![]() ![]() Townshend’s wit, his intelligence, is still running wild, in the many interviews that have appeared recently as well as on this LP. Time seems to be a challenge that’s left them invigorated, eager to get on with their lives - which is to say, eager to get on with rock & roll. And yet there is nothing pathetic about the record he and his band have made. Townshend, in fact, looks much older than he is: in this picture, he could pass for fifty. marked “Not to Be Taken Away.” Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend look very old. Keith Moon, unstable, unreliable, sits in a chair. The fears of aging, irrelevancy and the dissolution of one’s self, one’s band or one’s audience that peeked out of Who’s Nextand The Who by Numbers have finally surfaced whole. Who Are You is an LP the Who have been working toward all through the Seventies. Twitter Is Feeling Sorry for Whoever Got Seated Behind Tems at the 2023 Oscars If this is anger, if this is the end of the world, no one has anything to be afraid of. In “Had Enough,” the singer tries to get mad - “I’ve had enough of being nice,” he chants at the beginning “Here comes the end of the world,” he yells as the tune ends - but he can’t do it. The boozy stumblebum of “Who Are You” turns up again in Entwistle’s “Trick of the Light”: this time it’s sex that has pulled the rug out from under the singer, as he begs the prostitute he’s hired for the night to reassure him about his performance in bed. “In suspended animation,” he says quietly, “My childhood passed me by/If I speak without emotion/Then you know the reason why.” His hardest lines, “Every sentence in my head/Someone else has said,” bounce off Townshend’s admission in “New Song” that he has nothing to say that he hasn’t said before: cloning may be the promise of the future, but the Who are afraid they can enter the future (i.e., this year) only by cloning themselves. ![]() Entwistle’s vocal is perfect: lost, damned, accepting. The music, led on by an eerie, climbing riff, sets a science-fiction mood - a mood that’s all the more unsettling since the story is no longer quite science fiction. John Entwistle’s “905” is surely the finest cut here, a return to the form of “Boris the Spider,” “Whiskey Man” and “My Wife.” The timeliness of the song is uncanny: it’s about a test-tube baby. The other numbers on the LP, those that don’t posit rock as a metaphor for life, connect directly with those that do: they too are about fear, emptiness, failure. Debut Opening For the Who at Madison Square Garden Meet The Ridiculously Ambitious British Band That Made Its U.S. “I really want to know!” Daltrey shouts back, echoing Donovan’s “What Goes On,” but while Donovan communicated hippie certainty that all things would come, Daltrey is desperate, sure of nothing. Townshend (in the voice of Roger Daltrey) wakes up with one enormous question: Who are you? It’s addressed to Cook and Jones (Who are these upstarts, who would never have played a note had not Townshend picked up a guitar more than a decade back?) to the cop who, recognizing Townshend, sends him home without a bust (Who are the fans?) to himself (What does it mean to be a rocker? What kind of wreck has the life made him?) and, finally, to anyone who’s listening. The incident left Townshend passed out in a Soho street, which is where the song begins. Corrected, he felt even more confused: Why can’t I see straight? Cook and Jones, supposedly arrogant young punks working out their rock & roll Oedipal complex, were thrilled to meet Townshend and horrified at what he had to tell them: the Who were finished, used up, wasted. “Who Are You” was spun out of the night that Townshend, already drunk after hours of financial haggling, half-recognized two members of the Sex Pistols in a bar: that is, he thought either Steve Jones or Paul Cook was Johnny Rotten. The dynamics are much more subtle this time - and all the smugness is gone. And then there is “Who Are You,” a far stronger single than “Squeeze Box,” the hit from 1975’s The Who by Numbers, and a song that, stretched out over more than six minutes on the LP version, is far more moving than “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” the band’s certified Seventies masterpiece. ![]()
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