Townshend (New York: Plume, 1996), 55. 7. Johnny Black, Eyewitness The Who: The Day-by-Day Story (London: Carlton, 2001), 38. 8. Richard Barnes, The Who Maximum R&B (London: Plexus, 1996), 96. 9. Black, Eyewitness The Who, 86. 10. Joe McMichael and “Irish” Jack Lyons, The Who Concert File (London: Omnibus Press, 1997), 142. 11. Barnes, The Who, 41. 12. Tom Wright, Roadwork: Rock ’n’ Roll Turned Inside Out (New York: Hal Leonard Books, 2007), 8. 13. Marsh, Before I Get Old, 477. 14. Giuliano, Behind Blue Eyes, 36.

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15. Mark Wilkerson, Who Are You: The Life of Pete Townshend (London: Omnibus Press, 2008), 29. 16. Pete Townshend, Who I Am: A Memoir (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), 69. 17. “The Kids Are Alright,” disc 1. 18. Townshend, Who I Am, 134. 19. Amazing Journey: The Story of The Who, two-film DVD box set (2007). 20. Amazing Journey. 21. Marsh, Before I Get Old, 88. 22. Keith Altham, “The Who in Britain,” in The Who Thirty Years of Maximum R&B (Universal City, CA: MCA, 1994), 2. 23. Wright, Road Work, 15–16. 24. Wright, Road Work, 16–17. 25. Amazing Journey, “Six Quick Ones.” 26. Amazing Journey. 27. C. P. Lee and Paul Kelly, Like the Night: Bob Dylan and the Road to the Manchester Free Trade Hall (London: Helter Skelter, 1998). 28. Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980), 158–60. 29. Gareth Stedman Jones, “The Redemptive Power of Violence? Carlyle, Marx and Dickens,” History Workshop 65 (2008): 1–22. 30. Atkins, The Who on Record, 18. 31. Giuliano, Behind Blue Eyes, 63–64. 32. Giuliano, Behind Blue Eyes, 64–65. 33. Giuliano, Behind Blue Eyes, 54. 34. Wilkerson, Who Are You, 45. 35. Steven Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 24–25. 36. Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals, 93. 37. William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 38. Barbara Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions in History,” American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (2002): 837. 39. Johnson and Cloonan, Dark Side, 150–60. 40. Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (New York: Plume, 2006), 70: “Composers,” writes Levitin, “imbue music with emotion by knowing what our expectations are and then very deliberately controlling when those expectations will be met, and when they won’t. The thrills, chills, and tears we experience from music are the result of having

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our expectations artfully manipulated by a skilled composer and the musicians who interpret that music” (111). 41. Kim Kahari, “Assessment of Hearing and Hearing Disorders in Rock/ Jazz Musicians,” International Journal of Audiology 42 (July 2003): 279–88; Mary A. Danenberg, “Temporary Hearing Loss and Rock Music,” Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in the Schools 18 (July 1987): 267–74. 42. For instance, BBC News, January 4, 2006: “Who Guitarist’s Deafness Worry.” 43. Levitin, Your Brain on Music, 2. 44. Guardian, March 31, 2004. 45. McMichael and Lyons, The Who Concert File, 99. 46. Townshend, Who I Am, 188. 47. Atkins, The Who on Record, 129–30. 48. Binky Philips, “I Caught Pete Townshend’s Guitar,” Huffington Post (June 26, 2010). 49. Townshend, Who I Am, 314. 50. Johnson and Cloonan, Dark Side, 95, 123, 194. 51. Giuliano, Behind Blue Eyes, 64–65. 52. Marsh, Before I Get Old, 133. 53. Marsh, Before I Get Old, 122. 54. “Irish Jack,” http://www.thewho.net/irishjack. 55. “The Who Concert Guide,” http://www.thewho.net/concertguide/. 56. “The Who Concert Guide.” 57. Steve Hughes, Newcastle Evening Chronicle, quoted in McMichael and Lyons, The Who Concert File, 155. 58. Townshend, Who I Am, 133. 59. “The Who Concert Guide.” 60. McMichael and Lyons, The Who Concert File, 164–65. 61. Townshend, Who I Am, 62. 62. Black, Eyewitness The Who, 119. 63. Black, Eyewitness The Who, 61. 64. Barnes, The Who, 40–41. 65. Herman Melville, Billy Budd and Other Stories (New York: Penguin, 1986), 302. 66. Casey Harison, “Redemptive Violence and Stuttering across the Atlantic: The Who’s ‘My Generation’ and Herman Melville’s Billy Budd in Historical Perspective,” Atlantic Studies 8, no. 1 (2011): 49–68. There is a considerable literature on stuttering. The physiology and behavior of stuttering, which is found “in all cultures and ethnic groups,” is not fully understood by speech pathologists or psychologists. It is probably not inherited, and it can be corrected with early therapy; Christian Büchel and Martin Sommer, “What

