Pete, You Must Be Joking

I got an email today from The Who.

For the low price of $59.99, I can purchase "Platinum Membership" in The Who 2006 Tour and buy tickets four days before they go on sale. Tickets that are already absurdly priced.

Now, any reader of this blog will know I love The Who and that Pete has always been my hero.

But it pains me to see the band revert to its usual form and just come across as a bunch of money-grubbers, looking to cash-in however they can.

Let's review.

This is NOT The Who that is going on tour. It is Roger and Pete, backed by session musicians. For completely unknown reasons, Pete is bringing his brother along to play rhythm guitar. All of these guys are excellent players (well, I have no idea about Simon Townshend; his playing is so superfluous), but they are not Entwistle and Moon. The band was barely credible after Moon died to begin with and Entwistle's departure utterly dismantled the Who sound. To quote Pete himself, this is more like "The Who on Ice."

Which is fine, up to a point. I admit that I still love to see Pete play and enjoy his banter between songs. And if, as he promised at Knebworth, the band does start to play some rarities, it will be a vast improvement over sleepwalking through "I Can't Explain" for the 10,000th time.

But the ticket prices, the Platinum memberships, the overall chutzpah of pretending that this is a real Who tour is starting to grate. And the honest truth is that Pete tends to mail it in for these shows. I can't tell you how often he was sitting back and letting the band play while he noodled indifferently or abused his tremolo bar like a 13 year-old who had just bought his first electric guitar. By the way, what the hell is Pete doing with a tremolo bar on his guitar anyway?

So $59.95 so I can be a few rows closer to this thing?

Hey Pete: Fuck You.