The Who The Kids Are Alright DVD (1979)

From lifeofthebeatles.blogspot.com

The Kids Are Alright is a rockumentary film about the English rock band The Who, including live performances, promotional films and interviews from 1964 to 1978.

Production

The film was primarily the work of American fan Jeff Stein who, despite having no previous experience in movie-making, convinced the band to support the project and served as the film’s director. Stein had produced a book of photographs from the band’s 1970 tour when he was just 17. In 1975, he approached Pete Townshend, The Who’s principal composer and lead guitarist, about compiling a collection of film clips to provide a historical reference for the band’s fans. Townshend initially rejected the idea, but was persuaded by the group’s manager, Bill Curbishley, to give their cooperation.

When Stein and his film editor, Ed Rothkowitz, soon previewed a 17-minute compilation of clips from their US television appearances to the band and their wives, they could hardly believe the reaction. “Townshend was on the floor, banging his head. He and Moon were hysterical. Daltrey’s wife was laughing so hard she knocked over the coffee table in the screening room. Their reaction was unbelievable. They loved it. That’s when they were really convinced that the movie was worth doing.”

Stein knew that many of the band’s best performances and most memorable moments had either never been recorded or been lost, erased or discarded. For more than two years, he collected movie, television and fan film footage in England, the US, Sweden, Germany, France, Australia, Norway and Finland, in some cases actually rescuing footage from the trash. Nevertheless, there were gaps in the depiction of the band’s catalog and persona that required the shooting of new material. This began on 20 July 1977 at Shepperton Studios in Middlesex, England with the playing of the song “Barbara Ann” at Stein’s request. The film crew then spent five days chronicling the daily life of drummer Keith Moon at his Malibu, California home, including his 31st birthday party. Finally, Stein attempted on several occasions to record performances of songs that were not covered by the archival footage, particularly “Baba O’Riley” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again”. The final recordings were made on 25 May 1978, but unfortunately, most of the original reels of this show were lost. A version of “My Wife” was recorded at the Gaumont State in Kilburn in December 1977, and, although not included in the film, it appeared on the soundtrack album.

The sound editing was supervised by bassist John Entwistle and, with the exception of a 1965 performance of “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere” where Entwistle had to replace a missing bass track, and the footage of Moon smashing a drum kit – as the original 8mm footage was silent, Moon overdubbed drum sounds – most of the sound was authentic. Entwistle did fight for – and won – getting him and Pete to overdub their backing vocals on the Woodstock footage because Entwistle deemed the original gig’s backup vocals “dire.” During the process of sound editing, on 7 September 1978, Keith Moon died. All of the band members except Townshend had seen a rough cut of the film just a week before and, after Moon’s death, they were determined not to change anything.

The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on 14 May 1979. The Who promoted the release of the film with some live performances with their new drummer, former Small Faces and Faces drummer Kenney Jones.

An album was released as a soundtrack in June 1979 that included some songs and performances from the movie. The album reached #2 in the UK, and fared better in the US where it peaked at #2 on the Billboard album charts and went Platinum.

Contents

The Kids Are Alright premiered in the US on 15 June 1979 in the middle of the disaster film era that started with films like Earthquake, The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno. In this environment, the original press kit for The Kids Are Alright drew on the band’s destructive reputation and called it “the world’s first rock ‘n’ roll disaster movie.”

With the collection of material he included, Stein attempted to create not a linear, chronological documentary, but “a celluloid rock ‘n’ roll revival meeting” and “a hair-raising rollercoaster ride” that was worthy of the band’s reputation. The performances which comprise the body of the film are organized around a number of playful encounters by the band members with various variety and talk show hosts, Pete Townshend’s playful relationship with his fans, admirers and critics, and the endless antics of Keith Moon.

Television shows and interviews

The film starts with a bang — literally — at the band’s only US variety show appearance. On 15 September 1967, The Who appeared on the CBS show The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in Los Angeles following the end of their first US tour. They lip-synched the songs “I Can See For Miles” and “My Generation” and flustered host Tommy Smothers by refusing to follow the script as he tried to converse with them before “My Generation”. Moon made the biggest impact, however, when the destructive nature of his on-stage persona reached its highest level. After The Who’s performance of “My Generation”, they began smashing their instruments. Moon packed explosive charge in his bass drum which set Townshend’s hair on fire and rendered him temporarily deaf for 20 minutes, while cymbal shrapnel left a gash in Moon’s arm. Townshend then took the acoustic guitar Smothers was holding and smashed it to bits on the ground. Smothers was completely frustrated, but the audience thought the whole performance was staged.

Clips of a 1973 interview from London Weekend Television’s Russell Harty Plus appear six times throughout the film. While Harty delves into the background of the members’ lives, Moon again steals the show as he rips off Townshend’s shirt sleeve and then promptly strips down to his underwear.

One of the TV interviews included in the film features Ken Russell, the director of the film Tommy, who makes his mark with his exaggeratedly passionate plea: “I think that Townshend, The Who, Roger Daltrey, Entwistle, Moon could rise this country out of its decadent ambient state better than Wilson or all of those crappy people could ever hope to achieve!”

An early performance from ABC television’s Shindig! and one of only two surviving tapes from the group’s many appearances on the British program Ready Steady Go!, both recorded in 1965, are included along with numerous interview clips from BBC Radio, as well as mostly b/w interviews, stage and blue-screen performances (such as of Tommy, Can You Hear Me?) on the music programme Beat-Club recorded at the Radio Bremen studios in Hamburg, Germany. Segments filmed in each of the band member’s homes include several conversations between Moon and fellow drummer Ringo Starr.

