Off The Record More than two decades after their last release (1982's It's Hard) comes the Who's first new studio album in almost 25 years, Endless Wire. In the wake of the tragic death of bassist John Entwistle in 2002, The Who, now...

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Led Zeppelin will perform a one-time comeback concert in memory of Ahmet Ertegun, a co-founder of Atlantic Records.The band will perform together for the first time in 19 years on Nov. 26, at London's The O2 venue, on the banks of the River Thames.Promoters said...

More than four decades after they first hit the road, The Who gave an impromptu performance Thursday to show they're in fighting form for a 28-city European tour.The band's two surviving original members, Pete Townshend, 61, and Roger Daltrey, 62, played a four-song acoustic set...

The years between 1964 and 1968 represented the adolescence of The Who as a group. Their early years were a host of garbled impressions and varied influences which they assimilated uncritically; their middle years show them, like their audiences, struggling for some kind of identity in the chaos of the world at that time; since about 1968 they have achieved the mark of maturity—the faculty of self-critical development. Among the influences which the group did assimilate, artistic movements played the...

Since Townshend is a master of commercial usages, the indifferent success of his group [before 1969] is a curiosity. Despite his creative equipment, he has always required guidance. Until he met his first manager, Peter Meaden, he never thought in terms of image, and until he hooked up with his present advisers, Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, he didn't try to extend the images musically. The whole mod youth violence thing which Townshend perceived at the center of rock—and still does: the live s...

Quadrophenia is the Who at their most symmetrical, their most cinematic, ultimately their most maddening. Captained by Pete Townshend, they have put together a beautifully performed and magnificently recorded essay of a British youth mentality in which they played no little part, lushly endowed with black and white visuals and a heavy sensibility of the wet-suffused air of 1965. Nonetheless, the album fails to generate a total impact because of its own internal paradox: Instead of the four-sided interaction...