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Causes Stuttering?” PloS Biology (February 2004): 159. Stuttering is not uncommon among children, though it is usually outgrown. Approximately 1 percent of adults stutter, particularly affecting persons with personality traits such as extreme self-consciousness. Stutterers are more likely to be male. There have been famous stutterers—Winston Churchill, Charles Darwin, and John Lee Hooker among them. See brief assessments by Gregory K. Fritz, “Understanding Stuttering: Greater Research and Advocacy Efforts Needed,” Brown University Child and Adolescent Behavior Letter (December 2007): 8; “Searching for the Cause of Stuttering,” commentary, The Lancet, 360 (August 31, 2002): 655–56; and Amy P. Ginsberg, “Shame, Self-Consciousness, and Locus of Control in People Who Stutter,” Journal of Genetic Psychology, 161 (2000): 389–99. Culturally, in American film and television, stutterers have often been made to be comic or weak characters. On the cultural representation of stuttering, see Marc Shell, Stutter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Jeffrey K. Johnson, “The Visualization of the Twisted Tongue: Portrayals of Stuttering in Film, Television, and Comic Books,” Journal of Popular Culture, 41 (2008): 245–61; and Ankhi Mukherjee, “Stammering to Story: Neurosis and Narration in Pat Barker’s Regeneration,” Critique 43 (fall 2001): 49–62. 67. Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work (New York: Vintage Books, 2006), 11, 107–8. 68. In the interview, Townshend said that his “favourite opera is [Benjamin Britten’s] Billy Budd,” noting that only recently had he “realized that [he] had stolen the entire setting of Billy Budd for [the] last scene in [the Who album] Quadrophenia, the young boy on a rock, alone, fearing death in the grey rain”; TimesOnline (April 20, 2009). 69. Jones, “The Redemptive Power of Violence?” 1–22. 70. Some of these themes are described in Marc W. Steinberg, Fighting Words: Working-Class Formation, Collective Action, and Discourse in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). 71. Quadrophenia: Director’s Cut, “Two Stormy Summers,” 17.

4. “THE REAL ME” 1. “Irish Jack,” http://www.thewho.net/irish/jack. 2. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005). 3. Keith Altham, “The Who in Britain,” in The Who Thirty Years of Maximum R&B (Universal City, CA: MCA, 1994), 13.

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4. David Brooks, “The Power of the Particular,” New York Times (June 25, 2012). 5. Richard Barnes, The Who Maximum R&B (London: Plexus, 1996), 45. 6. Dave Marsh, “The Who in America,” in The Who Thirty Years of Maximum R&B (Universal City, CA: MCA, 1994), 3. 7. Dave Marsh, Before I Get Old: The Story of The Who (London: Plexus, 1983), 3. 8. Marsh, “The Who in America,” 8. 9. Tom Wright, Roadwork: Rock ’n’ Roll Turned Inside Out (New York: Hal Leonard Books, 2007), 129. 10. Barnes, The Who Maximum R&B, 105. 11. “The Who Concert Guide,” http://www.thewho.net/concertguide/. 12. “The Who Concert Guide.” 13. Joe McMichael and “Irish” Jack Lyons, The Who Concert File (London: Omnibus Press, 1997), 59. 14. McMichael and Lyons, The Who Concert File, 149. 15. McMichael and Lyons, The Who Concert File, 150. 16. Marsh, “The Who in America,” 14. 17. David Simonelli, Working Class Heroes: Rock Music and British Society in the 1960s and 1970s (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 85–89. 18. Norris R. Johnson, “Panic at ‘The Who Concert Stampede’: An Empirical Assessment,” Social Problems 34 (October 1987): 362–73. 19. Gerhard Van der Leun, Let It Bleed: The Rolling Stones, Altamont, and the End of the Sixties (New York: Grand Central, 2009). 20. Pete Townshend, Quadrophenia: Director’s Cut, “Two Stormy Summers”; Richie Unterberger, Won’t Get Fooled Again: The Who from Lifehouse to Quadrophenia (London: Jawbone Press, 2011). 21. Amazing Journey: The Story of The Who, two-film DVD box set (2007). 22. Mark Wilkerson, Who Are You: The Life of Pete Townshend (London: Omnibus Press, 2008), 154. 23. Wilkerson, Life, 154. 24. Pete Townshend, Lifehouse Chronicles (2000), 11. 25. Charles Tilly and Lesley J. Wood, Social Movements 1768–2012, 3rd ed. (New York: Paradigm, 2012). 26. Christine Feldman, “We are the Mods!” A Transnational History of a Youth Subculture (New York: Lang, 2009). 27. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis-Napoleon (1852). 28. Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980), 155–56. 29. McMichael and Lyons, The Who Concert File, 17.

