My wife has been back East visiting family the last 4 nights, leaving the dogs and I to revive a tradition familiar to long time readers; namely, Bachelor Night. The menu is always more-or-less the same: red meat with an appropriate starch, a minuscule amount of the obligatory green vegetable, and a big red wine, followed by port or Wild Turkey Liqueur, a Dunhill Peravia or two, and a DVD. This time around we've been watching concert videos:
There's no doubt in my mind that these are the greatest rock and roll bands ever. To be sure, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones have their advocates, but for me they pale by comparison. The Who and the E Street Band have been the soundtrack of my life. (Besides which, if the Stones are so great, why does one of my posts about The Who rank #1 on a google search for "world's greatest rock and roll band", while the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's site for the Stones ranks #2?)
But how to choose between the two? At one level, it's an easy choice. The original line-up of the Who - Townshend, Daltrey, Entwhistle, and Moon - remain my choice as the World's Greatest Rock and Roll Band and the Isle of Wight remains their greatest concert. (I was lucky enough to see the original lineup on one of their last US tours and it remains the highlight of my rock concert list.)
I'd also rank the 1975 version of the E Street Band higher than the current line-up, if only because of my memories of seeing them play at Bryn Mawr, and multiple tours in the late 1970s. Plus, back then Springsteen and Clarence Clemons acted in concert like they liked each other, with Bruce using Clarence as a foil all night, instead of just treating each other like parts of a money-making machine. (The Townshend-Moon relationship at Wight gives you some sense of what the Springsteen-Clemons relationship might have been if the latter had been telepathic.)
My dilemma is deciding whether Townshend + Daltrey post-Entwhistle/Moon outrank any iteration of the E Street Band. In other words, is The Who in Boston > The E Street Band at the Hammersmith Odeon?
After watching 4 concerts in 4 nights, I think the answer is that Townshend + Daltrey have to be ranked # 1 whether they have Entwhistle and Moon with them or not. Springsteen simply can't match Daltrey as a vocalist, neither Springsteen, Van Zandt, or Nils Lofgren can match Townshend as a guitarist, and even moments as great as Clemon's sax solo in Jungleland or Bruce's guitar solo in the extended introduction to Prove it All Night in the 1978 tour can't match Pete's guitar solo in Won't Get Fooled Again even as late as the Boston concert or Roger's penultimate banshee scream as that classic winds to its end.
More generally, going back to the initial question, nothing Bruce has ever done matched the moment when the Who played See Me, Feel Me at dawn at Woodstock (to be sure, I wasn't there, but I've seen the damn movie), or that amazing moment on the Isle of Wight when they duplicated the sunrise with a battery of search lights (ditto).
Having said all that, as a Sirius radio subscriber, if I had my druthers, Sirius would bring back E Street Radio on Channel 10 and convert Channel 11 to The Who 24/7. But if wishes were fishes ....
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