MonkeyPants

Rock and Roll Will Never Die.

So E’s employers gave him floor seats for The Who last night. Guess which lucky girlfriend got to go. The performance was phenomenal. All old rocker jokes aside, Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend were both in good shape and were able to give higher energy performances than I have seen younger performers give.

I have been to some concerts but never one by such a huge band. Yes, they started their musical careers more than forty years ago, but that’s why they are great: They are not only musicians but icons of what Rock and Roll is. Townshend no longer smashes guitars (too expensive, repetitive strain injuries) and Daltrey looks like an ad for multivitamins, but they still rock hard. ‘My Generation’ was deliciously ironic. Honeys, you ARE old, and you don’t want to die. On the video screen for this song were images from the past sixty years of teenagers hula hooping in the fifties, love-in-ing in the sixties, punking in the seventies, gothing in the eighties, and raving in the nineties.

One of the unexpected bonuses of last night was getting to watch the crowd. There was a huge mix, from people who had been fans for 40 years to teenagers. That’s what good music does: It lasts. A few of my favourite fans:

Annie Boy: Overweight, about 20, a riot of red curls, wearing a (possibly ironic) sweater vest in a Kelly green. Sang along to every song and had tears in his eyes for ‘Behind Blue Eyes’. I wanted to hug him.

Hippie Guy: Decades-long fan. Cheered himself to pieces, flipped his Lipizzaner- white mane in a frenzy of headbanging. He flagged a little in the middle but regained his energy to rock out for ‘Pinball Wizard’.

Family Dad: Brought wife and two teenaged kids. Had to put his bificals on to type into his BlackBerry before holding it above his wife’s head so he could take a video.

It was amazing.