The Who are coming to Louisville Saturday night, riding the tricked-out mod scooter of their epoch-defining rock opera
Should you go? From all accounts, yes. The first five sung notes of “Baba O’Reilly” still run from auditory cortex to ischium in a nanosecond. The men who first made them can still perform them well.
In the early 1980s, The Who played Rupp Arena on their “Farewell Tour,” and, gripped with panic, I hocked, scrambled and camped to get fourth row tickets. So I could feel that music.
The current show, with guitarist Pete Townshend and singer Roger Daltrey in fine form, brings all that power to bear in a focused format — a performance of the “rock opera” soundtrack to the film “Quadrophenia.” If the generation within generations that repetitively makes good ‘rock’ music (current age 12-74) has an Odyssey and an Iliad, it is The Who’s “Tommy” and “Quadrophenia.”
So, hey, Homer is performing the Iliad in Louisville, should I go?
The music of the The Who is a common denominator of those who would take the lesson to kick back at a system. When you look at “influencers” of the artists who create, startle, empower, often with a very different overall sound, you read the lists and on every one, embedded in entries ranging from jazz to world to punk to twee to noise: The Who.
This is not a nostalgia show. It is a performance of the classic texts of our time, as we define that time in our own musical slipstreams, timestamped as we happened into this club.
The Who: Quadrophenia and More. Feb. 16, Saturday. Louisville’s YUM! Center.
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