The Night The Who Saved New York

On Wednesday evening at the spiffy newly-renovated Madison Square Garden, Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey led a small ensemble of professional musicians through a tight, powerful performance in full of The Who’s last great recording, the 1973 mods and rockers double album tale, Quadrophenia. The performance was remarkable for the serious attention to the material, its explicit ties to departed bandmates Keith Moon and John Entwistle, and for the spectacle of a rock opera that actually rocks. That and Townshend’s screaming guitar sent power pop played by an older generation into the hearts of the younger members of the crowd. My kids dug it.

Townshend spoke of next week’s planned 12.12.12 concert to benefit the victims of Hurricane Sandy in the metro area, a big fundraising all star show featuring Bruce Springsteen, Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney and The Who. It’s a social venture designed to both raise attention for a cause (the plight of those still suffering from the storm) and to raise money. But Townshend’s appeal reminded me that music can sometimes literally merge people with the cause they support, that is has the force to do so, from the Concert for Bangladesh to the present day – and that one night in my concert-going life was the pinnacle of that experience.

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It was another night in the same big room 11 years ago – an evening I still think of as the night The Who saved New York.

The Concert for New York unfolded (and that’s the right word because it was massive, went way past curfew, and melded all sorts of voices and talents together) on Oct 20, 2001. The ruins at Ground Zero in lower Manhattan still smoldered ominously. The days of false alarms and panicked evacuations from New York towers were not yet over. And neither were the funerals. The concert was organized in part by Paul McCartney, whose father had been a volunteer fireman in Liverpool and the event was centered around the city’s beleaguered, exhausted and deeply bereaved uniformed first responder services. The most devastated service was of course the Fire Department, which lost 343 people in the collapse of the World Trade Center, a death toll exacerbated by the firefighters’ deeply held instinct to run toward trouble, toward danger, toward risk. As workers fled on September 11, many firefighters lost their lives climbing the stairs in the two towers.

The FDNY filled the Garden that night, but somehow thousands of cops and emergency services workers managed to get in as well. I had a ticket. They didn’t need one. The uniform was the ticket. To say that occupancy laws were stretched that night is to undersell the size of the place. Picture a Knicks game, then double the crowd. From the start, the building ran on a river of emotion and beer, which, if you wore a uniform – or your late loved one’s cap – was free. The thousands of cops in attendance studiously ignored thousands of other cops and firefighters lighting up a little reefer. Large bottles of high proof spirits were produced. The Garden was the biggest Irish wake in history.

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David Bowie opened with a pitch perfect solo version of Paul Simon’s America. Jay-Z blasted H to the Izzo, which was well-received by what can only be described as a largely white ethnic crowd. Billy Joel did New York State of Mind, and Eric Clapton and Buddy Guy ran through a taught Hoochie Coochie Man. The Backstreet Boys were booed (as were perceived anti-war liberals Susan Sarandon, Richard Gere, and Senator Hillary Clinton). Destiny’s Child was politely ignored. Movie stars made speeches, and short films were screened. Will Ferrell cavorted as George W. Bush. The concert was entering the familiar territory of long all star fundraising festivals.

Then actor John Cusack and a group of first responders introduced the next band. “A band who loves New York and is loved by New York. From England, The Who!”

Townshend, Daltrey and Entwistle (in his last U.S. Who performance) launched into Who Are You. Two minutes into the song, after a solo, Townshend whipped into his trademark windwill on his Stratocaster. The crowd lost it. Completely broke down. The lights flashed. The Union Jack behind the band was joined by the Stars and Stripes. From there, things got really hairy. The band’s two biggest anthems both feature classic moments of visceral tension and release, using neutral repeated synthesizer riffs to build toward the massive intervention of guitar, bass and drums. Baba O’Riley brings that at the beginning.

And it’s a song that stuck a spike straight into the cultural vein of the crowd – cops, firefighters, EMS workers, their husbands, wives, kids, brothers. It tapped directly into long summer rides to Jones Beach with the dash-mounted eight-track blasting, to boom boxes in the Rockaways and Beach Haven, and turntables in back bedrooms of ethnic neighborhoods in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and the burbs.

This was adolescence, the sudden instinctive remembrance of what’s been lost that is the purest expression of grief, the music of an earlier trip to Madison Square Garden, the sound of the parking lot at West End Two.

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And man, it was catharsis. We were halfway back on the first set of risers above the floor. Everyone was crying, drinking, screaming. The refrain, “We’re all wasted!” was never more enthusiastically endorsed by law enforcement (if anyone asks you, the legalization movement took wing here). And it built from there into what became the unofficial anthem of the night, the signature song of Townshend’s career.

Won’t Get Fooled Again is so familiar a cultural document that it can fade into the background. Yet it never had such expression in a single instance since its release in 1971. This was the moment for that song. By that point the crowd was so loud, that Townshend had to cup his hands around the microphone and shout. “We. Are Honored. To Be Here.” Then he windmilled into the first power chord, Entwistle’s bass slugged the crowd with a roundhouse, and the familiar synthesizer lines began. And the uniformed crowd poured itself into the maelstrom, throwing themselves bodily into a song of personal revolt. Build and release. Three chords centering the entire thing. Tension and then power. The synthesizer to the bottom, the Daltrey scream and big Townshend power chords to the finish. It all said: “We’re still here.”

And then they were off, with Roger Daltrey’s final words to the crowd: “We could never follow what you did.”

I’ve never seen a band become as unified with an audience, and I’ve seen a lot of shows. Keep in mind, The Who were already late in their career and their performance was treated as something of a comeback. Rolling Stone called it “one of the 50 moments that changed rock and roll.” It was ranked the fourth greatest event in Madison Square Garden history. And when Townshend and Daltrey accepted Kennedy Center honors seven years later, they were surprised with a chorus made up of New York City uniformed services singing their tribute.

The Concert for New York raised $30 million for the families of those lost, but for those who were there it created something of a legacy. It felt for one long, loud bit of time like fear and sadness and life had been synthesized into a single massive group experience. It felt like The Who saved New York.

The show fit the long tradition of the Jerry Lewis Telethons, George Harrison’s epic Concert for Bangladesh (which made fundraising for developing nations a key charity icon in Baby Boomer sensibility), LiveAid, FarmAid, and No Nukes. Next week’s all star concert for Sandy victims will follow in its footsteps, and doubtlessly raise many more millions. But it will have huge shoes to fill.

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