NOISE

“In Tommy’s mind, everything is incredible, meaningless beauty.”

--Pete Townshend, Rolling Stone interview, July 12, 1969


Let me tell you what The Who means to me.

1988: I was 14 years old, in the 8th grade, and my parents were breaking up. I was making the rounds of classic rock bands: The Doors, Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, Black Sabbath, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Pink Floyd... I was catching up on all the greats, much in the same way I started reading classic literature the following year-- I wanted to know a little bit about all of the masters so I could figure out which ones spoke to my heart.

The Doors spoke to my dark side; Floyd spoke to my cerebral interest in sound design; Zep appealed to my horny teen wanderlust; Sabbath was the forbidden zone, thanks to my religious upbringing and my need to rebel; CCR made me think about less being more and led me to post-punk and The Velvet Underground; The Beatles were The Beatles...

Later on I got into The Velvets, The Stones, and countless other groups, but the one group that actually spoke to my heart and soul was The Who.

Blame it on Pete Townshend, one of rock's most poignant songwriters. He has this ability to make you want to scream and cry at the same time, with his melodies, with his guitar playing, with his lyrics.

Blame it on his band, more a gang of blue-collar thugs than a collection of art-school students like Pete: Roger Daltrey, handsome and charismatic, whose looks belied a mean temperament and a whale of a voice; John Entwistle, perhaps the loudest bass player in the world and also The Who's most accomplished musician (his bass lines were more like leads, and dude played the trumpet as well!); and, of course, Keith "The Loon" Moon, poor on technique but brimming with unparalled mad genius behind the skins.

In Junior High, I was depressed, but not for the same reasons as everyone else. Yes, everyone felt like a loser trying to fit in, but I felt like I was alone. I didn't care about fitting in-- I was lost in my own world, and no one was going to get me to open up.

No one.

My schoolmates and I were talking about Pink Floyd's The Wall when someone on the school bus told me about Tommy. They said it was the first rock opera. They said it wasn't as good as The Wall but that it was just as important. All I knew about The Who at that time was that they had a song called "I Can See For Miles" that used to get played constantly on the classic rock station KLSX, which is now a talk radio station thanks to the success of Howard Stern in the '90's.

My friend Mike Kelly and I were on some sort of crusade to hear every single important rock album ever made before we were born, and so he and I embarked on a mission: find a copy of Tommy and listen to it.

Mike's dad had seen The Who perform Tommy in its entirety in 1969, but he only owned the soundtrack to the movie adaptation by Ken Russell. I found a copy of the opera performed by the London Symphony which featured guest appearances by various rock stars.

One night, I asked my mom if she could take me to the local Wherehouse to buy an album with money I had saved. She drove me to the store, and it only took me five minutes to find Tommy on cassette. My mother marveled at the speed and singularity with which I was able to make my selection.

I put it in the car stereo as we drove home. Usually my mother couldn't stand the "noise" I listened to, and I was fully expecting Tommy to be a loud, boisterous, blistering rock experience. But after the "Overture", it devolved into a quiet, acoustic tune about the birth of a baby boy. My mother looked at me like I was sick-- she was used to me blaring "acid rock", the kind she avoided as a young girl in favor of the early Beatles, Motown and girl groups.

When we got home, I listened to the album four times before I started to figure out the story. By the next day, I concluded that Tommy was about me: a young boy traumatized and made deaf, dumb, and blind by a tragic family incident, who found salvation and redemption through the healing power of music.

I was a fan of The Who from that point on. I bought every album I could find, and back then The Who's stock was a little low; thus, all of their albums were discount marked.

Then, the news came: The Who were reuniting and going back on tour. It was as if Pete Townshend heard of my interest in the group and resurrected them solely for the purpose of entertaining me.

I read up on the mythology of The Who: they started off as Mods, rode the wave of the British Invasion, made it big with Tommy (and inadvertantly started the rock opera craze that groups like The Kinks, Pink Floyd and Yes strip-mined for a full decade), became The World's Greatest Rock Band at one point, helped usher in punk, and survived the death of Keith Moon at the end of the '70's, only to limp to an undignified end at the onset of the '80's.

People told me it was a waste of time to go see The Who, now that they were old, now that Moon was long gone, now that their relevance seemed questionable. I didn't care-- Mike and I bought tickets for the 1989 Reunion Tour, and (given the somewhat recent death of bassist John Entwistle) I am glad that I did. Now I can brag that I saw The Who live when there were three original members in the band!

To bone up on the concert, Mike and I went hog-wild and bought all the albums we could, trying to cram them all into our consciousness before the show date. I especially fell for Who's Next, considered by many to be The Who's best studio album, and which contained the legendary "Baba O'Riley", also known to us as "Teenage Wasteland".

My life was a teenage wasteland at the time, and then when I heard Quadrophenia for the first time, I was blown away. How could a band be so fucking good? How could one group capture all of the unease and doubt of the adolescent years so faithfully? How could one songwriter pen such authentic lyrics, encapsulating the self-loathing and angst of not only his own generation but mine as well?

The concert was my first major rock event, and it changed my life 100%. I'd entertained being a doctor or a lawyer before that concert; I thought that I would end up like everyone else in my Magnet class, on the path to wealth and suburban bliss, with the house and the car and the two-car garage and the 2.5 kids and the family dog...