Large concerts

Performances from three of the band’s largest concert appearances bear witness to the band’s progression from the British mod scene to global superstardom:

* Their reluctant gig at the Woodstock Music and Art Fair on 17 August 1969 was not an artistic success in the eyes of the band, but it helped Tommy become a critical blockbuster. Warner Bros. allowed Jeff Stein to look through their 400,000 feet of film from the three-day festival. Stein, then, reconstructed a “new” cut of the Who’s song highlights (as opposed to the “split-screen” images from the original Woodstock film). He chose three songs: “Sparks”, “Pinball Wizard”, and “See Me, Feel Me”. He also added a snippet of “My Generation” when Townshend smashed his guitar following a brief excerpt of “Naked Eye”.
* The group’s 1975 US tour reached its peak before a crowd of 75,962 at the Pontiac Silverdome on 6 December. The images in the film were broadcast to large screens in the stadium so those in the far reaches could actually see the band members on stage. From this appears the “Roadrunner/My Generation Blues” medley. However, the soundtrack includes “Join Together” which precedes “Roadrunner”.
* While it appears near the end of the film, the band’s appearance at the Monterey International Pop Festival on 18 June 1967 brought about their first big media exposure in the United States. In the film, The Who’s Monterey Pop appearance cuts away to footage from past concerts depicting the band destroying their equipment before returning to the destructive end of “My Generation”. This performance does not appear on the soundtrack.

Discarded footage

At least three chapters in the film preserve performances that were discarded or thought to be lost:

* When the English National Opera allowed the band to play in the London Coliseum on 14 December 1969, the show was recorded for later release. The poor quality of the footage, however, made it expendable to the group and Jeff Stein retrieved the footage from a trash dump. The band’s rendition of “Young Man Blues” is included in the film.
* A promotional film for the song “Happy Jack” was shot on 19 December 1966 for a BBC Television series called Sound and Picture City but the show was never aired.
* The Rolling Stones Rock ‘n’ Roll Circus was to be a television special featuring a variety of rock bands and circus performers, but after the filming the Rolling Stones felt their own performance was substandard and the project was shelved. The film includes a rousing performance of the group’s first “rock opera” — A Quick One, While He’s Away — shot on 10 December 1968. Originally, the clip’s picture was cropped and bordered by flashing lights to compensate with the film’s copy. After the Stones’ former label, ABKCO, released the “Rock ‘n’ Roll Circus” on DVD, Stein extracted the Who’s performance from the DVD and inserted it back in.

Moon’s final performances

The film incidentally became a sort of “time capsule” for the band, after Keith Moon died only one week after he’d seen the rough cut of the film with Roger Daltrey. Moon, according to Daltrey, was deeply shocked by how much he’d changed physically in just 15 years, “from a young good-looking boy to a spitting image of Robert Newton”. After Moon’s death, the rough cut didn’t suffer a single change, since neither Jeff Stein nor the rest of the band wanted to turn the movie into an homage to remember Moon’s passing, but to celebrate his life and career with The Who.

Moon’s last performances with the band were:

* The clip for Who Are You — Last studio performance. Jeff Stein wanted to show The Who recording in the studio, even though the band had already finished recording the song. Stein planned to have the band mime over the original recording, but The Who played it live at the Ramport Studios, London, on 9 May 1978. The only playback tracks were Entwistle’s bass guitar, the acoustic guitar solo in the middle, the backing vocals and synthesizer track.
* The show at Shepperton Studios, London, on 25 May 1978—Last live performance.

DVD edition

For many years the film was released on VHS in an edited 90-minute form, extracted from a TV broadcast copy made in the 1980’s. Several scenes were removed and the audio had several pitch problems and dropouts.

In 2003, a DVD edition of the film was released. The film had been transferred from the restored 35mm interpositive and the audio was extensively restored. In addition to the original film, with English subtitles, on-screen liner notes, commentary with Jeff Stein and DVD producer John Albarian, and a 27-page booklet, the DVD contained a bonus disc with over three hours of additional materials:

* “SEE MY WAY”: Q&A with director Jeff Stein
* “BEHIND BLUE EYES”: Q&A with Roger Daltrey
* “MIRACLE CURE”: Documentary on the restoration of The Kids Are Alright
* “GETTING IN TUNE”: Audio comparison (old vs new)
* “TRICK OF THE LIGHT”: Video comparison (old vs new)
* “THE WHO’S LONDON”: A tour of Who locations in London
* “THE OX”: Isolated tracks of John Entwistle for Baba O’Riley and Won’t Get Fooled Again
* “ANYTIME YOU WANT ME”: Multi-angle feature for Baba O’Riley and Won’t Get Fooled Again
* “PURE AND EASY”: Trivia game. The prize: A rare radio trailer of Ringo Starr promoting The Kids Are Alright
* “IT’S HARD”: Trivia game. The prize: A slide show to the Who Are You 5.1 studio mix

The DVD was released by Pioneer Home Entertainment. The digitally-restored version of the film was premiered at the New York Film Festival in October 2003 with Daltrey, Lewis, Stein and Albarian in attendance.