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30. Richard S. Grayson, “Mods, Rockers and Juvenile Delinquency in 1964: The Government Response,” Contemporary British History 12 (1998): 19–47. 31. McMichael and Lyons, The Who Concert File, 23–24. 32. Wright, Roadwork, 93. 33. “The Kids Are Alright,” disc 1. 34. Johnny Black, Eyewitness The Who (London: Carlton Books, 2001), 161–62. 35. Black, Eyewitness The Who, 161–62. 36. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1991). 37. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 72. 38. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 55. 39. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 158. 40. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 153. 41. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 159. 42. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 159. 43. McMichael and Lyons, The Who Concert File, 17. 44. Black, Eyewitness The Who, 98. 45. Wright, Roadwork, 89ff. 46. Marion Leonard, Gender in the Music Industry: Rock, Discourse, and Girl Power (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007); Lucy O’Brien, She Bop II: The Definitive History of Women in Rock, Pop and Soul (London: Continuum, 2002). 47. Geoffrey Giuliano, Behind Blue Eyes: The Life of Pete Townshend (New York: Plume, 1997), 64. 48. Lisa L. Rhodes, Electric Ladyland: Women and Rock Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). 49. Pete Townshend, Who I Am : A Memoir (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), 505–6. 50. “Irish Jack,” http://www.thewho.net/irishjack/. 51. Townshend, Who I Am, 505. 52. Amazing Journey.

5. “WON’T GET FOOLED AGAIN” 1. Quadrophenia: Director’s Cut, 9–10. 2. Quadrophenia: Director’s Cut, 16. 3. Quadrophenia: Director’s Cut, 10. 4. Johnny Black, Eyewitness The Who (London: Carlton Books, 2001), 202–3.

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5. Quadrophenia: Director’s Cut, 26, 28. 6. Black, Eyewitness The Who, 203. 7. Quadrophenia: Director’s Cut, 35. 8. Quadrophenia: Director’s Cut, 31. 9. Quadrophenia: Director’s Cut, 31. 10. Dave Marsh, quoted in Mark Wilkerson, Who Are You: The Life of Pete Townshend (London: Omnibus Press, 2008), 211. 11. Lynn Van Matre of the Chicago Tribune quoted in Joe McMichael and “Irish” Jack Lyons, The Who Concert File (London: Omnibus Press, 1997), 159. 12. Quoted from Melody Maker; Mark Wilkerson, Who Are You: The Life of Pete Townshend (London: Omnibus Press, 2008), 215. 13. McMichaels and Lyons, The Who Concert File. 14. McMichael and Lyons, The Who Concert File, 164–65. 15. Susan Fast, In the Houses of the Holy: Led Zeppelin and the Power of Rock Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 2001. 16. Simon Garfield, “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” Intelligent Life (summer 2011). 17. “Kids Are Alright”; Townshend interview with Melvin Bragg. 18. David Simonelli, Working Class Heroes: Rock Music and British Society in the 1960s and 1970s (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books), 2013. 19. David P. Szatmary, Rockin’ in Time: A Social History of Rock-and-Roll, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 191), 232. 20. Pete Townshend, Who I Am: A Memoir (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), 298. 21. Amazing Journey: The Story of The Who, two-film DVD box set (2007). 22. This episode became the basis for the song “Who Are You?”; Wilkerson, Who Are You, 258. 23. Blaine W. Stephenson, “Profiles of Mod Revivalists: A Case Study of a Re-emerging Adolescent Group,” Adolescence Sum 22 (1987): 393–404. 24. Wilkerson, Who Are You, 259. 25. The Kids Are Alright, DVD (1979), disc 2. 26. The Kids Are Alright, disc 2. 27. The Kids Are Alright. 28. Townshend, Who I Am, 306. 29. Townshend, Who I Am, 340. 30. Szatmary, Rockin’ in Time 31. Townshend, Who I Am, 340. 32. McMichael and Lyons, The Who Concert File, 151. 33. Wilkerson, Who Are You, 188.

