The Who didn’t have a new album to support when they kicked off a late summer U.S. tour at the Capitol Center in Landover, Maryland, on Aug. 3, 1975, but it didn’t matter. They were a rock institution, rivaled in popularity only the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd. The strength of their back catalog guaranteed sellout crowds whenever they toured.
That doesn’t mean Pete Townshend was satisfied. “It’s just that when I’m standing up there on stage playing rock and roll, I often feel that I’m too old for it,” he told NME the previous year, shortly after his 30th birthday. “When we last played Madison Square Garden I felt acute shades of nostalgia. All the Who freaks had crowded around the front of the stage and when I gazed out into the audience all I could see were those very same sad faces that I’d seen at every New York Who gig. There was about a thousand of ’em and they turned up for every bloody show at the Garden, as if it were some Big Event – The Who triumph over New York…It was dreadful.”
A furious Roger Daltrey fired back in his own interview with NME later that year. “I never read such a load of bullshit in all my life,” he said. “To be perfectly honest, it really took a lot of my Who energy out reading that. Because I don’t feel that way about the Who, about our audiences or anything in that way. It was an unbelievably down interview. And I still haven’t come out of it properly yet. I’ve talked to fans, and I think Townshend lost a lot of respect from that article. He’s talked himself up his own ass. And there are quite a lot of disillusioned and disenchanted kids about now.”
This may have read like a band on the verge of a nasty breakup, but the Who had survived worst schisms in the past — including a very brief period in 1965 where Daltrey was thrown out of the band following a fistfight with drummer Keith Moon.
When Miami News music critic Jon Marlowe visited Daltrey in his suite at the Watergate hotel in Washington, D.C., right before the gig in Maryland, the singer was still processing the band’s battle in the press. “I took a real chance answering Pete that way with another interview,” Daltrey said. “But I sat there and I read what he said and just had to do something. In my eyes, Pete was wrong… Besides, at that point, the band was almost over always, so it really was a final move in hopes of saving everything…[Today] we’re quite close. We’re always going to be a little frayed at the ends, but that’s the Who. You’ve got four people who are just so totally different from one another. But those interviews cleared the air. Everything had been building for a long, long time. And something just had to give.”
Daltrey spent the Who’s early days living somewhat in the shadows of Townshend and Moon, but his staring role in Ken Russell’s twin 1975 films Tommy and Lisztomania dramatically upped his public profile. They also drew his time and attention away from the Who, leaving bassist John Entwistle time to record his solo LP Mad Dog and tour with his side project Ox. Moon, meanwhile, recorded Two Sides of the Moon, his only solo album, with buddies Ringo Starr, Harry Nilsson, Joe Walsh, and Bobby Keys. (It’s possible an illicit substance or two was consumed during these sessions.) Townshend used the layoff to write songs for the next Who album, and oversee With Love, a tribute album to his spiritual leader, Meher Baba.
The Who toured major markets across the United States in March 1976, played a handful of big shows in Europe in late May and early June, and then came back to the States in August. “[This tour is] simply to hit the cities that the Who missed last time around,” Daltrey told Marlowe. “We really won’t be making any money from this one, but that’s not the point of it.”
Tickets for every seat in the 18,000-capacity Capitol Center were $8.75, or $51.35 adjusted for the inflation of today. Many venues didn’t use tiered-pricing in the Seventies, meaning people in the highest nosebleed seats paid the same amount as people in the front row. Neil Diamond came to the same arena a week later and asked for $10.00 ($58.69), but the Doobie Brothers and special guest Firefall were only charging $6.50 ($37.95) in advance and $7.50 ($43.79) on the day of show.
Florida Times-Union writer Roy Simpson traveled to D.C. for the show. “Townshend was his acrobatic best,” he wrote. “He jumped and whirled about the stage seemingly indifferent to the fact that his guitar was connected to a wall of amplifies by a cord. His windmill-like flails at his instrument caused resounding sounds throughout the hall, certainly not too far below the decibel label of a supersonic Concorde landing at Dulles Airport nearby. Even though Moon was almost hidden behind his massive chrome and white drum kit, his presence was felt in every beat…. It is hard not to wonder how Moon can keep up such a high energy pace without ever missing a beat or even just plain passing out.”
