Customer Reviews

Before I Get Old: The Story of the Who

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Dave Marsh can be an arrogant, snotty,and belligerent writer. Which is fitting as The Who often shared the same faults. Marsh does everything he possibly can to don the cloak of The Who and write as though he was one of them.

I agree with other reviewers in criticising the book's overall veracity. But that really is a small matter as "Before I Get Old" frequently is as entertaining as the group it documents.

Pete Townsend certainly is one of the few geniuses Rock music has produced. "Before I Get Old" certainly works extremely hard at presenting Townsend as Rock's All Father, a mantel Townsend himself worked very hard to develop. As a result, Townsend often comes off a real prententious jerk. But God, what great music he and his band mates produced out of their many disputes.

Marsh works hard at praising the contributions of Daltrey, Entwhistle and of course the incomparable Moon the Loon in producing some of the finest music Rock could ever hope to produce (boy, that was an arrogant statement- see the book rubs off. Marsh also never loses the fact that he is first and foremost a rabid fan. Maybe that is the book's biggest weakness, maybe it is the book's biggest strength. Marsh builds the case that The Who were the greatest Rock and Roll group of all time. An opinion I share (The Beatles are in a class all by them selves). He also makes the case that The Who really died with Keith Moon.

"Before I Get Old" is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it will do until we get the definitive work. As is, this is a blast to read.

It seems to me that if you pick up a rock bio and expect to get something even close to the reality of what really went on, you are setting yourself up for a hard fall.

Dave Marsh does a really good job, however, at summing up the Who's career and belting out the facts with nice writing and concise direction. You're given behind the scenes looks at a lot of infighting, songs, albums, lives and careers and it all gels rather well together.

Marsh definitely has his opinions and is not hesitant in letting loose with them. I say good. Rock journalism is not the place for objectivity, just as rock n' roll is the essential forum to spill out everything you ever thought about everything. He has his biases and likes and it's nice to see because from that you understand that you are reading a Who fan's bio of the band. A much more well-informed fan than most, but basically, a fan.

The downside is also an upside. The downside being that almost all the quotes and personal asides in the book are taken from other interviews or films or whatnot, but that's also an upside. You get a collage view of the Who from their early days of snotty-punk-rock and their later days of fried-out elegance.

Pound for pound, in my book, the Who were the best band to come from the whole British invasion. And this book is as good a companion piece to the music as you're apt to find. Either it's this or waiting for their respective autobiographies....

Then you really won't know who to trust.

Nobody would mistake the warring personalities of The Who with, say, the unified (pre-White Album) Beatles. But the group was one of the best British outfits of all time, and Dave Marsh's book, although lengthier and more involved than other books on the band, still manages to miss the drama. Would that Philip Norman could turn his sights on this magnificent band!

Most of the trouble Marsh has with the subject is the emphasis on Pete Townshend's natterings about pop music. Townshend was (and is, if he gets the chance) a voluble man when it comes to music. It's certain that, if he didn't possess an ounce of musical talent, he would've become a first-rate novelist or journalist. But Marsh's own extended forays into pop culture theory bog down the reader. Fans of The Who are not stupid types. They understand where the band came from, much as Beatle fans know about that band's origins. But, history aside, it's the telling of the tale that counts. Having read Marsh's book several times over twenty years, I've come to like it less and less.

The author seems to take a subconsciously perverse delight in skewering the band's foibles, whether it's their reliance on staged ritual drama/violence for a few years longer than deemed acceptable (by Marsh), or Townshend's complexes and frustrations in getting his grandiose ideas across to the other band members. These were part of the band's core identity and they wrestled for years with the image of the angry upstart Mods and, later, bona-fide rock legends who pounded stage after stage until Moon's untimely end. Another writer would perhaps come across as sympathetic while still taking a critical view of the group's history. By the book's end (in 1982, when Kenney Jones filled in for Moon), the band are seen as nothing more than an exhausted assembly of sell-outs going through one more corporate-sponsored mega-tour. What would Marsh later make of U2, Springsteen, Oasis and a dozen reunited 60s bands? Such a disappointing book for the group that gave us The Who Sell Out, Tommy, Who's Next and Quadrophenia.

Not a bad book, but Dave Marsh's style of writing/preaching/knowing-it-all really got on my nerves (minus 2 stars because he wrote it, and not someone else). There's way too much about the making of "Tommy", and not enough about the older albums. Some great stuff in here about Shel Talmy, Kit Lambert, Radio Caroline, New Action/Track Records, and a good section about Mod culture (essential reading for those outside the UK... Mod was more than just wearing a bulls-eye T-shirt). The book ends after Keith Moon dies, and the first "final tour", so if you were looking for more recent Who history, it's not in here. Still, it's a decent read if you can stomach Dave Marsh.