Trivia

* In the scene where John Entwistle shoots up gold discs with a shotgun, then with a Tommy gun, those discs weren’t his, according to Entwistle himself. They were Roger Daltrey’s.
* On that same scene, Entwistle’s seemingly endless collection of bass guitars were positioned around the staircase especially for that shot.
* The “Shepperton gig” probably had more songs than just Baba O’Riley and Won’t Get Fooled Again, according to DVD producer John Albarian – most likely a full-set -, but the reels of that show are presumed too deteriorated for a complete restoration.
* There were two takes of Won’t Get Fooled Again. The first take didn’t make it because the band simply ended the song, which looked “lame”, in the words of director Jeff Stein. The one that made it to the final cut was the second take, but the middle section of the performance – Keith’s drum fill and Roger’s scream – required around 15 takes, which becomes obvious when the film and soundtrack versions are compared. The laser light show was also added in post-production, as it is missing from the multi-angle performance in the DVD bonus features.
* According to Roger Daltrey, Bette Davis and Mickey Rooney were at the same episode of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour when Keith Moon’s bass drum exploded. And when it did, Davis immediately fainted and “fell on her arse”, while Rooney clapped his hands and “screamed for more”.
* The sounds on the 8mm film scene where Moon smashes his “Pictures of Lily” drumkit were created in studio by Stein and others, since the original 8mm film didn’t capture the sound.
* During the “Keith Moon Montage”, there’s a photo of a room trashed by Keith, and a quote on it from an “anonymous hotel staff-person”: “Excuse me, sir, but someone has just blown-up the toilet.” It was also meant to be the promotional poster for the film, according to director Stein, with the title: “Keith Moon slept here.”
* Award-winning sound mixer Ted Hall, of POP Sound, worked on turning the original sound of the movie into a 5.1 mix. He died at the age of 48 on 26 July 2008.

Credits

* Starring: Roger Daltrey, John Entwistle, Keith Moon, Pete Townshend
* Appearing: Tommy Smothers, Jimmy O’Neill, Russell Harty, Melvyn Bragg, Ringo Starr, Mary Ann Zabresky, Michael Leckebusch, Barry Fantoni, Jeremy Paxman, Bob Pridden, Keith Richards, Garry McDonald (as Norman Gunston), Steve Martin, Rick Danko (who appears in the credits despite his scene being cut), Ken Russell
* Executive Producer: Sydney Rose
* Produced by: Bill Curbishley, Tony Klinger
* Associate Producers: Jeff Stein, Ed Rothkowitz, The Who
* Edited by: Ed Rothkowitz
* Musical Director: John Entwistle
* Written and Directed by: Jeff Stein

Quotations

* “Most rock films are pretentious. They’re made for the sole purpose of making Robert Plant’s dick look big. This is totally the opposite. Within the first half hour we’re made to look like complete idiots.” – Roger Daltrey
* “I felt like the monument on the cover of Who’s Next.” – Jeff Stein, on how he felt after filming “The Kids Are Alright”
* “A definitive end? What do you want me to do? Go out there and fall asleep on stage? Maybe I should go out there and die during my last solo? Or maybe I should hit that motherfucker who’s been yelling for ‘Magic Bus’ over the head with me guitar?” – Pete Townshend’s angry response to Jeff Stein’s request for an encore of Won’t Get Fooled Again
* “…Yeah, that’d be fine.” – Jeff Stein’s reported answer to Townshend

The Who: The Kids Are Alright Review DVD (2003)

From thedigitalfix.com

Maximum R&B…it quickly became the description that The Who applied to their music throughout their lifetime, as well as being the title of their outstanding four-CD boxset. Even amongst the roar of late-sixties rock, The Who stood out, both by their volume and their ambition. With a clutch of great albums behind them, 1979 saw the compilation of this documentary, showcasing the greatest British rock band during the years in which everything they touched, even a mini-rock opera about Ivor The Engine Driver, put their peers to shame.

In as much as the recent Led Zeppelin two-disc set had a story of sorts, so The Kids Are Alright is the story of The Who from their earliest years playing in London clubs as The High Numbers through their near-bankruptcy during their year before the release of Tommy and how a deaf, dumb and blind pinball wizard saved them from financial ruin. As Tommy ended the album freed from his obligations as a saviour so that album gave The Who the opportunity to indulge in further concept albums and rock operas, head-staggeringly loud concerts and great rock music.

Yet, in as much as the story of Led Zeppelin ended with the death of their drummer, John Bonham, so The Kids Are Alright ends with the disappointment at seeing Keith Moon age and, although it is not captured in the film, his death two weeks before its premiere. There’s no doubt that Moon’s death, like Bonham’s, was largely self-inflicted given his prodigious drug usage but the difference between the young Moon on one side of the DVD sleeve to the overweight, bearded, understudy to Oliver Reed seen on the other is a clear picture of how The Who changed from art-school punks and creators of daring rock operas to a band who faded from before both prog rock and punk with barely a breath left for a fight.

Unfortunately, The Kids Are Alright is rather too fond of celebrating Moon’s performances outside of the stage and recording studio, barely allowing an interview opportunity to pass by without choosing those moments when it dissolves into chaos due to Moon’s influence. Even in those moments when Townshend and Moon share a television studio, the film’s need to include a moment of destruction from Moon detracts from the intelligent comments offered by Townshend on the band and its place in pop culture, whether as a mod band, as the writers of Tommy or as pensionable rock stars.

