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Amazing journey: story of the Who |
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Written by Kurt Brighton
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Thursday, 03 January 2008 |
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I hate to break it to all the Ramones, Sex Pistols and even Stooges fans out there, but The Who — despite the group’s later arena-rock excesses — were in fact the first punk band.
If you don’t believe that, rent “Amazing Journey: The Story of The Who” and check out the sullen, barely civil way the embryonic rock gods dealt with each other (or didn’t) on stage in 1964. Check out the “I-don’t-give-a-crap” sneer that a teenaged Pete Townshend, John Entwistle and Roger Daltrey offer the cameras, the audience, and each other — the same sneer made famous by Johnny Rotten almost two decades later. And listen carefully to their earliest live shows, where Keith Moon, a former surf band drummer, doubled the rhythm of their R&B covers out of boredom, making a noise that to Roger Daltrey sounded “…like a jet engine taking off behind me.”
Sounds like punk to me.
But The Who was also a boy-band before that term was invented, groomed by their first management team to adopt the “mod” pose just when it was emerging in working-class British youth culture. And the four of them competed intensely with one another on stage, with personalities so distinct and contradictory that it’s a miracle they made it through their first few years without killing each other. As unlikely as it seems in retrospect, Pete Townshend emerged out of all this as one of the most prolific, nuanced and talented songwriters in modern music history, seamlessly blending all the rage and pathos, all the passion and pain of youth, and conjuring it into a living thing, as embodied by the band and their music.
These contradictions are just the tip of the iceberg in the story of The Who, nicely laid bare by directors Paul Crowder and Murray Lerner in the two-disc set “Amazing Journey”, through funny, frank, and often nakedly honest interviews with band members, their children, friends, spouses, musicians and former managers, as well as rare archival footage. Despite the ease with which films like this can slip into formula, the story never gets boring, even for Who fans who may be familiar with many of the tale’s plot twists.
Allowing the participants to address these old stories is what makes this film uniquely valuable. For instance, as many Who fans know, bassist Entwistle has often been given short shrift in terms of his impact on the group’s music. The Ox’s stoic, barely-mobile stage presence necessarily took a backseat to Townshend’s frenetic leaping windmills, Daltrey’s mic-swinging swagger, and Moon’s untamed, frenzied attack on the drums. But as Townshend points out, Entwistle essentially played lead bass guitar, re-inventing an instrument a few short years after it had come into existence.
And that’s the real secret of The Who: all four members played lead. Moon played lead drums, Entwistle lead bass, Townshend lead rhythm guitar and Daltrey lead vocals. That’s what gave the band such an explosive sound, as well as the sense that every time they played, they were dancing on the edge of chaos for two hours at a time. And that’s also why later incarnations of the band after Moon’s untimely departure in 1978 never really worked in the long-term. Clips from the Kenny Jones era are thankfully brief. But later regroupings did work, at least for one-off shows like the 9/11 benefit Concert For NYC featuring Zak Starkey on drums, an electrifying performance that has become legendary.
Although VH1 aired a truncated version of the theatrical release of “Amazing Journey”, it’s worth seeing not only the theatrical release in its entirety, but also the companion disc. On it, the filmmakers delve even deeper into the music and the personalities, breaking out each member’s individual tracks from old recordings, examining in detail the nuances therein. Even if you think you know what Moon or Entwistle did on those songs you know by heart, it’s still eye-opening to hear their tracks isolated from the rest of the band.
Perhaps most touching of all are the interviews near the end of the film with Townshend and Daltrey. As the only surviving members talk about the iron-like bond they have formed in the face of 10 lifetimes worth of slings and arrows, it is a poignant reminder that someday, perhaps soon, one of them will be left all alone.
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