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Jul 08, 2015 Web Exclusive By Frank Valish

By 1982, The Who was arguably a band past its time. Its two most recent albums, 1981’s Face Dances and 1982’s It’s Hard failed to reclaim past glory. Punk had overtaken the landscape a few years earlier, and the more synthesized sounds of the 1980s were beginning to emerge on the horizon. The band had lost its irreplaceable drummer, Keith Moon, four years prior, and though they vowed to soldier on at the time, much of the old Who spark was gone.

The Who’s 1982 outing was billed as its farewell tour, and despite all the obvious irony with which that can be viewed these days, at the time it seemed like a last hurrah for a band that had been, along with The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Kinks, so instrumental in building what had become known as rock and roll. What is interesting about Live at Shea Stadium, which is culled from the band’s October 12th and 13^th shows from that tour, is not the fact that this was a band in decline trying to cement its legacy for all time. Certainly that is likely the case, and the band played through all its classic catalog cuts with vibrancy and energy befitting of a final go-round. However, when viewed in 2015, what becomes most intriguing about these Shea Stadium performances are the way Roger Daltrey, Pete Townshend, and John Entwistle (with Kenney Jones on drums and Tim Gorman on piano/keys) rage through their newer material, songs the band has largely shunned in more recent years.

Directly following opening tunes of “Substitute” and “I Can’t Explain,” the band enters into the Entwistle-written/Daltrey-sung “Dangerous” from It’s Hard, and the song is performed with typical Who fire. Entwistle takes the center vocal mic for “The Quiet One,” from Face Dances. Pleasantly, the song stands up well after 30-plus years, a barn-burner lost in the mire of late-catalog Who. “Eminence Front,” from It’s Hard presents like the lesser-Who radio standard it has become in intervening years. “Cry If You Want” seems to have suffered a much worse fate with age, its ‘80s feel and march temp sounding dated at best, but “A Man is a Man,” another track from the band’s 1982 album, included here as a bonus track to the DVD proper, has aged better than expected.

A barrage of hits rounds out the performance, with 9 of the last 11 tracks, excepting a Beatles cover (“I Saw Her Standing There”) and “Twist and Shout,” being Who staples. It’s to be expected, but it’s also a bit tiring to listen to these tracks for what seems like the thousandth time, if you grew up anywhere near a classic rock radio station. The Who plays Live at Shea Stadium as one imagines they would, thinking it would be the band’s final tour. But in 2015, the document’s excitement becomes the way the band shows off its newly-written songs, attacking them with vigor unrestrained, as if fighting to stay alive at the same time offering up a resigned defeat. (www.thewho.com) (www.eagle-rock.com)

Author rating: 7/10