But there’s always the concert footage and never is it better than during the years either side of Tommy in which Daltrey finally let himself go to be the front man who deserved to be standing to the front of Entwhistle, Moon and Townshend. With Tommy‘s messianic songs came the need for Daltrey to become the deaf, dumb and blind pinball wizard who is miraculously healed, before opening a retreat within a British seaside holiday camp and as seen at Woodstock in his tasseled leather jacket, he provides Zeppelin’s Robert Plant with a marker for his entire wardrobe for the next ten years. Although Entwhistle only changes from year to year by the cut of his moustache and Moon leers out from behind his drumkit, Townshend remains the focus of the music, remaining great so long as he plays either a Rickenbacker, Les Paul or SG and in the Clockwork Orange garb at Woodstock, is the whip-smart street thug to Daltrey’s messiah. When it all comes together, as it does on the euphoric performance of See Me, Feel Me at Woodstock, with The Who taking to the stage at 4am, unpaid and having been spiked with LSD, the performance is all that The Who were meant to have been.

Elsewhere, Stein has rescued The Who’s performance of A Quick One While He’s Away from The Rolling Stones’ Rock ‘n Roll Circus from whatever archive it was lost within and there’s a fistful of great performances and interviews from US, British and German television shows, including Townshend defending The Who from an audience accusing him of having little artistic merit and another in which a young Jeremy Paxman spars lightly with him over his youthful anger.

As good as all this is, The Kids Are Alright still has glaring omissions, of which Quadrophenia is the most obvious. Arguably a better album than Tommy and certainly better at holding tight to a more difficult concept, Quadrophenia has been repeatedly written out of The Who’s history and although it was never as extensively toured as either Tommy or Who’s Next, neither was Sgt. Pepper but imagine a documentary on The Beatles that failed to mention it. Jeff Stein would have produced a better film had he considered moving away from the concert footage to allow five minutes to the likes of Quadrophenia, Lifehouse, I Can See For Miles and other moments that are either never or only briefly mentioned in the rush to include another shot of Moon’s arse or a couple more minutes of live footage.

According to both Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey, Keith Moon was disappointed to see himself looking grizzled, overweight and old but neither Townshend nor Daltrey ever give much away in their appraisal of their band, preferring to stay together, tour the old songs and occasionally get back to finishing off abandoned projects like Lifehouse. As The Who prepare to tour once again, with only Townshend and Daltrey alive, The Kids Are Alright is a great way to look back on the fury, the dazzling rock operas and the Union Jack jackets from when The Who still meant a four-piece piercing 12″ speaker bins with the distant end of a Rickenbacker.

Picture

Even from the film’s opening minutes, it’s evident that the transfer of The Kids Are Alright makes it look better than it has in years, even better than its Laserdisc release, according to Jeff Albarian, who remastered the film for DVD. The quality of the image is terrific and although it is a vast improvement on the quality of the VHS release and that of recent cinema screenings, The Kids Are Alright is never quite as flawless as a number of other recent music releases, the Led Zeppelin set included.

Sound

The Kids Are Alright has been transferred onto DVD with a PCM stereo soundtrack or a choice of surround soundtracks, either Dolby Digital or DTS. Of the three, the stereo track is the most immediate with the rear channels on the surround tracks being used to add presence to the music tracks if not the interviews.

Extras

Audio Commentary: Martin Lewis introduces and hosts the commentary track, joined by director Jeff Stein and the man responsible for the restoration of the film on DVD, Jeff Albarian. As expected from these guests, Stein is good on the origins of the footage and the reaction of the band to seeing the film in 1978-79 whilst Albarian chips in with details on his work for this year’s DVD release.

Eyesight To The Blind: This set of subtitles offers liner notes for each song and interview featured in the film.

Guitar & Pen: Whilst given this title, this extra is only English subtitles for the songs and interviews in the film.

Miracle Cure (40m26s, 1.33:1, 2.0 Stereo): Opening with an interview with the producer of the DVD release of The Kids Are Alright, John Albarian discusses his efforts in sourcing footage for this release. In addition to his comments on the old VHS and Laserdisc releases of The Kids Are Alright, Albarian also talks about the amount of searching that was required to track down all of the negatives of the original footage and how the owners of the footage assisted in the restoration of this film. This is an exhaustive documentary and one of the best yet presented on DVD as regards the restoration of a film for release on DVD.

Getting In Tune (6m13s, 1.78:1 Anamorphic, 2.0 Stereo): Using three scenes from The Kids Are Alright – I Can’t Explain from 1965’s Shindig!, John Entwhistle skeet-shooting his gold discs and Won’t Get Fooled Again from the Shepperton Film Studios – this compares the sound from previous releases of this film to the restored sound on this DVD release, showing a clear and improved difference from one to the other.

Trick Of The Light (5m05s, 1.78:1 Anamorphic, 2.0 Stereo): Using split screen, this bonus feature demonstrates the improved quality of the DVD release over the VHS and Laserdisc releases, again using three chapters from the film, including Baba O’Reilly from the Shepperton Film Studios performance, the tour of John Entwhistle’s home and a recording of Who Are You in Ramport studios.

The Ox (1.78:1 Anamorphic, 2.0 Stereo): With multiple angles, one for each of the members of The Who, this bonus feature allows John Entwhistle’s bass track to be isolated within recordings of Baba O’Reilly (6m42s) and Won’t Get Fooled Again (11m39s) from the Shepperton Film Studios performance. Both songs can also be played in full with 5.1 Surround and 2.0 Stereo audio tracks.