“As usual Entwistle’s bass guitar carried the heaviness of the Who’s message to their fans,” he continued. “Entwistle’s style is not fancy, just extremely efficient. How can he stand there almost motionless amidst all the energy will probably remain a mystery to audiences forever.”
Simpson declined to name any songs they played so he wouldn’t spoil their upcoming show at Jacksonville’s Gator Bowl, but the show was a standard hits revue with a very large portion of Tommy in the middle. “Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to introduce a piece of music written by Mr. Peter Townshend that was made into a ballet, an opera, and a motion picture,” Moon told the audience before it began. “Ladies and gentleman, I give you the original rock opera, performed by the Who, Tommy!”
The album came out seven years earlier, but it remained their signature work. “We knew that Tommy was big,” Daltrey told the Miami News before the show. “But nobody in the group had any idea of what it was going to turn into. Movies, lunchboxes, touring companies, beach towels, posters. And when it got that big, people just said, ‘That’s it. The Who have reached their peak. They’ve gone as far as they can go. That is it for them. There’s nothing left for them to do,’ which really hurt us immensely because the next album (Who’s Next) was a much better record than Tommy. There’s no question about it. But nobody wanted to know about it.”
It’s a wild overstatement to say that “nobody wanted to know” about Who’s Next considering it featured “Baba O’Riley,” “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” and “Behind Blue Eyes,” and went triple platinum in America. But it’s true that anything after Tommy was going to feel at least slightly underwhelming, especially since the Tommy machine kept chugging along with a ballet, an actual opera, a symphonic work, and finally the Ken Russell movie.
The Who’s early hits (“I Can’t Explain,” Substitute,” “My Generation”), an eight-song Tommy block, the three Who’s Next hits, and Entwistle’s spotlight moment with “My Wife,” didn’t leave room for even a single song from Quadrophenia at the Landover show. And even though The Who By Numbers was their newest album, they ignored it besides “Squeeze Box” and “Dreaming From the Waist.” The album is simply too dark, quiet, and introspective for an arena crowd.
The Miami News described a teenage girl in the third row at the Capitol Center as a typical fan. “Her hands are on her hips and her lips pouted ala Mick the Magic, screaming and writhing along with Daltrey as he bites out the words and tells them all ‘We’re Not Going to Take It.’” Her boyfriend, meanwhile, is “fingering an imaginary Fender Telecaster, filling in notes that Pete Townshend will never ring.”
These aren’t fans waiting for “No Matter How Much I Booze,” “Imagine a Man,” “Blue Red and Grey,” or “How Many Friends.” They came for the Tommy suite and the other oldies, even if Townshend already knows it’s somewhat of a trap to keep playing them.
“You’ve got to remember that there was a time when suddenly Chuck Berry couldn’t write any more,” he told NME in the infamous 1975 interview. “He just went out and performed his greatest hits and I’ve always wondered what that was all down to? Jagger told me at his birthday party that he was having difficulty in writing new material for the Stones, which is unfortunate because nowadays so much importance is placed upon writing songs.”
Jagger didn’t need to worry. Some Girls was on the horizon. And the Who’s next album was 1978’s Who Are You. The title track became one of their biggest hits.
Days before the 1976 Landover show, Moon was looking ahead to all of this with optimism. “As soon as we finish this tour, I’d imagine we’ll be starting work on [an album] in September or October,” he told the Florida Times-Union. “I’m too young to retire. I’m doing a couple of films, producing a play, and all sorts of things.”
He’d be dead in just two years, weeks after Who Are You hit record stores shelves. The Who limped ahead until 1982 with Kenney Jones of the Faces behind the kit, and they still had a few great songs left in them, but Moon’s death marked the end of their imperial era. The setlist in Landover would largely remain their setlist for the next 50 years.
But nobody at the Capitol Center knew they were seeing the start of the Who’s final tour with Keith Moon. They just knew they were witnessing an incredible night of music. “Individually, they are musical giants,” wrote Simon in his review of the concert. “Onstage together in Washington they lived up to the title of ‘rock’s premier attraction.’”
