The Guardian on Maximum Who
Brian in Atlanta
http://observer.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,768712,00.html
Who's Who in the Who
Lyrics were spat out, guitars were trashed and no subject was off-limits.
Ross Halfin documents the true voice of Sixties disaffection in The Who
Sean O'Hagan
Sunday August 4, 2002
The Observer
The Who: Maximum Who
compiled by Ross Halfin
Genesis £234, pp272 (limited edition)
'We stand for pop-art clothes, pop-art music and pop-art behaviour,' the 20
year old Pete Townshend told Melody Maker in the summer of 1965. 'We don't
change offstage. We live pop-art.'
From their name to the cut of their clothes, their provocative lyrics to
their violent stage shows, the Who were as controversial and iconoclastic,
as arty and as primitive, as any mid-Sixties pop group. Like a kind of
low-rent, emphatically English answer to the Velvet Underground, they made
music that sounded new and utterly modern, brash and bright and shaded with
dark undertones.
While the latter outfit featured a German chanteuse and songs about heroin
addiction and S&M, the Who had Keith Moon, and songs about amphetamine
anxiety and masturbation. While the Velvets had Warhol and an aesthetic that
tended towards the nihilistic, the Who had Chris Stamp and Kit Lambert -
budding film directors - and an attitude that could best be described as
antisocial. They looked and sounded like trouble and, alongside the Rolling
Stones, consigned the notion of the clean-cut, well-scrubbed, asinine teen
idol to the dustbin of history, from which, four decades later, it has sadly
re-emerged, even more clean-cut, well-scrubbed and asinine than ever.
In songs like 'I Can't Explain', 'Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere' and the anthemic
'My Generation', they distilled all the inarticulate anger and frustration
of adolescence into three-minute pop songs that barely held together, but
sounded for a brief pop-art moment, like the shock of the new in all its
inchoate glory.
It is difficult now to hint at how shocking and darkly defiant a line like
'I hope I die before I get old' sounded back then before hippy idealism
derailed the proto-punk attitude that underpinned the much misunderstood Mod
movement which, by accident or design, the Who were inextricably aligned to
back then.
On stage, they did everything short of implode: Daltry out front, sneering,
stuttering and spitting out the lyrics, while Moon flailed at his kit and
Townshend wrenched all manner of noise from his guitar. Only bassist, John
Entwistle, as oddly English as his name, stood passive, the still centre of
a storm of violence that culminated more often than not in screeches of
feedback and a dismembered Rickenbacker.
'I get jet planes, morse code signals, howling wind effects,' Towshend told
the same Melody Maker writer proudly, but most of all the sound the Who
produced was the howl of amphetamine-fuelled teenage rage - 'anti-middle
age, anti-boss class and anti-young marrieds', as the guitarist once
memorably put it.
If the Who's image was originally moulded by canny managers who saw that the
time was ripe for the mass marketing of a certain kind of negativity and
aggression, the group soon transcended their limitations to become, like the
Sex Pistols after them, arbiters of a whole generation's disaffection. Their
songs, too, became more ambitious and eccentric: 'I'm A Boy' dealt with
transvestism, 'Pictures of Lily' with masturbation.
Later, of course, the three-minute form would be stretched to whole sides of
an album and Townshend would be credited with the dubious honour of
composing the first pop opera. This book, though, deals in the main with the
pre-Tommy era. It is a visual portrait of a group in excelsis, resplendent
in Union Jack jackets and button-down shirts, sharp suits and proper hair
cuts.
Culled from mainly on-the-road portraits by six photographers, including
Ross Halfin, who wrote a previous companion collection, The Who Live, and
Dominique Tarle, who put together an equally lavish - and expensive -
Rolling Stones photo album last year, Maximum Who is one for devotees of the
band, or of that particular Sixties moment when pop started turning into
rock and the possibilities therein seemed infinite and explosive.
In many ways, too, it is a sad and valedictory book, not just for that era,
but because, last month, the stoical John Entwistle died of a heart attack.
Entwistle's intricate bass signatures and unruffled onstage demeanour were
as integral to the group's sound and image as the hyperactive drum style and
wild man antics of his rhythm partner, the late Keith Moon. Entwistle's
oddly illuminating asides accompany many of the photographs here. 'We'd go
off in three different directions,' he recalls, 'and try to stay together.'
When they succeeded, the Who sounded like no other pop group before or
since, a perfect merging of the street and the art-school, an illustration
of how, as with all great pop groups from the Beatles to the Smiths, the
whole effortlessly transcends the sum of the parts.
Somewhere Dominique Tarle describes the sound and vision of the Who in the
Sixties as 'sophisticated brutality'.
You can't ask more of a pop group, particularly a pop-art group, than that.
· Maximum Who is a limited edition of 1,500 numbered copies signed by Ross
Halfin, only available at www.genesis-publications.com
--
-Brian in Atlanta
The Who This Month!
http://www.thewhothismonth.com