The Who’s London (8m44s 1.78:1 Non-Anamorphic, 2.0 Stereo): This bonus feature looks at twenty key places in London related to where the members of the band were born, where they met, played their first gigs and lived during their early years.

Behind Blue Eyes (25m38s, 1.33:1, 2.0 Stereo): This is an interview with Roger Daltrey, who is now looking very old and who, compared to Pete Townshend, was never the most articulate of interviewees. As a result, this plays up on Daltrey’s tough Londoner character and his frequent refusal to give a straight answer soon grates.

Anytime You Want Me: (1.78:1 Anamorphic, 2.0 Stereo): Using the same multiple angles as The Ox – Ox Cam, Pete Cam A, Moonie Can and Roger’s Pit Cam – this includes the recordings of Baba O’Reilly (6m42s) and Won’t Get Fooled Again (11m39s) from the Shepperton Film Studios performance. Given, however, that John Entwhistle’s bass track can be isolated on this extra, Anytime You Want Me is really no more than a retitled version of The Ox.

Pure And Easy: This is a trivia game of twenty-one questions on The Who leading to a recording of Ringo Starr promoting The Kids Are Alright.

It’s Hard: Another trivia game of twenty-one questions on The Who leading to a recording of Who Are You (6m21s) remixed in 5.1 Surround.

See My Way (29m23s, 1.33:1, 2.0 Stereo): This is an interview with Jeff Stein, the director of The Kids Are Alright as to his introduction to The Who, how he came to make the film and how his relationship with the band changed during the making of the film, particularly as he requested they perform live for the film.

Overall

I’ll admit to being biased as the mix of Daltrey and Moon’s wild-eyed anger and Townshend’s art-school concepts have always impressed me much more than the pop noodlings of The Beatles and the brief bloom of The Rolling Stones. In particular, during the years from the writing of The Who Sell Out, through Tommy, Quadrophenia and Who’s Next, The Who left a thrilling set of albums that sit rock and pop next to concept albums about freedom, responsibility, maturity and Odorono deodorant. Yellow submarines? Doesn’t get anywhere near…

The Kids Are Alright would have made a perfect boxset had it shipped with Quadrophenia as then the story on The Who would almost have been complete. But to buy both those films and the Maximum R&B boxset, then you’re getting close to as good as rock has ever been.

The Kids Are Alright: Fifteen Years of The Who

From rollingstone.com by Dave Marsh

This story is from the August 9th, 1979 issue of Rolling Stone.

The Who documentary captures the spirit of rock and roll over the past fifteen years

In September 1967, the Who made an appearance on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour that surely ranks as one of the greatest bits of rock & roll mayhem ever to grace network television. They were almost through a raveup on ”My Generation,” complete with all the standard special effects of the period: smoke bombs, cracked amps, smashed mikes and busted guitars. Keith Moon had even worked up a surprise gimmick for the occasion: he’d had his bass drum rigged with gunpowder.

According to the legend, what the producers didn’t know was that Moon had spent the interval between rehearsal and show time bribing the stagehand charged with loading explosives with twenty-dollar bills and nips from Keith’s ever-ready hip flask. By air time, Moon had so successfully befuddled the hapless crewman that his bass drum held ten times as much gunpowder as it should have had.

The blast threw Moon off the drum riser and sent cymbal shrapnel slicing through his arm. Pete Townshend‘s left ear took the full force of the explosion, which also did in a camera and the studio’s monitors. Nonplussed, Tommy Smothers entered from the wings, an acoustic guitar strapped round his neck. Spying him, Townshend forgot the ringing in his ears, grabbed the guitar, smacked it on the floor and put his foot through it. Backstage, Bette Davis fainted dead away into the arms of Mickey Rooney.

This sequence opens Jeff Stein’s Who documentary, The Kids Are Alright, on a note of slapstick chaos that doesn’t let up for two hours. For the unconverted, The Kids Are Alright offers a glimpse of rock & roll as it was always meant to be: a force of elemental anarchy that dispels gloom without denying it exists. And for veteran Who fans, ”It proves that the Who were the greatest rock & roll band in the world,” as director Stein put it.

The Kids Are Alright highlights the Who’s fifteen-year career, from silent footage at London’s Scene Club in 1965 to the final concert with Moon at Shepperton Film Studios in 1978. In between there was Monterey, Woodstock (”I ‘ated it,” Townshend tells an interviewer), television interviews in which Townshend nearly falls asleep and Moon and Townshend shred each other’s shirt sleeves, montage sequences of each member and a number of superior performance clips, including the first official release of anything from the legendary Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, the 1968 TV special. Since all of this unspools at a furious pace, without subtitles or narration, The Kids Are Alright has struck some observers as a muddle. New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin called Stein’s viewpoint ”willfully uninformative.” In fact, Stein says, his aim was to make a film as self-referential and potentially alienating as rock is at its best.

Curiously, the band members seem indifferent to the film. Although John Entwistle, new drummer Kenney Jones and Townshend were in town the weekend the movie opened, only Entwistle, who mixed the soundtrack, showed any interest. (Roger Daltrey stayed in London, where he’s making a film entitled McVicar.)

”I don’t think this movie is a very significant part of my life or the Who’s life,” said Townshend, sitting in his suite at the Navarro Hotel, scene of some of the group’s most eloquent mischief. ”Its new significance was never meant to be. The new weight that’s been added to it is Keith’s dying – with Keith’s immaculate sense of timing.”

Those are strange sentiments for Townshend, previously so obsessed with the Who’s history that when the band’s singles compilation album, Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy, was issued in 1971, he himself reviewed it in Rolling Stone.

