{"id":8532,"date":"2015-09-22T05:30:59","date_gmt":"2015-09-22T09:30:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=8532"},"modified":"2015-10-19T13:06:01","modified_gmt":"2015-10-19T13:06:01","slug":"video-review-the-who-live-at-shea-stadium-1982","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2015\/09\/22\/video-review-the-who-live-at-shea-stadium-1982\/","title":{"rendered":"Video Review: The Who — Live at Shea Stadium 1982"},"content":{"rendered":"

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In the eyes of most pop music historians, The Who<\/strong><\/a> circa 1982 gets a pretty bad rap. With the hindsight of history, it’s not that difficult to understand why. Drummer Keith Moon<\/strong> had died in 1979, just before the release of Who Are You<\/em>. The group enlisted former Small Faces<\/strong><\/a> drummer (and authentic \u201cmod\u201d) Kenney Jones<\/strong><\/a> to fill the drum throne, a move that enraged a certain subset of Who fans. And the pair of post-Moon Who albums \u2013 1981’s Face Dances<\/em> and It’s Hard<\/em> from the following year \u2013 didn’t rate among anyone’s choice for best albums of the group’s career. And with a bit more hindsight, the marketing of the 1982 tour can look like a case of misleading advertising: as the live document of that tour, the largely uninspired 2LP set was called Who’s Last<\/em>, the group was more or less expected to hang it up and go their separate ways after the tour. They didn\u2019t, instead reuniting multiple times and eventually (2006) releasing new studio material.<\/p>\n

Some bigger problems for the group were internal: Pete Townshend<\/strong><\/a> was mired in drug and alcohol abuse, and racked with self-doubt and confusion about his artistic direction; Roger Daltrey<\/strong> never could get on with Jones.<\/p>\n

It was amidst this backdrop that The Who mounted a massive tour, documented now a third of a century later, on Live at Shea Stadium<\/em>. Those who know the group’s history and\/or those who have sat through Who’s Last<\/em> would likely expect this video (on DVD and Blu-ray) to be a dull and lifeless affair, a document of a group past their prime and with little left to say.<\/p>\n

And they’d be wrong. The band are shown here in fine form. Daltrey is athletic, and his voice is powerful yet controlled. Bassist John Entwistle<\/strong> is rock solid, with respect to both his stage movements (nearly imperceptible) and his bass playing (sterling and thunderous). Townshend looks more than a bit silly in his trendy clothes and haircut; he looks to all the world like the middle-aged guy who’s trying more than a bit too hard to fit in with the younger crowd. (And by all available accounts, that’s almost exactly what was happening with him at the time.) Jones is doing more than an acceptable job; rather than attempting to ape Moon’s drumming style \u2013 a feat largely impossible anyhow \u2013 he plays the drums forcefully, but in a manner consistent with his work up to that point. Remember that this was a man who had played on quite a few studio albums and performed countless live dates before joining The Who; it’s not as if Daltrey and his band mates wouldn’t have known what they were getting with Jones. (Keyboardist Tim Gorman<\/strong> is kept in half-light nearly offstage.)<\/p>\n

For those who didn’t witness the ’82 tour firsthand (I attended a date<\/a> on the brief 1980 tour), the Who’s Last<\/em> album has until now been the more-or-less official record of that period for those who cared enough to listen. And it presented a lopsided picture of those tour dates. As was (and probably remains) standard practice, the concert tapes were edited to remove songs that had been released not long earlier as studio tracks. So Who’s Last<\/em> came off like an oldies revue, a perception reinforced by the encore number, an Entwistle-led \u201cTwist and Shout.\u201d The world didn’t need another version of that song in 1982.<\/p>\n