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34. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005). 35. Judt, Postwar. 36. Masha Gessen, Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot (New York: Riverhead Trade, 2014). 37. László Kürti, “Rocking the State: Youth and Rock Music Culture in Hungary, 1976–1990,” East European Politics & Societies 5, no. 3 (autumn 1991): 483–513; Anna Szemere, Up from the Underground: The Culture of Rock Music in Postsocialist Hungary (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001); Timothy W. Ryback, Rock around the Bloc: A History of Rock Music in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 38. Pedro Ramet and Sergei Zamascikov, “The Soviet Rock Scene,” Journal of Popular Culture 24, no. 1 (1990): 149–74; Ekaterina Dobrotvorskaja, “Soviet Teens of the 1970s: Rock Generation, Rock Refusal, Rock Context,” Journal of Popular Culture (1992): 145–50. 39. Jonathan Campbell, Red Rock: The Long, Strange March of Chinese Rock and Roll (Hong Kong: Earnshaw, 2011). 40. Timothy Scott Brown, “Subcultures, Pop Music and Politics: Skinheads and ‘Nazi Rock’ in England and Germany,” Journal of Social History 38 (fall 2004): 157–78. 41. Bruce Johnson and Martin Cloonan, Dark Side of the Tune: Popular Music and Violence (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009). 42. David Simonelli, “Anarchy, Pop and Violence: Punk Rock Subculture and the Rhetoric of Class, 1976–78,” Contemporary British History 16, no. 2 (2002): 121–44; Joseph Heathcott, “Urban Spaces and Working-Class Expressions across the Black Atlantic: Tracing the Routes of Ska,” Radical History Review 87 (2003): 183–206. 43. Cited in Townshend, Who I Am, 229. 44. Johnson and Cloonan, Dark Side of the Tune, 168, 170. 45. New York Times (July 17, 2008). 46. Townshend, Who I Am, 114–15. 47. Townshend, Who I Am, 465. 48. Amazing Journey. 49. Amazing Journey. 50. Amazing Journey. 51. Neil McCormick, “On Stage I Feel like the Goalkeeper,” Telegraph (December 14, 2006). 52. Townshend, Who I Am, 340. 53. Introduction by Pete Townshend, in Tom Wright, Roadwork: Rock ’n’ Roll Turned Inside Out (New York: Hal Leonard Books, 2007), x–xi.

GLOSSARY

AOR

Album-oriented rock

anglophone

English speaking

audiophile

Person fascinated by sound and sound technology

bootleg

A recording of a performance done from the audience and without the permission of the performer; bootlegs were often shared among fans

chart

Published listing of top-selling records and albums

counterculture Against the mainstream; many young people in the 1960s adopted counterculture lifestyles cover

To play another musician’s or another band’s song

demo

Preliminary recording of a song

dinosaur

Disparaging description of older rock musicians and bands

DJ

“Disc jockey”—slang for persons who selected, played, and commented on records played on radio stations

front man/ woman

The singer in a band who normally stood at the front of the stage

gig

A performance/show

git/hooligan/ yob/yobbo

British slang for belligerent male teen

193

194

GLOSSA RY

groupie

Young woman who followed and socialized with rock band musicians

hard rock

A genre of rock music and a phrase that has come to refer to a style of guitar-driven rock and roll that began with the British Invasion of the 1960s

heavy metal

A version of hard rock music that began in the late 1960s and early 1970s; this music tended to be loud and aggressive

homology

The set of beliefs or worldview held by a defined group or subculture

LP

Long-playing album consisting of two sides of music and normally including ten to twelve songs; LPs rotated at 33 rpm, compared with the 45 rpm of the single

roadie

Member of a rock tour crew or entourage; roadies often had specific technical skills

rock opera

A set of rock songs or an album based on operatic form; sometimes considered pretentious

set list

The group of songs performed at a gig

skiffle

British popular music of the 1950s played on homemade instruments; served as a precursor to rock music in England

single

A song released on a 45-rpm record and not necessarily part of an album

solo album

An album released by one person from a band

subculture

A group possessing a distinct set of beliefs, style of dress, and/or speech—that is, possessing a homology

tinnitus

Ringing in the ears sometimes caused by loud music played live or heard through headphones

