"You know who I like? Peter Townshend. He knows how not to play. Somebody else would use three chords, but he picks the one, the right one, and uses it. He knows how not to play." -- Miles Davis
View From A Backstage Pass is a compilation of (mostly) previously unreleased live material from between October of 1969 (at the Grande Ballroom in Detroit) and June of 1976 (at a stadium in Wales). Ever the contrarians, or just terminally mis-managed, the Who released this, their best and most-representative-of-their-strengths album, only to subscribers of their website ("Free to subscribers!" = a bullshit $50 subscription fee, which otherwise only gives you access to Pete Townshend's blog about how he committed to a new Who album in 2008 only to completely reverse himself hours later, and Roger Daltrey's blog wherein he reveals that he hates the internet, and tells readers to "Get a life"), a full 25 years after their first "final" break-up.
While they get it wrong in almost every conceivable extramusical respect (exorbitant ticket prices, exorbitant website subscription fees, songs used in 9 out of 10 TV commercials), they get it right musically. And they get it right by getting it wrong. Ginger Baker once implied that Keith Moon was somehow deficient because he wasn't "trained," and couldn't have played with a big band. All wrong. A big band couldn't have played with him.
"He's beautiful. Totally free." -- Tony Williams on Keith Moon
For every 100 drummers who engage in careerist beak-wetting, there are 2 or 3 who are redefining how percussion is approached, to the point where session work is simply not an option. It's the difference between accepting the established vocabularies, trying to make yourself, as a musician, available and amenable to all who work within those parameters; and finding the established parameters deficient, to the point that musicians will have to come to you (cf. Bill Dixon in Imagine The Sound talking about "all those people that laughed at Ornette Coleman, and then had to go around and try to play like him"). The irony is that as widely as Moon is heard on TV commercials nowadays, a drummer with Moon's imagination today wouldn't have a prayer trying to get steady session work. This isn't exactly a unique phenomenon: Bill Dixon often spoke of how, if he were to resurface today, Thelonious Monk wouldn't be allowed to participate in the competition that bears his name; and bass guitarist/composer James Jamerson's idiosyncratic style found a home at Motown (or, more accurately, Motown was built around Jamerson's idiosyncratic style), but was not easily adaptable to LA session work, and he was finding work hard to come by -- of course, today his work is correctly seen as what a sizeable chunk of 20th century Western music revolves around.
"The man is a drummer. Everything he plays, he contains it." -- Elvin Jones on Keith Moon
Any drummer in the world can woodshed their brains out and come out sounding like Ginger Baker or Neil Peart or Brian Chippendale or whatever shiny piece of equipment happens to be the Modern Drummer pinup of the month. But no amount of woodshedding can bring a drummer anywhere close to the precarious delicacy of Sunny Murray, or the swing of Al Jackson, or the casual propulsion of Bernard Purdie, or the focused panic of Keith Moon. It's the spaces between the sounds...and the spaces between the spaces between the sounds, and the impetus behind the sounds and the spaces. Musicians too often forget about those parts.
"We were playing a lot of Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Elmore James, B. B. King, and they are maximum R&B. You can't get any better. ... Of course any song we did get 'old of, we weren't playing straight from the record. We 'Who'd' it, so that what came out was the Who, not a copy." -- Keith Moon
A VH1 special this past summer featured a few bands paying tribute to the Who, but they did so in a pretty bizarre way: they tried to sound as much like the Who as possible. In what universe is that any kind of tribute? Aside from revealing that these bands had no original ideas (or if they did, they were well-hidden; I know the Flaming Lips are more daring than their performance on this show would indicate), I came away from the show with the sense that they'd all completely missed the point. The distinction between what these bands did and someone playing Guitar Hero is a technical one. These bands' love of the Who seemingly blinded them to the kinds of risks involved in making that music, and they were unwilling (or unable) to peer beneath the surface and come up with something unique. As Cecil Taylor said, "The favorite song could be the rope that hangs your development." (As a kind of corrective, Bettye LaVette re-imagined "Love Reign O'er Me" at the Kennedy Center Honors in December. She showed everyone how such a tribute is supposed to be approached.)
All the points that those bands on the VH1 special missed -- all the things that make the Who great -- are on this record: the vulnerability, the
precariousness, the humor, the danger, the awkwardness, the thrill of
the chase, fighting against fatigue, fighting the creeping
corporatization of the music business (or all of the above
simultaneously on "The Punk and the Godfather") -- it's all proudly on
display here. And it's where Sun Ra and Link Wray are finally
introduced to each other and realize how much they have in common.
The Who were always deeply suspicious of the future while recklessly
barreling towards it. How did their radical redefinition of their
instruments' roles and emphasis on the audience-performer relationship
to a degree unthinkable by most of their contemporaries turn into
streamlined showbiz? Obviously in capitalist culture, such co-option is
inevitable. But their deep frustration at not being able to change the
situation is audible. And fascinating.
There are no more profound triplets than those that Keith Moon uses to introduce the heretofore-unscaled heights of the version of "Magic Bus" heard here. It's the most earth-shattering climax in a career defined by earth-shattering climaxes, completely absurd, rampagingly comical in its violence. And if John Entwistle grew weary of having to play, as he put it, "eight-and-a-half minutes of A" in that song, you'd never know it; here, he's as hypnotically determined as Tony Allen.
The Kilburn 1977 DVD sheds new light on what was once unanimously thought to be a disastrous performance. It was filmed because director Jeff Stein didn't have any contemporary footage for his documentary The Kids Are Alright; problem was, the Who hadn't played live together in 14 months. The footage was immediately shelved, with all involved agreeing never to speak of it again (at one point in the concert Townshend says to Stein, "This wasn't fucking worth filming"). What's remarkable about this show isn't just how surprisingly dynamic they are, but that the performance shortcomings are largely technical -- a forgotten verse here, a missed chorus there. Improbably, Keith Moon, just returned from a year-long bender in California, is the most fired-up, the one with the most to lose, the one who lived for the danger of the live performance. He's also the one who manages to hold everything together (most strikingly, the famously tone-deaf Moon, in an attempt to remind Townshend how to play one of his own songs, sings it in the correct key, while a distrustful Townshend ends up playing it in the wrong key). At no point does the band appear tired or resigned; as one reviewer pointed out, this is supposed to be the Who at their worst? Given their live work up to that point, their worst show was roughly analogous to an off night by Charles Mingus' 1964 group. But with too-few exceptions, the desultory and lifeless shows of the 1980, 1981, 1982, and 1989 tours lowered the bar significantly; The Who At Their Worst was sadly being redefined on a nightly basis.
This concert is bundled with a 1969 performance which is reliably stunning, Moon was at the peak of his powers here, pouring all he learned from Dannie Richmond and Elvin Jones into a new language that is today spoken-of far more than it's spoken.
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