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One of the few major alterations in The Who is that for years there has been no breaking of instruments. "Sometimes I got the feeling," says Entwistle, 35, "that the people wished we would just come out, smash up the lot and leave." An additional, sadder change occurred when Keith Moon died of drug overdose at 31; he was replaced on drums by Kenny Jones, 31. The group still puts My Generation across with enough swagger and insinuation to get you giddy or make you feel like you are being stalked down a dark street. When Townshend, 35, called himself "the aging daddy of punk rock," he was not being entirely facetious. Who music can match the tough street impact of punk, especially as Daltrey dishes it out. At 35, he may be one of the oldest kids in the playground, but he is still one of the toughest. Townshend melodies like Pure and Easy, Baba O'Riley and Music Must Change have the structural sophistication of music that is usually presumed to be more "serious." They also have a visceral challenge, a rush that only Springsteen, among Who contemporaries, can rival.
The rush is the path into the music. The way to the center and out again is a good deal more complex and subtle. Townshend's obsessions are the audience, music itself and a certain evasive, almost evanescent kind of spirituality that has its roots in the teaching of the Indian mystic Meher Baba, to whom Townshend is devoted. Tommy, which became the most widely known Who work, was a two-record "rock opera" about a deaf, dumb and blind pinball champ who was raised into a kind of pop artifact and rock-'n'-roll godhead. It sold more than 2 million copies, bought the band out of years of accumulated debt from broken instruments, leveled hotel rooms and erratic U.S. touring. It also brought the members of The Who a flash of stateside fame they had not previously known. Before Tommy they had been notorious; now they were celebrities. Also in 1969, The Who appeared at Woodstock. "It was all very lovely," Entwistle remembers. "People shacking up in tents sunk three feet in the mud, no toilets, peace and love. Backstage I had a couple of cups of fruit juice and found out someone had put acid in it. I wanted to kill him." Onstage The Who sliced through the flower power like a chain saw in a daisy garden, played with an intensity that took the show away from such Mallomar bands as the Jefferson Airplane. Abbie Hoffman scrambled up to join the proceedings, and Townshend responded, as he recalled later, by "kicking [his] little ass in a proud rage."