SELECT DISCOGRAPHY

SINGLES “I Can’t Explain” (1965) “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere” (1965) “My Generation” (1965) “The Kids Are Alright” (1965) “Substitute” (1966) “I’m a Boy” (1966) “Happy Jack” (1966) “Pictures of Lily” (1967) “I Can See for Miles” (1967) “Magic Bus” (1968) “Little Billy” (1968) “Pinball Wizard” (1969) “I’m Free” (1969) “The Seeker” (1970) “Summertime Blues” (1970) “Won’t Get Fooled Again” (1971) “Behind Blue Eyes” (1971) “My Wife” (1971) “Join Together” (1972) “Relay” (1972) “Love Reign O’er Me” (1973) “Squeeze Box” (1975) “Slip Kid” (1975) 195

196

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“Who Are You” (1978)

ALBUMS My Generation (1965) A Quick One (1966) The Who Sell Out (U.K. release, 1967; U.S. release, 1968) Tommy (1969) Live at Leeds (1970) Who’s Next (1971) Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy (1971) Quadrophenia (1973) Odds and Sods (1974) The Who by Numbers (1975) Who Are You (1978) The Kids Are Alight (soundtrack, 1979) Face Dances (1981) It’s Hard (1982) 30 Years of Maximum R&B (1994) Endless Wire (2006)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

THE WHO Altham, Keith. “The Who in Britain.” In The Who Thirty Years of Maximum R&B. Universal City, CA: MCA, 1994. Amazing Journey: The Story of The Who, two-film DVD box set, 2007. Atkins, John. The Who on Record: A Critical History, 1963–1998. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000. Barnes, Richard. The Who Maximum R&B. London: Plexus, 1996. Black, Johnny. Eyewitness The Who. London: Carlton Books, 2001. Bogovich, Richard. The Who: A Who’s Who. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002. Carraway, Steve, and Tom Wheeler. Guitar Player (November 1977). Clarke, Steve. The Who in Their Own Words. New York: Quick Fox, 1979. Fletcher, Tony. Moon: The Life and Death of a Rock Legend. New York: Harper, 1999. Garfield, Simon. “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” Intelligent Life (summer 2011). Giuliano, Geoffrey. Behind Blue Eyes: The Life of Pete Townshend. New York: Plume, 1996. “Irish Jack.” http://www.thewho.net/irishjack. Kelts, Roland. “Pete Townshend’s War.” New Yorker (October 9, 2012). The Kids Are Alright. DVD. 1979. Marsh, Dave. Before I Get Old: The Story of The Who. London: Plexus, 1983. ———. “The Who in America.” In The Who Thirty Years of Maximum R&B. Universal City, CA: MCA, 1994. Neill, Andy, and Matt Kent. Anyway Anyhow Anywhere: The Complete Chronicle of The Who, 1958–1978. New York: Barnes and Noble, 2002. Perry, John. The Who Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy. New York: Schirmer Books, 1998. Philips, Binky. “I Caught Pete Townshend’s Guitar.” Huffington Post (June 15, 2010). ———. “I Have a Chat with Pete Townshend in His Hotel Suite, 1974.” Huffington Post (September 16, 2011). ———. “I See the Who’s First American Gig with Murray the K, 1967.” Huffington Post (March 7, 2011). ———. “Pete Townshend Meets my Mom and Dad at the Fillmore East.” Huffington Post (October 28, 2010). Smith, Larry David. Pete Townshend: The Minstrel’s Dilemma. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999. Townshend, Emma. The Independent (June 17, 2002). Townshend, Pete. Who I Am: A Memoir. New York: HarperCollins, 2012. Unterberger, Richie. Won’t Get Fooled Again: The Who from Lifehouse to Quadrophenia. London: Jawbone Press, 2011. 197

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Wilkerson, Mark. Who Are You: The Life of Pete Townshend. London: Omnibus Press, 2008. Wright, Tom. Roadwork: Rock ’n’ Roll Turned Inside Out. New York: Hal Leonard Books, 2007.

BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT Appleby, Joyce. The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism. New York: Norton, 2008. Bailey, Peter. “Fats Waller Meets Harry Champion: Americanization, National Identity and Sexual Politics in Inter-war British Music Hall.” Cultural & Social History 4 (December 2007): 495–509. ———. Music Hall: The Business of Pleasure. Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1986. ———. Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Bailyn, Bernard. Atlantic History: Concepts and Contours. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Bayley, Amanda. Recorded Music: Performance, Culture and Technology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Braun, Hans-Joachim, ed. Music and Technology in the Twentieth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Brooks, David. “The Power of the Particular.” New York Times (June 25, 2012). Brown, Timothy Scott. “Subcultures, Pop Music and Politics: Skinheads and ‘Nazi Rock’ in England and Germany.” Journal of Social History 38 (fall 2004): 157–78. Campbell, Jonathan. Red Rock: The Long, Strange March of Chinese Rock and Roll. Hong Kong: Earnshaw, 2011. Cannon, Steve. Popular Music in France from Chanson to Techno: Culture, Identity, and Society. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003. Carson, David A. Grit, Noise, and Revolution: The Birth of Detroit Rock ’n’ Roll. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Catefois, Theo, ed. The Rock History Reader. London: Routledge, 2007. Cavicchi, Daniel. Tramps like Us: Music and Meaning amongst Bruce Springsteen Fans. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Chapman, Robert. Selling the Sixties: The Pirates and Pop Music Radio. London: Routledge, 1992. Chase, Gilbert. America’s Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present. Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Coelho, Victor. The Cambridge Companion to the Guitar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Cohen, Stanley. Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980. Cohn, Nik. Yes We Have No. London: Secker and Warbay, 1999. Cook, Nicholas. The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Cope, Andrew. Black Sabbath and the Rise of Heavy Metal Music. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. Crocker, Richard, and David Hiley, eds. The Early Middle Ages to 1300. Vol. 2 of The New Oxford History of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Cushman, Thomas. “Rich Rastas and Communist Rockers: A Comparative Study of the Origin, Diffusion and Defusion of Revolutionary Musical Codes.” Journal of Popular Culture 25, no. 3 (1991): 17–61. Danenberg, Mary A. “Temporary Hearing Loss and Rock Music.” Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in the Schools 18 (July 1987): 267–74. Davies, Ray. X-ray: The Unauthorized Autobiography. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1994.

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INDEX

“A Quick One,” 8, 108, 109 African Americans, xiv, 11, 24, 46, 59, 98, 139, 175 Amazing Journey, 45 “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere,” 31, 33, 34, 47, 55, 73, 81, 87, 109 Atlantic world, xiv, 5, 19, 56, 59, 61, 79, 98, 104, 114, 116, 139, 147, 148, 163, 165, 166, 174; and generation, xii, xv, 124, 153, 155, 175; and history, x, xi, xiii, 34, 37, 107, 175; and Revolutions, 15, 16; and slave trade, 11, 37, 174 Australia, 61 authenticity, 94, 96 Baba, Meher, 42, 99, 110 “Baba O’Riley,” 11, 142 Bailyn, Bernard, xiii “Bargain,” 114 Barnes, Richard, x, 51, 104 BBC, 26, 54, 104, 125 Beatles, x, xiii, 5, 29, 38, 51, 55, 71, 93, 97, 109, 120, 139 “Billy Budd,” 105, 108 brand, The Who, ix, xi, 2, 34, 48, 49, 56, 76, 84, 87, 91, 120, 159, 162, 170, 172 Brighton Beach, 32, 113, 129, 150 British Invasion, x, xiii, 11, 31, 38, 39, 45, 72, 117, 122, 142, 154, 157, 161, 163 cabaret, 19

“Call Me Lightening,” 47 Canada, 56, 61, 69, 98, 116, 118, 121, 135, 148 Cash, Johnny, 13 Chicago, 12, 28, 120 Cincinnati, xv, 70, 103, 120, 126, 161 Clapton, Eric, 26, 46, 47, 98, 172 Clash, The, 117, 158, 161 classic rock, xv, 80, 161, 163, 164, 170 Cohen, Stanley, 87, 128, 133, 134 Cohn, Nik, 53, 96, 164 Cold War, 27, 30, 41, 52, 71, 80, 89, 99, 171 Concert for New York, 171, 172, 174 Cream, xiii, 134, 137, 148, 163 crowds, 127–128 Daltrey, Roger, xii, 2, 6, 11, 13, 17, 21, 49, 51, 110, 133; and film, 10, 45, 161 de-colonization, 30, 41, 116 deep blues, 12, 24 Delta, 12, 24, 46, 121 Denmark, 72, 73, 123 Detroit, 12, 28, 118, 120 diffusion, 37, 49 Dylan, Bob, 5, 59, 86, 98, 142, 163 Eastern Europe, 165, 166, 167 Entwistle, John, xii, 2, 6, 14, 63, 109, 169 European Economic Community, 30, 41, 116 205

