Two better, Two bet
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Oct. 6th, 2006 | 10:55
Just for the record, as the principal part of my birthday celebration, I went to see the Who at the Saddledome last night. I won’t attempt a full-length review or reminiscence, as I did with Queen in Vancouver a few months ago, because to be honest, they weren’t nearly as good. It was, to be clear, quite a good concert; it just wasn’t up to that standard. I wouldn’t have travelled 500 miles to see it, and if I had, I would have been disappointed.
If you could have only two members of each band’s original lineup in concert, you would certainly choose Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey for the Who — meaning no respect to the late Keith Moon — but you would never choose Brian May and Roger Taylor. Yet May and Taylor, with a front man who was emphatically not Freddie Mercury, did a better job of being Queen than Townshend and Daltrey did of being the Who.
I think a major reason for this is that Queen frankly acknowledged the gaping hole Mercury left behind, with plentiful footage of him on the screens, his recorded rendition of ‘It’s a Beautiful Day’ to open the show, and his studio-magic duet with Paul Rodgers on ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. Townshend and Daltrey never so much as spoke Keith Moon’s name, though they mentioned John Entwistle when introducing his replacement on bass. And none of the new musicians were permitted to step forward of the invisible curtain separating The Two from The Hired Plebs, which ran right across the front of Zak Starkey’s drum kit. The show was not about the Who, the power-rock quartet of the sixties and seventies; nor was it about the Who in its current form. It was the Pete and Roger Show, and suffered for that.
By the way, Starkey is a hell of a drummer in his own right — diametrically opposite in style from his father, whose chilly response to any comparison between the two is, ‘There’s no best’ — and covered Keith Moon’s parts better than anyone had a licence to expect.
The band tried to rock their way through twelve new songs off their upcoming CD, which was far too many. It‘s not that they’re not good enough to perform on stage; some were quite interesting to listen to, and one or two may well take their places in the Who’s permanent canon. It’s that most of them are, well, album tracks: they can’t hold a candle to the Who’s classic arena repertoire, long since honed and perfected through endless live performances. There was no ‘Squeeze Box’, no ‘Kids Are Alright’, or any number of other oldies, and audience members called out for them in vain.
On the bright side, both Townshend and Daltrey have recovered magnificently from their pathetic condition in the 1980s, when Townshend had to play acoustic guitar in a soundproof booth on the stage because of his tinnitus, and Daltrey’s vocal cords were festooned with nodules the size of grapes. Daltrey was in fine voice, though he is now a fully mature baritone and not the boyish tenor of Tommy, and Townshend, though a bit stiff-jointed, windmilled and solo’d with a fair approximation of his old verve and gusto.
On the whole, I’m quite glad I went. But it will never be the signal event in my musical history that it was to see Brian May playing the Red Special.
If you could have only two members of each band’s original lineup in concert, you would certainly choose Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey for the Who — meaning no respect to the late Keith Moon — but you would never choose Brian May and Roger Taylor. Yet May and Taylor, with a front man who was emphatically not Freddie Mercury, did a better job of being Queen than Townshend and Daltrey did of being the Who.
I think a major reason for this is that Queen frankly acknowledged the gaping hole Mercury left behind, with plentiful footage of him on the screens, his recorded rendition of ‘It’s a Beautiful Day’ to open the show, and his studio-magic duet with Paul Rodgers on ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. Townshend and Daltrey never so much as spoke Keith Moon’s name, though they mentioned John Entwistle when introducing his replacement on bass. And none of the new musicians were permitted to step forward of the invisible curtain separating The Two from The Hired Plebs, which ran right across the front of Zak Starkey’s drum kit. The show was not about the Who, the power-rock quartet of the sixties and seventies; nor was it about the Who in its current form. It was the Pete and Roger Show, and suffered for that.
By the way, Starkey is a hell of a drummer in his own right — diametrically opposite in style from his father, whose chilly response to any comparison between the two is, ‘There’s no best’ — and covered Keith Moon’s parts better than anyone had a licence to expect.
The band tried to rock their way through twelve new songs off their upcoming CD, which was far too many. It‘s not that they’re not good enough to perform on stage; some were quite interesting to listen to, and one or two may well take their places in the Who’s permanent canon. It’s that most of them are, well, album tracks: they can’t hold a candle to the Who’s classic arena repertoire, long since honed and perfected through endless live performances. There was no ‘Squeeze Box’, no ‘Kids Are Alright’, or any number of other oldies, and audience members called out for them in vain.
On the bright side, both Townshend and Daltrey have recovered magnificently from their pathetic condition in the 1980s, when Townshend had to play acoustic guitar in a soundproof booth on the stage because of his tinnitus, and Daltrey’s vocal cords were festooned with nodules the size of grapes. Daltrey was in fine voice, though he is now a fully mature baritone and not the boyish tenor of Tommy, and Townshend, though a bit stiff-jointed, windmilled and solo’d with a fair approximation of his old verve and gusto.
On the whole, I’m quite glad I went. But it will never be the signal event in my musical history that it was to see Brian May playing the Red Special.
(no subject)
from:
jd3000
date: Nov. 7th, 2006 2:03 (UTC)
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Are you sure that's not "There's no Best"? :-D
--JD
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