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In the midst of all these pyrotechnics, it was easy enough to lose sight of the fact that The Who stood in defiance of the Woodstock generation. "You've got to remember that Tommy was antidrug in 1969," Daltrey recalls. Townshend, who had been through his own phase with drugs, was not only using Tommy as a mirror for Baba's antidrug strictures but was also putting refractions of Baba's teachings into a rock context. Tommy ended by pulling the rug out from under false idols, directing the search for salvation inward and out toward the audience. What Tommy sang to his disciples, freeing them, was also the Who's address to its audience, both thanks and a supplication: "Listening to you, I get the music/Gazing at you, I get the heat/Following you, I climb the mountain/I get excitement at your feet."
All of this, which seems clear in retrospect, got muddled up in the psychedelic Zeitgeist of the waning '60s, and then confounded even further by the buoyantly bonkers ministrations of Director Ken Russell, whose wildly successful 1975 film version of Tommy was like Busby Berkeley on a bummer. By that time, The Who was working on extensions both of Tommy's form and its themes. Quadrophenia (1973) was an even more ambitious, although less flashy, successor, a two-record chronicle of the desperate life and ironic resurrection of a poor London Mod kid in the early '60s. (It has just been released in a street-shrewd, roughhouse movie adaptation. The sound track, remixed by Entwistle, sounds even better than the recorded original.)
Another project, conceived after Tommy but so far unrealized, is a futuristic tale about the rediscovery of music in a society that is totally programmed and controlled. Called Lifehouse, the piece was intended to be a kind of environmental theater event. Some of Townshend's best songs were written originally for Lifehouse: Baba O'Riley, with its synthesizer line running like cold water down the spine, mixing with an old Irish fiddle reel and the memorable lyric refrain, "Don't cry/ Don't raise your eye/ It's only teen-age wasteland"; the aching, almost elegant poignancy of The Song Is Over and Pure and Easy. All these songs concerned music and the compact of trust between audience and artist. As compositions they enhanced and extended the possibilities of rock. As Townshend wrote those songs, and The Who performed them, the truth of Townshend's contention became clear: "Rock has no limits." All that, and they can be danced to, too.
As individualistic as those Townshend compositions are, they remain a group statement. Townshend, who has no use for modesty, insists, "I can still use The Who more effectively to speak to people heart to heart than I ever could on a solo album." Daltrey observes, "Did you ever notice that nobody ever does Townshend's songs? The Who are the only people who can play them. That's one reason we've survived. None of us is very good on his own. It's only as part of The Who that we're great."