After seeing The Who rock the L.A. Colliseum in 1989, I gave The Finger to all of my business aspirations and decided that I was born to be a dreamer. Fuck college, fuck getting an ulcer and going bald, fuck trying to do homework and getting into Harvard... I wanted to rock.

The ensuing years haven't been that kind to The Who. Moon and Entwistle, aka "The Ox", are dead. Pete was busted on some child-porn charges, which forced him to disclose a fact that I'd suspected all along-- that he himself had been the victim of sexual abuse as a child, via his mentally ill aunt. How else can someone write a song like "Fiddle About" or "The Acid Queen" and not be speaking from experience?

Bands like The Stones carry the banner of being The Greatest, by virtue of the fact that they have most of the original band intact and had more hit singles than The Who (it's a fact that The Who never had a Number One single in the States). But there was something truly great about The Who that a band like The Stones cannot match.

Mick Jagger and company thrived off of rock and roll excess and notoriety, but they were relatively safe compared to the menace of The Who. It took the combined efforts of Mick, Keith Richards and Brian Jones to build up the aura of darkness behind The Stones, but all it took for The Who was the antics of Keith Moon.

There are so many Keith Moon stories out there, most of them apocryphal, all of them hilarious. My favorite story about Keith also exemplifies what I feel about anything I've ever been a creative party to, in my own life.

Legend has it that Keith was entering a hotel lobby (he was infamous for turning the destruction of a hotel room into an art form) blaring a Who rehearsal tape from a portable tape player. The hotel concierge, not knowing who he was dealing with, told Moon to "turn off that noise". Surprisingly, to the shock of everyone else, Moon complied.

But that wasn't the end of it.

He returned to his room, and took out his trusty bag of explosives, which he used on tour occasionally to liven up the proceedings. He rigged the hinges on the front door of his suite with some detonators. Then, he phoned the concierge and asked him to come up to his suite to help out with a "problem".

The concierge showed up at the door and knocked. On cue, Keith Moon blew the hinges off of the door. It fell over, smoke emanating from the room. Keith calmly walked out of the room, stepping on the door, tape player in hand. He took a long, hard look at the astonished hotel concierge.

Keith pointed to the door and said, "That was noise." Then he pointed at the tape player, still blaring, and said, "THIS is the fucking Who!"

You gotta love it.

The image of John Entwistle in the movie The Kids Are Alright, skeet-shooting gold records from the front lawn of his estate? You gotta love it.

Pete Townshend knocking a man off the stage of a Who concert with his guitar, and finding out later that the man was an undercover cop trying to alert concertgoers of a structure fire in the adjacent building? You gotta love it.

Live At Leeds, the reissue? You gotta love it.

The Who at Woodstock, which they considered their worst performance ever? You still gotta love it.

The 1979 Ohio concert that resulted in the stampede deaths of 11 fans trying to get into the show? Sorry, I can't show that any love.

Roger Daltrey's swinging microphone gymnastics? Gotta love it. His acting career in the aftermath of The Who? You don't have to love it, but I do.

The last two Who albums featuring Kenney Jones on drums? They're hard to love, but I can find it in my heart.

John Entwistle's death in a Las Vegas hotel room, with a table full of cocaine and two prostitutes at his side? You GOTTA love it.

I still have the concert T-Shirt. On the front is a famous picture of The Who, feigning sleep and draped in the Union Jack. It still fits, although it's a bit torn. And I love it.

I leave you with song lyrics-- notice how I put them last, because I know that not everyone who reads this wants to read lyrics to songs they probably haven't heard.

This is my all-time favorite Who song, off an album of rarities entitled Odds & Sods. It was supposed to be a part of the album that eventually morphed into Who's Next: a concept album tentatively titled Lifehouse, which has since been released in its entirety.

The concept of the album centered around The Note, a stand-in for God or The Force or The Universal Mind or whatever you want to call the dynamic binding energy of the cosmos. Since Pete Townshend was a follower of Meher Baba and Eastern religions, its symbolism is apparent and intentional.

The song is called "Pure And Easy" and it makes me laugh and cry every time I hear it. Its melody is stunningly beautiful, like the face of a woman who inspires more passion inside of me than I can bear. It represents not only everything I feel about The Who and the music that saved my soul, but also about life in general.

If you ever get a chance to hear it, then you will probably come closer than anything else to understanding what my heart is all about.

Have a nice weekend, folks...


There once was a Note, pure and easy,
Playing so free, like a breath rippling by.
The Note is eternal, I hear it, it sees me,
Forever we blend it, forever we die.

I listened and I heard music in a word,
And words when you played your guitar,
The noise that I was hearing was a million people cheering,
And a child flew past me riding in a star.

As people assemble,
Civilization is trying to find a new way to die,
But killing is really merely scene changer,
All men are bored with other men's lies.

I listened and I heard music in a word,
And words when you played your guitar,
The noise that I was hearing was a million people cheering,
And a child flew past me riding in a star.

Gas on the hillside, oil in the teacup,
Watch all the chords of life lose their joy,
Distortion becomes somehow pure in its wildness,
The Note that began all can also destroy.

We all know success when we all find our own dreams,
And our love is enough to knock down any walls,
And the future's been seen as men try to realize,
The simple secret of The Note in us all.

I listened and I heard music in a word,
And words when you played your guitar,
The noise that I was hearing was a million people cheering,
And a child flew past me riding in a star.

There once was a Note, pure and easy,
Playing so free, like a breath rippling by.