Did anybody out there watch the VH-1 Rock Honors show honoring The Who? It premiered last Thursday (7/17).
There was a very entertaining clip of John that I hadn't seen before. It looks like he's in the warmup room with a Buzzard on and the camera shooting mostly at his back. He turns and says this is the bass player and plays a little figure, then flips a couple of switches on his rig and says and THIS is the Bass Guitarist and unleashes a snarling burst of Entwistle.
Yes, I too think the later Entwistle years were suffering from overprocessed tone. The Quadrophenia sound is amazing, both on the original album (it sounds like this was in the Thunderbird years to me) and on the soundtrack album (mostly the same tracks, but it sounds like the bass lines were rerecorded, this time sounding like an Alembic).
Pete Townshend is my favorite artist, period. The VH-1 show was definitely not a memorable Who performance unfortunately, not really measuring up to the last time they were on tour a couple of years ago. I think Pino Palladino is a great bassist, but his playing with The Who seems particularly flat and uninspired. I never had a chance to see the real Who with Moon live. The first time I saw them was with Kenney Jones (it seems like it must have been the first Farewell tour; Townshend was playing the Schecter Teles in that show and it seemed like the set list was heavily derived from Who Are You?), and that started the bad precedent of personality-less substitute players.
In the VH-1 Honors show, there were covers by Foo Fighters and Pearl Jam among others which were unusually straight covers. Even though Jeff Ament was staying very close to the recorded tracks, I think any Who fan would rather hear somebody like that handling the bass lines over Pino.
VH-1 will repeat this show ad naseum over the next month, but if you can't get it, I can blast the Entwistle clip online.
David Fung
