You can argue as much as you want whether this was the Who, or – as Roger Daltrey was fond of putting it – Who2. Some jokingly called them “The Two,” while others argued that Endless Wire should have arrived as a Pete Townshend solo album on Oct. 30, 2006. Or maybe it should have simply been called Townshend/Daltrey instead.
But the fact remains the same: Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey recorded and put new music out together again after 24 years of not doing so.
Of course, it was not your old Who. Not the Who of Who’s Next or Tommy or really even Quadrophenia. Was anyone really even expecting that? Instead, what Endless Wire presented was the “mature” Who that emerged during and after Quadrophenia, the one that really began its life with The Who By Numbers and, for all intents and purposes, had ended with It’s Hard. A kinder, gentler Who, maybe, a bit more thoughtful and pensive rather than wound up and destructive.
With any mention of the Who comes cries that the group ended when drummer Keith Moon died in 1978, but the reality is that the Who people loved was already long gone. It’s easiest to tell by the evidence left in the wake of Moon’s passing: Who Are You, the final album with Moon, is a far cry from the rancorous band that tore up stages earlier in the same decade. But the Who hadn’t been that crazy, riotous institution it had been, at least musically, for at least a couple of albums. Moon’s death, while a tragic blow, was not the end of the Who’s wild days many want to think it was. The Who had already been winding down for a few years.
Of course, with powerhouse bassist John Entwistle passing as well, it was easy to see how some long-time fans might have had a hard time accepting anything new under the old Who moniker. But with an album of songs this accomplished, it’s difficult to hold too much of a grudge against survivors Townshend and Daltrey for opting to use the old name. It may have been more respectable to go out as a duo, but it certainly doesn’t pack the same wallop as saying “We’re the Who.”
That’s not to say everyone’s going to be convinced this is the Who. There were more shades of Pete Townshend’s solo career than of his old band here, aside from obvious and questionable nods to “Baba O’Riley” in the album opener “Fragments.” There were theatrical elements Townshend certainly would have liked to have pulled off with the Who, but they wouldn’t have let him when all four were alive – such as the unintentionally comical vocals of “In the Ether,” where Townshend attempted to channel Tom Waits (and failed, miserably) and the overly emotive and, again, oddly sung “Trilby’s Piano.”
But then there were songs where the spirit of the old Who shines through, such as on “Fragments” (after the “Baba”-derived opening, that is), the “Who Are You”-ish “Mike Post Theme” (there was some fun irony there — a song about the man responsible for a huge number of TV theme songs sung to a tune that sounds a lot like a theme for a very popular TV show), “Endless Wire,” “It’s Not Enough,” and the beautiful “God Speaks, of Marty Robbins,” and album-closer “Tea & Theatre” that mark a return of Townshend going the simple, acoustic route as he did so perfectly with “Blue, Red, and Grey” from By Numbers.
Townshend saved up all the old anger and spite he used to channel into the old Who songs for one song in particular: “Man In a Purple Dress,” a vicious attack on the hypocrisy of religious figures who use their status to position themselves as leaders of the powerless. It was this Pete Townshend that we haven’t heard in decades — and maybe never with quite this much unrestrained wrath, funneled through an equally revved up Roger Daltrey, whose vocals here were among the album’s finest moments.
It’s a shame, then, that the “mini-opera” so touted with this album, Wire & Glass, was such a let down. Why it’s called out as such is also a mystery: The seeds were sewn early in the album, as “Fragments” and “In the Ether” played into Wire & Glass, but fall far outside of the self-contained opera.
The opera, itself, failed simply because it felt self-conscious, contrived and hasty. While it picked up a storyline begun with Townshend’s 1993 solo album, Psychoderelict, one would be hard-pressed to decipher what exactly the story was here. And that wasn’t even its real problem: The story behind the concept pieces was by far the least concerning element; instead, it’s that there is little flow. The best pieces stood on their own — “Unholy Trinity,” “Endless Wire,” “We Got a Hit,” and “Mirror Door” — but the linking material hardly felt complete and only tenuously tied them together. Its worst sin was that it felt terribly rushed, like an incomplete thought.
While Endless Wire wasn’t a perfect album, it was by far the best Who album in three decades, and one of Townshend’s best works in that time, as well. The stumbles of its mini-opera weren’t enough to knock it down, either, as the album’s highs are far superior to its fortunate few lows. “Tea & Theatre” – this album’s proper end, though the disc actually concludes with two extended takes on “We Got a Hit” and “Endless Wire” – hinted that this may have been the true end of the Who.
It wasn’t, of course, but Endless Wire spent some well-deserved time as a much more fitting closing note than the somewhat-sour It’s Hard.
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