Word: great
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...long time, back in their early days, the four received a great deal of notoriety for smashing their instruments at the end of each performance. It was, at first, a flashy, frightening and finally exhilarating thing to see. Drummer Keith Moon blew up his drum kit, and Townshend rammed the neck of his guitar into his amp, while Daltrey slammed his microphone against the stage and Entwistle held tight to his bass, playing stubbornly on like a shipwreck's lone survivor trying to keep dry in a leaking lifeboat. There was too much discussion about how all this was rock...
...Beatles fell prey to divisiveness, disarray. The Rolling Stones traveled fast, turned gangrenous. The Who kept its distance, stayed strong by staying stubborn, contentious. Buoyed by the great breaking wave of British rock during the '60s, the group managed to swim clear. "We've sometimes been able to hide behind bands like the Beatles and the Stones, who got so much flak," Townshend says. "Yet we were significantly stronger than other contemporaries. Stronger in live performance, for example. And much more daring with material...
...observes, "Did you ever notice that nobody ever does Townshend's songs? The Who are the only people who can play them. That's one reason we've survived. None of us is very good on his own. It's only as part of The Who that we're great...
Daltrey got the band together. At 15, he left school in London, took a job as a sheet-metal worker that he held for five years. He also made his own guitars and formed a group called the Detours. On the street one day, he spotted "this great big geezer with a homemade bass that looked like a football boot with a neck sticking out of it," and recruited Entwistle on the spot. Soon after that, Daltrey decked the Detour's lead singer and took over the vocals himself. Now the Detours needed a rhythm guitar player. Entwistle mentioned...
...were from a working-class background in London. Daltrey's father was a clerk, Entwistle's a mechanic. But both Townshend's parents were dance-band musicians. "My dad's a great player," Townshend says. "Not a cowboy, but a great player. My mom was a singer. She was a bit of a cowboy." The band found its own cowboy, or show boater, one night when a half-drunk rowdy took the stage, displaced the drummer and gave an uninvited audition that ended when he kicked over the drum kit. Keith Moon was a member of the band...