Which leaves it up to the kids, who are quite capable of carrying on the Who tradition by themselves. (In New York, where the film opened June 15th, lines went around the block the first weekend, and on the opening night, the kids took over Fifty-eighth Street outside the Plaza Theatre, forcing cops to cordon it off.) And that’s all right with Stein, 25, who’s been a fanatic since 1965, when he heard about this group that did a song called ”My Generation” and then broke up all its equipment. ”After hearing it,” he remembers, ”I knew, and from then on, I had the disease.”

By 1975, after meeting the band and publishing a photo book about them, Stein finally got the opportunity to broach the idea he’d nurtured for years – to make a documentary about the band.

”I went up to the hotel where Pete was getting ready for the première of Tommy,” Stein recalls. ”There he was, with his neat little suitcase, polishing his shoes – that was the beginning of the image shattering for me.

”I said, let me put together a compilation for those who yearn for the days of the Smothers Brothers and the Murray the K shows. So you’re freed from ‘Jump, Pete, jump’ and ‘Smash your guitar, Pete.’

”Pete came out of the bathroom where he was brushing his teeth and said [imitating Townshend with a mouthful of Pepsodent], ‘Thash sha good idea. Lesh do it.’”

Stein spent the next year seeking financing (the Who eventually put up the nearly $2 million production costs themselves) and gathering film clips. It was the classic beg, borrow and steal routine; on their first date, Jeff took his girlfriend to a screening of some Townshend guitar-smashing clips from another project. Halfway through the screening, his girlfriend noticed that Jeff had been stuffing her pocketbook full of the film as it unrolled through the projector.

By early 1976, when the Who were back in New York to play Madison Square Garden, Stein and his editor, Ed Rothowitz, had assembled the Smothers Brothers footage; the group’s riotous BBC interview with Russell Harty in which Moon strips off his clothes, rips Townshend’s sleeve and generally performs like an unhouse-broken but lovable puppy; the ”Young Man Blues” sequence from a 1969 concert in London; a Keith Moon montage set to ”Cobwebs and Strange”; some early – silent, unfortunately – footage of the High Numbers/Who at London’s Scene Club; and the ridiculous ”Tommy, Can You Hear Me?” a cappella performance from Germany’s Beat Club TV show.

He set up a screening of the seventeen-minute film, and ”after the first minute they were screaming, in tears,” Stein recalls. ”Pete was punching and smacking Keith during the Smothers Brothers episode, especially after the explosion. ‘That’s where I lost me fuckin‘ hearing!’ he kept saying. ‘That’s where I lost it! I knew it! I knew it!’ Pete was laughing so hard, he was literally banging his head on the floor. Keith was screaming and jumping up and down, of course. ‘Tommy, Can You Hear Me?’ tore the house down – I knew then that they understood the real meaning of ‘Tommy,’” he smirks. ”So I thought, well now I want to show them that we’ll be fair and I put in ‘Young Man Blues,’ and Pete was riveted. He turned to me in the middle of it and whispered, ‘Where’s this from?’ And they said, ‘Yeah, go ahead and do it.’ To me, this is still the highlight of the project.”

In typical Who fashion, the film took about three times as long to complete as expected, but it was worth the wait. For those who love this band, The Kids Are Alright is as near to the realization of our dreams as we are likely to come. The Who were always the one band that refused to conceal its inner conflicts and torments. There’s no copping out here, either. And Stein never loses sight of the fact that the music was what made it all mean anything.

In another way, too, Stein tells the real story. After the first fifteen minutes, in which we’ve seen Moon young and at his peak, Stein cuts to the version of ”Baba O’Riley” shot at Shepperton in spring 1978. Moon struggles to keep up with the rest of the group – themselves looking a bit faded – which only makes their remarkable performance seem more miraculous. But there’s something scary in seeing what time, rock’s ultimate enemy, has done to the best drummer in the history of the music. And there’s something scary in Townshend’s admission that what he is now is ”a desperate old fart . . . not boring, though.”

Finally, though, it’s Keith’s movie. Stein shows Moon in a variety of antic stunts, from the Keystone Kops-style promo film for ”Happy Jack” to a bizarre sadomasochistic interlude at a Hollywood porn emporium. Moon also provides the film’s most sobering comment. Asked by the cameraman to tell the truth for once, an overweight, bearded and beleaguered Moon turns his eyes upward. ”The truth as you want to know it? Oh no, dear boy. No, I’m afraid you couldn’t afford me.”

Stein’s been accused of making no statement at all, but I think he’s made a major statement about what’s happened to rock in the past fifteen years – and what’s happened to those who tried to follow it.

”The message is there in the last three songs – ‘My Generation,’ ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ and ‘Long Live Rock,’” Stein explains. ”When we were younger, ‘My Generation’ summed it all up for us, in terms of anger and self-destruction. ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ is about being a generation that wanted to become a force and how we all had let ourselves down. We were the New Boss and we were the same as the old bosses. We were cynical now instead of just angry; we had gotten our way and we had fucked up.

”But at the end, I put ‘Long Live Rock,’ which is a basic roots type of song in the Chuck Berry mold, because that song’s a celebration of rock & roll. And that’s what the Who is. That in spite of fucking up, rock & roll was still something worth dreaming about, something worth fighting for, and it had been worth loving. And no matter how cynical one gets, it is ‘Long live rock, we need it every nite.’”

