Seriously? The Who?

I got a notice from Ticketmaster alerting me to the availability of tickets for the upcoming tour of The Who. This raises a couple of questions for me:

  • If half of the original members of a band are dead, can you really call the band the original name? In other words, I could go with “Roger and Pete on tour,” (which is kind of what Jimmy Page and Robert Plant did a few years ago), and I was willing to go with The Who sans Keith Moon (mostly because that is how I was introduced to The Who as a youth), but also without John Entwistle?
  • It seems to me that if you are a band known for (among other things) breaking stuff on stage and in hotel rooms, wishing in a song to die before getting old, and other generally childish bits of behavior, then you shouldn’t be allowed to go on tour when you do indeed get old.
  • Having said all that, I really liked The Who as a kid. It was my first big rock show, the first time that they were over-the-hill…. 25 years ago. Am I going to this round of shows, which will be making a stop in Detroit? Won’t get fooled again, baby….

4 thoughts on “Seriously? The Who?”

  1. I saw the Who, probably the same tour that you did, at the Pontiac Silverdome. It seems like it was around 1982 and the Clash and Eddie Money opened for them. I just remember from my seat I could see about three people around me throwing up in their seats. Those were the days.

  2. Saw the same show at The Silverdome. Was about a thousand degrees in there. The Clash pretty much got booed off stage, which was fine, because they really sounded terrible. Eddie Money went over a little better.

    This was soon after those kids got trampled to death at an earlier Who show. Remembered being a little nervous about that happening again, even though we had assigned seats.

  3. I, too, wish that I could go back and see The Who that I saw about 12 times from late ’70’s to early 2000’s, from Pittsburgh and Philly to Toronto. I sometimes think they should bill this, not Who’s Next but Who’s Left.
    That being said, I now have a new family with high school age kids that never saw them, and if I don’t let them get a chance now, however diluted, then when?

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