Flashback
On Aug. 3, 1976, the classic lineup of the Who played an explosive show in Maryland. No one knew it'd be the last tour for the drummer Moon, who died two years later
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.”