In that sense, The Kids Are Alright stands at the opposite pole from the other great rock documentary of our era, Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz, where the audience was genuinely irrelevant; rock was no longer a matter of idealism and passion, violence and alienation. It had become a streamlined money machine, truly musical but also truly a commodity.

At the end of the film, Stein has captured the definitive ”Won’t Get Fooled Again.” Quite accidentally, as it happened. The show had closed with that song, but Stein, who was filming, didn’t feel it was as ”definitive” as he wanted. So he went backstage to try to convince a band that never did encores to do it again. ”A definitive end!” Townshend replied facetiously. ”What would you like me to do, go out there and fall asleep while playing, or just die onstage or better yet just smash that motherfucker over the head with me guitar who keeps yelling out ‘Magic Bus.’”

The song begins with Townshend in a comic rage, wiggling his hips in a true parody of his legend, leaping and grimacing in mock savagery. But when Daltrey lets loose that final scream and the lasers shut off, the lights come back up to reveal Townshend in an astounding, knees-bent leap across the width of the stage, sliding on the floor as he hits the chords. A few bars later, he’s smashing his guitar, the satire gone; if he ever meant it, he means it now, as he raises his red Gibson high above his head and sacrifices it one last time. ”Sacrificed for us,” says Jeff Stein, ”and for everything we ever wanted – and for the moment. That moment is the moment, all we ever lived for and the moment we’ll always remember. For that, I’m grateful.”

Me too, but it’s hard not to remember with equal clarity what comes next. Moon climbs painfully over his drum kit – which had been nailed down so he couldn’t destroy it – to join the others at the front of the stage, where they wave goodbye as ”Long Live Rock” fills the theater. As if he knew it was the last one, Keith reaches round for a hug and a kiss from each of the others, a last goodbye. And Pete Townshend, rock’s once and future Sun King, stands and waves, his eyes red from the tears, while the camera pulls back one last time, to show a sea of hands raised and waving, saying goodbye for all of us to the final expression of our dream, our innocence, our vision.

The Who can duck The Kids Are Alright and the comment it makes about their career. But they’ll never duck that moment, which is as close to the truth about rock & roll as anything that ever hit the screen. It’s not only an emblem of the last time rock captured you; it’s a symbol of the first. The last words belong to Jeff Stein.

”What sums it all up for me,” he says, ”is that after the first time my brother and I saw the Who at the Fillmore, we walked out of the theater not caring if we got run over by the Second Avenue bus. Because we knew we would go straight to rock & roll Valhalla.”

The Who The Kids Are Alright DVD (Deluxe Edition) (2008)

From amazon.com

Really, I just don’t know how this DVD could be any better.

It seems like every night, Dave and Jay have some new band on stage. Some angst-projecting vocalist trying to sound like Kurt Cobain, some guitarist who knows 5 chords and 2 ways to strum each one, a bassist who plays one note at a time, and a drummer who knows only one rythem – bump-bah-bump-bah-bump-bah-badump. But no matter how bad they are, they all have one thing in common – they’re all pretty enough for MTV. It’s enough to make me scream in frustration, because I know how good rock and roll can really be, and this DVD is it.

Patch your DVD player through your stereo, put masking tape on all your window glass, stuff the dog’s ears with cotton, protect all small children with DOT approved devices, then pop this DVD in and hide under the couch, because THIS is rock and roll as it was and is meant to be – master musicians with genuine f— it all attitude, playing through 10 tons of Marshall Hiwatt amps. In the late 70’s there was a famous ad in “Stereo Review” showing a guy sitting in an armchair in front of a speaker, with his necktie being blown straight back behind him. Picture that, and you get an idea of what this movie and this band are all about.

The movie itself is half comedy and half action-drama. The comedy comes during interviews and conversations with the band, with Keith initiating most of it and everyone else either joining in or, in the case of the slick corporate “host” types, getting skewered. The action-drama is all on stage, with Pete whirling his way through incredible guitar playing, Roger providing his usual peerless singing, Keith bringing something almost otherworldly to his drums, and John holding it all down, standing there motionless like the rock of Gibralter, his fingers on the bass a blur.

Unlike so many modern bands, who surround themselves with “star” mystique and who are always safe and cool on stage, The Who were self-deprecating and able to laugh at themselves when they weren’t playing, and when they were playing… well, when they were playing, they consistently reached for the stars. Sometimes it didn’t work – sometimes they sounded like crap. But when they were in the sweet spot, when they were in “the zone,” they were, to use the apt words of another reviewer, “the greatest rock and roll band ever to draw breath.”

Most of what you get in this DVD special edition is “in the zone,” and what little isn’t, doesn’t really detract from the experience. Everyone who worked on producing this DVD edition should get a medal, as the film looks and sounds as close to perfection as it is ever going to get.

By the way, if you are listening through an old-fashioned, two speaker system, choose “stereo” under sound options. The reviewer who panned the sound, probably hadn’t tried that option yet – on my system (Carver tuner with 2 Dahlquist DQM-9 Compact loudspeakers) choosing “stereo” cleaned up the sound greatly.

Unfortunately, most of the people who buy this DVD, probably already know how great it is. You won’t be disappointed, and if you show it to a friend or two, maybe the memory of The Who won’t die with us. There’s never been another band like them, and this DVD does them justice for the ages.

