Speaking of passion, book reviewer James Wood has a personal essay in the Nov. 29, 2010, The New Yorker about The Who drummer Keith Moon. It's worth a read. I saw Moon perform with The Who in '75 in my hick corner of N.C., festival seating, pressed up against the stage. I've experienced nothing like it before or since. The man truly was a beast. (N.B. My two roommates at the time have gone on to be professional rock drummers.)
When we saw The Who, the By Numbers tour, we were already starting to wonder if they were over the hill. We knew The Rolling Stones were—"It's ONLY Rock 'n Roll?" YFKM. We were big proponents of their early, rawer stuff, not the operatic jag Townsend took them down with "Tommy" and "Quadrophenia". The studio band, they proved, still had a spark of life in them, and it was ignited by Moon's amazing playing. And they were the undisputed loudest band, at least until My Bloody Valentine.
Maximum R & B.
Wood's three favorite The Who albums are "Live at Leeds" (no quarrel there), "Who's Next" (the first LP I ever bought with money I'd earned at a real job [pumping 25¢/gal gas], and "Quadrophenia", ignoring their first three albums.
I'm not sure why Wood felt he needed to bring Thomas Bernhard or William Walton or Georges Bataille or Gogol into the mix, however. The Glenn Gould I get (btw: my mother-in-law went to conservatory with GG, knew him fairly well). I guess he just felt he needed to show off. Like this:
Give a listen to the early Moon:
Life's too short to drink bad wine or read James Wood. Apropos of "nothing," there are signs on NYC buses that currently read: "Bus lanes are now camera enforced. Smiling won't help."
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