This is an exhaustive account of the Who's early to middle career, through the "Who's Last" tour. (It was published in 83 and hasn't been revised, so the Tommy revival tour and the Quadrophenia revival tour and Entwistle's death are not discussed.)
There are a couple of criticisms, chief among them that it seems Marsh didn't get much in the way of original interviews and relies heavily on other sources, giving it a bit of a "clip job" feel. He's also not shy about his opinions, some of which are right on target (Kit Lambert's shortcomings as a producer) and some which are way off base (his slighting of Quadrophenia). The later the story progresss throughout the band's career, the less time he spends on the narrative. In a 525 page book, you're barely out of "Tommy" by page 375.
Still, the 525 pages flies by, as the book is so well organized and the material freshly presented. Kudos especially to Marsh for his portrayal of the evolution and continuing contradictions of Townshend's thoughts.

From my own and friends' reactions, it seems that the more you like The Who, the less you will like this book. Like Leonard Malton on films and James Michener on any subject, Marsh makes exciting things insufferable. The wheezing digressions, no-nothing judgments and constant air of self-importance smother fandom's lively flame.

Lester Bangs could communicate to you the flavor, rhythm, and personal significance of a song or ouvre. Marsh has no such ear, and overwhelms this project with his own wooly-brained inanity. Even descriptions of the band member's intimate, often emotional life experiences are uninvolving. Tell you what--buy the albums and just guess what kind of lives these guys had and what their motives were. That'll be a lot more fun than this quagmire.

Like many Who fans, I suppose, I found my interest in the band recently rekindled by the tragic death of Who bassist John Entwistle and the near-miraculous rebirth of the band on their subsequent North American tour. One day while going through some old books of mine, I came across my (very) battered old copy of Before I Get Old, and, being "between books", decided to give it another whirl.

I was pleasantly suprised to see how well the book holds up. If nothing else, the sheer amount of research Marsh obviously did to put the book together is enormously impressive. Marsh's knowledge pays off in his ability to treat the book almost like a really wonderful non-fiction novel - it's a story many would consider unbelievable if it weren't actually true. Also in the book's favor is the fact that Marsh has herewithin abstained (praise God!) from the kind of "this guy/these guys can do no wrong" hero-worship which marred his Springsteen bio Glory Days.

The main issue I have with Marsh's book (and this is largely a matter of taste, I suppose) is the short shrift he gives to so much of the Who's post-Who's Next work. For example, he seems to regard their magnificient Quadrophenia as pretty much a failure. I think this is absurd. Quadrophenia may not be a perfect album, but I believe it stands as the ultimate realization of Townshend's long-standing ambition to create a musically- and narratively- linked song cycle, not to mention as one of the finest studio albums created by ANY artist, the Who or otherwise.

In spite of this, Before I Get Old still stands as the best Who bio that's been written to date. If you're a fan of the band, or are merely curious about the greatest rock band of all time, I highly recommend you pick this up.

Dave Marsh is the most long-winded fool ever to use a typewriter. Most of this book comes to you directly from his anus. It is nevertheless a good reference if you can dig through the piles and piles of rubbish.

While I can't say anything personal about David Marsh, this is a great book for the first half, until it hits on the mid-1970's. Then Marsh focuses less and less on the music. Tommy is covered a bit too much, but it is what the Who will be remembered for. The only problem I really had with the book was Marsh's total dislike of Face Dances and It's Hard. While these aren't the best Who albums, they are far from the embarrassment Marsh makes them out to be. Overall, a good introduction to the Who.

This book is not badly written, but it is not the story of The Who, as the title suggests. It is a book by a man fascinated by Pete Townshend, who writes a bit about the other band members only when he has to.
For example, we read early on that Roger Daltrey got married to his pregnant girlfriend. Almost a hundred pages later we read that he was divorced and paying child support. No mention of anything in between, nothing about whether he had a son or a daughter or even if the child is in his life. We're told at one point that John Entwhistle is on his honeymoon, without anything leading up to it. In fact, we only hear this because we're told that Pete had to get hold of him on board the yacht the newly-married couple were on. But in those pages there is no end to the detail about every aspect of Pete's life.
Worst of all, important musical facts are left out. Half-way through the book, while talking about a 1968 U.S. tour, Marsh mentions that the Who were intimately involved with the creation of Marshall amplifiers during the early- to mid-sixties. I knew that, and I was looking for some details on it, but in all the pages he devoted to Townshend's life in that period, he never once mentioned it.
I didn't find a single factual error (that's good), but there was nothing in here that I didn't already know about the band (and I didn't know all that much), making it kind of a pointless read. All the well-known facts are simply arranged here to pump up Pete's image and make his band-mates look like hangers-on. I can see why Pete liked the book, but I can't imagine why the others did.