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fandom, 58, 59, 133, 162 Fargo, North Dakota, 76 feedback, x, xi, xiii, 43, 44, 81, 84, 94, 96, 148, 174 First World War, 18, 25, 45, 116, 147 French Revolution, 8, 15, 107, 139, 147, 154 Godechot, Jacques, 114 Goldhawk Road Social Club, 36, 64, 65, 84, 113, 118 Grande Ballroom (Detroit), 57, 120, 130, 137 Grateful Dead, 132, 136 Great Depression, 24, 29, 116 guitars, xiv, 45, 46 “Happy Jack,” 67, 120, 142 headphones, 22, 80, 90, 92, 169 heavy metal, 84, 154, 156, 158 Hendrix, Jimi, 10, 53, 148 Herman’s Hermits, 31, 35, 69, 83 High Numbers, 30, 31, 47, 51, 52, 124 hippies, 131–132, 133, 136 Hoffman, Abbie, 102, 133 Hooker, John Lee, 13, 59, 104 Hynde, Chrissie, 62, 121, 142 “I Can See for Miles,” 54, 109 “I Can’t Explain,” 5, 21, 29, 31, 36, 55, 87, 109 Industrial Revolution, 15, 16, 17, 44, 49 Isle of Wight Concert, 57, 69, 125, 130 Italy, 7, 28, 71, 98 Jackson, Mississippi, 67, 86, 118 jazz, 12, 18, 24, 59 Jim Crow, 12, 26 “Join Together,” 81 Jones, Kenney, 34 Judt, Tony, 27 “The Kids Are Alright,” 45, 161, 163 The Kids Are Alright (film), 159, 160 Kilburn concert, 160 King, Martin Luther, 97, 148 Kinks, xiii, 5, 55 laissez-faire, 16, 40, 42, 50, 57, 116

INDEX

Lambert, Kit, 2, 33, 35, 45, 51, 52, 53, 54, 59, 65, 72, 104, 113, 118, 124, 140 Leary, Timothy, 79 Led Zeppelin, xi, xiii, 29, 32, 51, 76, 83, 109, 136, 154 Levitin, Daniel, 90, 92 Lifehouse, 42, 89, 124, 126, 127 Liszt, Franz, 10 Live at Leeds, 2, 32, 94, 96, 97 Liverpool, 28, 75 London, xii, 1, 7, 14, 17, 18, 33, 36, 51, 54, 63, 128, 152 lumpen, 128, 134, 152 Lyons, “Irish” Jack, 64, 100, 113, 136, 140, 150, 159 Macmillan, Harold, 30, 173 Madison Square Garden, 102, 154, 172 “Magic Bus,” 11, 96 Marquee Club, 2, 33, 65, 121, 137 Marsh, Dave, 37, 62, 120, 124, 164 Marshall amps, 4, 47, 82 Marx, Karl, 107, 128 “Maximum R&B,” 14, 133, 137, 151 Meaden, Pete, 33, 51, 52, 57, 132 Melville, Herman, 105 Metzger, Gustav, 35, 88 microphone, 21, 49 Mods, ix, xiii, xv, 32, 35, 36, 72, 87, 98, 107, 108, 129, 130, 132, 134, 140, 151, 159, 173 Monterey Pop Festival, 31, 61, 68, 126, 132 Moody Blues, 45, 132 Moog synthesizer, 45 Moon, Keith, xii, xv, 19, 35, 48, 55, 76, 100, 110, 140, 143, 153, 160, 161, 162, 168 Mozart, Amadeus, 10, 11 Murray the K, 67, 137 music hall, 1, 17, 18, 23, 50 “My Generation,” 1, 2, 17, 21, 31, 33, 34, 37, 38, 47, 55, 56, 81, 86, 87, 96, 104, 109, 111 “Naked Eye,” 63, 70 NATO, 28, 116, 155 the Netherlands, 72 New Musical Express, 60, 62, 138