The Who The Kids Are Alright DVD (Deluxe Edition) (2008)

From amazon.com

Review After having seen several other major DVD opportunities get squandered (The Beatles’s Hard Days Night leaps to mind), it is an utter delight to watch/listen to this DVD. It is great on several levels: the original film was one of the best collections of live performances in the history of rock, the reissue has dramatically improved the look and sound of the film, and the Special Edition extra disc includes some truly wonderful features. This ought to be the model for all future reissues, such as when/if they reissue the Rolling Stones’s Twenty-Five By Five.

Only a couple of years ago I was trying to explain to my daughter that in the sixties and seventies, the Who were full-fledged members of the rock Pantheon, as revolutionary and crucial as the Stones, the Beatles, or Led Zeppelin. For some reason, they went into a bit of a decline in the general musical consciousness (I found kids my daughter’s age might not know of them at all, whereas they knew the other aforementioned bands quite well). Thanks to some timely re-released and a tragic tour that saw the death of John Entwhistle, their star truly seems to be on the ascendant again. This album is crucial for proving what all of us at the time knew: the Who was without question one of the very greatest live bands of all time.

The Who was an amazing band, full of paradoxes. Roger Daltrey was one of the great front men in the history of rock, and Pete Townshend a crack songwriter and arguably the most entertaining to watch guitarist of all time. Yet, the lead instruments in the band, almost unique in rock, were Keith Moon and his maniacally abused drum kit and John Entwhistle’s bass, both of them among the top two or three of all time on their instruments, if not the best. They were a great rhythm section, but they jointly tended to take over the songs musically, unlike Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman for the Stones, who were content to stay rock solid in the background.

Live, they were amazing, with Daltrey marching in place, swinging the mike around like David about to use his sling against Goliath; Pete Townshend dancing disjointedly around while doing his famous helicopter chording of the guitar; Keith Moon playing as if he were on eight different drugs, tossing his drumsticks ten and twenty feet in the air; and amid it all, like the quiet in the eye of the hurricane, John Entwhistle standing stock still, motionless except for his hands moving up and down his bass, playing the instrument better than anyone else ever had, or perhaps has since.

The film begins with a bang, with a famous appearance on The Smothers Brothers Show (an awesome show because it was so amazingly subversive, with Tom and Dick acting like total squares, but in reality leftists who loved exposing the public to acts like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl, and bands like The Who and Cream). Unlike Ed Sullivan, Tom and Dick truly loved these bands, and the opening number/skit, a rollicking version of “My Generation” (with Roger Daltrey suffering so badly from a faux upper-induced stammer that was a badge of their identification with the amphetamine-crazed Mods that one isn’t certain he is going to be able to finish each line). Each number brings new revelations or refreshes old memories. For instance, in “I Can’t Explain” from SHINDIG! Keith Moon is sporting a T-shirt with a bull’s eye on it, a full decade before Richard Hell would achieve notoriety in New York for wearing one when he was still with Television.

The numbers included in the film are both wide-ranging and representative. I suppose any Who fan will find many of their own favorites missing, but no one can complain that the numbers focus too much on one phase of their career. The selections are extraordinarily well balanced. One of the more poignant features is the fact that the performance of “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” which was performed specifically for the film so that they could have one really good performance on film of one of their most famous numbers, was the last time the Who ever performed in their original line up; Keith Moon would die only three months later.

The extras disc is truly worth having, with a feature on the restoration of the movie, and nice items like a tour of the Who’s London, an interview with Roger Daltrey, and, my favorite bit, interesting versions of “Baba O’Riley” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” that features only John Entwhistle’s bass and visuals. There is no question about it: the guy could play bass.

All in all, one is going to come across very few music DVDs quite this good. I highly recommend it.

Review Having never seen this film before, I was in no position to be impressed by the improved sound or video quality. And having read many of the reviews I was in a sweat of anticipation to finally see this film. Sometimes reading such positive reviews can create over-expectation, and this is what I was most concerned about. I’ve had that with Roger Waters’ In the Flesh and also Pink Floyd’s Pulse. This expectation was all the greater as I rate Who’s Next as the single greatest album of all time. There is not a note in the wrong place. How can you better that?

So it was with some trepidation I shoved in disk 1. This was made even worse by my 9-year old daughter occasionally coming into the room to laugh at the ‘gay guy’ singing. This standing joke began with them seeing Mick Jagger in Rock ‘n Roll Circus and my kids now routinely mock every 60s band I watch – but it doesn’t stop them watching in fascination.

In the end I wasn’t disappointed. Quite the contrary. Usually, no matter how good a performance is I rarely watch it all the way through at one sitting – there’s just too much else to do. This time I did, and even more rarely it left me wanting much more by The Who.

I’ve always been very selective about The Who – I don’t have much of their pre-Tommy stuff, except a compilation, or their post-Quadrophenia.

But this film demonstrated that they are not a by-numbers band. I hadn’t expected them to be an improvisational band, but this DVD has several renditions of the same song and each was worth watching, and were better than the studio version. I’ve already seen 30 Years of Maximum R&B, and was really divided as to which one to buy. Now I see I need both, as well as Live at the Isle of Wight and maybe even the Royal Albert Hall.

My philosophy with other bands is just to have one DVD to see what they’re like live. But The Kids Are Alright shows the evolution of the band – as only 60s bands seemed to evolve. Their early 60s music is quite different to late 60s, and their early 70s music is similarly quite different. Only the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Traffic and Pink Floyd evolved quite as much.

The film also clarified another thing for me – the praise heaped on John Entwhistle. You cannot appreciate his talent unless you see him play.