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Last week, playing a concert date in Cincinnati during the first week of an 18-day blitz of the East and Midwest, The Who found itself performing after a crowd stampede that killed eleven people. The tragedy took place outside Riverfront Coliseum as thousands of kids holding unreserved seats charged across a concrete plaza toward two unlocked entrances. The group had not yet come onstage. "If it had happened inside," said Townshend, "I would never have played again." The musicians could not be blamed and, indeed, did not learn what had happened until after the concert. They were shattered, and, for a time, considered that in some way they might be responsible. The Who knows as well as its fans that, since the group's beginning, it has always lived at the outer limits of rock. That is the dangerous borderland where the best rock music is made, the music that lasts and makes a difference. Elvis Presley lived there. So still do Chuck Berry and John Lennon, Van Morrison and Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. Buddy Holly, Sam Cooke and Jimi Hendrix died there. And The Who has taken up permanent residence. The danger that pervades this territory is not a matter of threat, but a kind of proud, blind, spiritual recklessness, forming a musical brotherhood that could be bound by the words of Russian Poet Andrei Voznesensky: "To live is to burn."
For a long time, back in their early days, the four received a great deal of notoriety for smashing their instruments at the end of each performance. It was, at first, a flashy, frightening and finally exhilarating thing to see. Drummer Keith Moon blew up his drum kit, and Townshend rammed the neck of his guitar into his amp, while Daltrey slammed his microphone against the stage and Entwistle held tight to his bass, playing stubbornly on like a shipwreck's lone survivor trying to keep dry in a leaking lifeboat. There was too much discussion about how all this was rock's reflection of Pop art, happenings and autodestruction, how the demolition was an action critique of material values. But until the destruction came to be expected and then required, all this razing was never phony. Anyone in the audience could tell those instruments were extensions of, even surrogates for, the four blessed, blitzed maniacs in the band. That was not Pop art onstage; it was a gang war.
There were no separate peaces. Only nightly shards of instruments lying on the floor of the stage like jigsaw fragments. "We're always trying to outdo each other onstage," Daltrey says. "All of us are a bit mad. We've stayed together for 15 years because we've never stopped fighting." Adds Townshend, "The Who's like an open book. It leads to a kind of unwitting honesty. That's what I think the fans really get fanatic about."