I N DE X

New Orleans, 24, 25, 28 New York City, 67, 102, 118, 154, 156; and September 11, 2001, xv, 24, 170, 171–172 Nixon, Richard, 148, 155 Norway, 73, 122 opera, xii, 7, 8, 10, 19 Page, Jimmy, 29, 42 Palmer, R. R., 114 Paris, 7, 19, 71, 74, 122, 164 Phillips, Binky, 96, 137 “Pictures of Lily,” 19, 109, 141 “Pinball Wizard,” 19, 40 Pink Floyd, 132 pirate radio, 54, 125 power pop, xv, 55, 94 Presley, Elvis, 1, 14, 26, 29, 122 punk, 39, 154, 155–158, 167 “Pure and Easy,” 89 Pussy Riot, 166 Quadrophenia, 2, 31, 37, 70, 86, 93, 107, 110, 113, 129, 139, 143–145, 149, 149–153, 155, 164; and film version, 151, 159 radio, development of, 20 Railway Hotel, 52, 63 Ramones, 156 record player/phonograph, development of, 20, 22 “Relax,” 47, 91 “Relay,” 42, 43 rhythm and blues, xiv, 12, 24 rockers, 33, 108, 128, 129, 134, 150 Rolling Stone, 60, 62, 138 Rolling Stones, ix, xi, xiii, 5, 31, 32, 38, 51, 55, 71, 76, 97, 120, 126, 135, 139 Rotten, Johnny, 156 Second World War, 17, 28, 29, 30, 34, 116, 166 “The Seeker,” 71 Sex Pistols, 156–158, 168 Shepherd’s Bush, 1, 18, 33, 43, 65, 80, 108, 110, 120, 121, 124, 128, 135, 136, 145, 150

207

skiffle, 28, 29 skinheads, 133, 167 Smith, Patti, 121, 142, 156 Soviet Union, 27, 52, 80, 114, 155, 165, 166 Springsteen, Bruce, 120, 161 Squadronnaires, 75 Stamp, Chris, 14, 33, 35, 45, 51, 52, 53, 87, 105 Stein, Jeff, 159 stuttering, 33, 104, 107 subculture, ix, 2, 32, 128, 131, 133, 152, 157, 161 “Substitute,” 31, 55, 109 Sweden, xiii, 54, 72, 73, 84, 103, 123 Talmy, Shel, 31, 56, 86, 104 theremin, 45 tinnitus, 3, 91, 170 Tommy, xv, 2, 8, 10, 19, 30, 32, 40, 45, 56, 57, 58, 86, 91, 93, 94, 114, 120, 139, 141, 142, 161 Toronto, 120, 161 Townshend, Pete, xii, xv, 2, 23, 42, 55, 62, 70, 87, 88, 94, 99, 104, 108, 126, 133, 139, 140, 158, 165, 170, 173; and Second World War, 28; and smashing guitars, 35, 36, 63, 88, 91, 100, 103, 147; and social class, 17; and windmilling, 48, 86, 102 Treaty of Versailles, 171 trente glorieuses, 114 U2, 46, 121, 149 utopian, 42, 81, 155 Vedder, Eddie, 46, 151, 172 Vietnam, 80, 88, 98, 148, 155, 164 violence, xi, xv, 87, 100, 129 volume, xi, 3, 70, 80, 84, 91, 95 Wagner, Richard, 10, 151 Waters, Muddy, 13, 25, 46 West Germany, xiii, 28, 41, 54, 71, 98, 116, 124, 148 The Who Sell Out, 8, 55, 56, 92, 93, 117, 142 Who’s Next, 2, 32, 70, 142

208

Woodstock festival, 57, 69, 125, 126, 132, 148 “woman question,” 139 “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” 86, 142

INDEX

Wright, Tom, 12, 76, 83, 120, 130, 137 “Young Man Blues,” 26, 32, 96 Young Vic, 126

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Casey Harison is professor of history and director of the Center for Communal Studies at the University of Southern Indiana, Evansville, Indiana. He is the author of The Stonemasons of Creuse in NineteenthCentury Paris (2008) and articles on French and Atlantic history. Harison received his undergraduate degree from the University of New Orleans and his doctorate from the University of Iowa.

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