The Who: Tommy and Quadrophenia Live

This new 3-DVD set consists of two shows by The Who.
Disc One is a performance of Tommy from a charity show in LA, one of two complete Tommy performances from the 1989 tour. The Who were in what I call their "Las Vegas" phase: a 15-piece band, including a horn section. Special guests for this show included Patti LaBelle, Phil Collins, Steve Winwood, Billy Idol and Elton John. This certainly isn’t the "classic" Who of yore. Townshend plays acoustic guitar throughout and the horns certainly add a new twist to the music. But there’s no question whatever their configuration that this is a group of excellent musicians clearly enjoying themselves. The musical highlight is John Enwhistle’s bass solo during Sparks.
Disc Two is a performance of Quadrophenia from a 1996 tour. Again another large band, this time augmented by a visual presentation and guests P.J. Proby as The Godfather and Billy Idol as Ace the Face. Again Townshend sticks mostly to the acoustic guitar and the band is in fine form. This time the musical highlight is John Entwistle’s bass solo on 5:15. (Okay, yes, you caught me. I’m a bass player.)
The third disc consists of the LA show’s second set and encore, an extended encore from the Quadrophenia show, and three songs from Giants Stadium from 1989. No big musical surprises here, except the Quadrophenia encore opens with an acoustic version of Won’t Get Fooled Again, and features a slightly reworked version of Who Are You.
Both the Tommy and Quadrophenia shows have a "visual commentary" track by Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend, both of which are excellent. Controlled by the "angle" button, you can turn the commentary on and Pete or Roger appear on the screen, commenting on the concert, the music, the story, or whatever strikes their fancy. A must-watch for Who fans.
The viewer is alerted to the start of these segments by a pinball flashing superimposed on the screen in the case of Tommy, or a mod target symbol in the case of Quadrophenia. The downside is that the commentary segments start and stop all the time during the performances, and the viewer is constantly distracted by large flashing round objects in the middle of the screen distracting from the concert. Why didn’t the DVD producers put a less distracting and smaller symbol in the corner of the screen that doesn’t interfere with the enjoyment of the concert to signal the beginning of a commentary segment? Beats me, I guess that’s why they make the big bucks. Note to Rhino Records: Never do that again.

Our Gods Are Not Exempt

Our gods aren’t supposed to die.
But fate/God/kismet/whatever has that annoying habit of reminding us that our time is finite, and the price we pay for our scant few years of precious life is the knowledge that in the end we all owe fate/God/kismet/whatever a death.
Whether high-born or low-life, there is a cost for our brief journey in this reality that, in the end, is equal for everyone. In a sense, we are only renting a pocket of space-time for only a short moment.
Even our gods are not exempt.

I am a bass player. John Entwistle was my god.
With The Who, as Pete Townshend, Keith Moon and Roger Daltrey slashed, smashed and strutted, Entwistle stood immobile, save for invisible fingers that powered and drove The Who’s massive sound. The Who was not the usual band with the usual line-up of a guitar and a bass/drum rhythm section. They were a band with three lead instrumentalists in constant competition, always flashing their chops, always veering off into the unknown. And beneath it all, Entwistle somehow kept it in control, yet let it soar. He was thunder to Townshend’s lightning.
His songs were tiny, humourous nuggets almost lost against Townshend’s epic canvases. Yet Entwistle’s writing could cut to the chase and make the same thematic statements in 3:30 that took Townshend four album sides.

I saw The Who live only once, in Vancouver in 1989, during what I call The Who’s “Las Vegas” period as a 17-piece band (as opposed to their original four-piece version. And the six-piece version that was starting a four-month tour tomorrow night).
The rumble that poured from Entwistle’s stack of Trace Elliot amps and A.S.S. speakers felt like it was slowly cracking my ribs. He abandoned his usual trade-marked bass runs in “My Generation” and he served up brand new riffs with techniques and skills that to this day I still can’t figure out.
He stood rock still the whole night, of course, and thunder slipped off his fingers and the long steel strings of his bass as if from a shy Norse god.
My bass, as always, is nearby, but I can’t even look at it tonight. Tomorrow, I’ll plug it in and try to conjure some thunder of my own. But my bass is silent tonight, as is my god’s.

John Alec Entwistle
October 9, 1944 -- June 27, 2002

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe

During World War II, four British children are sent out to the country to spend the war under care of a reclusive relative. The children discover a gateway through a wardrobe into another world called Narnia. There, in a world of centaurs, griffens, and talking animals, the children appear to be the fulfillment of a prophecy that four humans will one day lead an army with the help of Aslan, a lion, to defeat the self-appointed queen of Narnia, a witch.
Based of the classic book by C.S.Lewis, Narnia is not a bad movie, but as I was watching it I kept thinking to myself Lord of the Rings did this better. Indeed, The Lord of the Rings has set a very high standard when it comes to fantasy films, and perhaps comparing anything to the wondrous magic of LotR is unfair.
There's nothing inherently bad in Narnia. The production is uniformly excellent, and the special effects are marvelous. The intergration of CGI characters into live-action elements is perfectly done.
But for me the film never grabbed me.
There's also been some talk about the "Christian" aspects of Narnia. Aslan's death and resurrection parallel Christ's, and I believe that C.S. Lewis was deliberately evoking Christianity in his story. That said, I didn't find that this aspect overwhelmed the story. Clearly, it's there if you want to read that into it, but death and resurrection are so much a part of fantasy and science fiction films (Gandalf and Obi-Wan Kenobi for starters), never mind other myths and religions, that it does not overpower the movie.
Look, this isn't a bad movie. Pay your money, you'll like it. Will you care about it the next day? That's another question.

John Lennon and the Button Man

The Button Man was a man that I struck up an acquaintence with when he worked at a local comic shop many years ago. He was middle-aged, I guess maybe he was my age now. He lost his job when the comic shop consolidated its two locations into one, perhaps my first personal experience with "downsizing."
He was also a music fan. We were both big fans of The Who. (In later years, I would buy a few Who items from his collection when he was short of cash, which I kept until I had to sell them because I was short of cash. The circle of life.)
New Wave and Punk were tearing apart the musical strata and the Button Man had starting bringing music buttons into the comic shop before he was let go. The buttons, mostly of Brit new wave Bands (The Selector, The Stranglers, Madness) were popular and selling well, so he continued to order them. He wore a demin jacket that he covered with buttons, and he stood on a downtown street corner. Kids would start talking to him about the buttons and he eventually he would sell them a button or two. He also brought in buttons from older acts, too. All the bands were getting in on the button craze.
He knew I wasn't much into the punk bands, and that I liked some new wave. (The Police were okay -- they might amount to something one of these days.) He knew I preferred some of the older bands, and when he got new buttons from Pink Floyd, The Who, Queen, Rush or The Beatles he always pointed out them to me.
25 years ago this very afternoon, I bought a button from the Button Man. It's a small button, a black and white rendering of an early Beatles promo photo, the four of them in their Brian Epstein suits. I still have it.
It says, "Come Back, Beatles." Hours later, any hope of a Beatles reunion was terminated by five rounds from a madman's gun.

I don't know what's worse about anniversaries of famous deaths.
Is it that yet again we are forced recognize the fact that an amazingly creative talent was stolen from us many years too soon, killed by an explosion of rage and anger, betrayed by the very thing that makes us all human?
Or is it yet another reminder that the years are passing and I am another day closer to facing my own mortality.
Either way, the result is that I am now two years older than John Lennon will ever be. And that leaves me sad.