So Sad About Us

Yesterday I had the chance to watch Amazing Journey: The Story of The Who as I'd Tivo'd it when VH1 put it on. The film is, to the best of my knowledge, the first feature length look at the band since The Kids Are Alright from 1979. It came as a welcome relief since I had recorded the episode of A&E's Biography about Pete Townshend a few months ago which I erased after watching about 10 minutes of it because it featured no interview footage with the man himself. And so I was looking forward to a decent documentary about one of my favorite bands.

Amazing Journey is a straight-forward affair, unlike The Kids Are Alright. For the latter, director Jeff Stein created an impressionistic montage instead of a chronological story. Stein assembled his film almost purely from archival footage with some live performances in the fall of 1977 and spring of '78 put on for the express purpose of filming to capture some songs which were not represented in the archives. The result was a wonderful movie which captured the band's explosive live performances and their often hilarious off-stage antics. It did as good as possible of translating the manic energy of the band to film but it lacked a bio, a look behind the scenes, or much of any commentary on the music. Viewers saw that they rocked onstage and liked to have fun off but were left wondering how it all happened.

Amazing Journey takes a different tack altogether. The surviving members (Daltrey & Townshend) were interviewed especially for the project (at least the former was) which starts at the beginning and works its way up to 2007. There's a ton of archive interviews, live footage, et al to be found here. We begin with the band members' childhoods and work our way to the formation of the group with which everyone is familiar. The filmmakers are to be highly commended for their portrayal of the band's formative years. There is a fair amount of depth here which details how Daltrey recruited first Entwhistle and then the rest into The Detours which became The Who followed by The High Numbers and then The Who again. This well-crafted section is topped off by live footage from 1964 at the Railway Hotel which is a real treasure.

As the 1960s progress, however, the film gets worse as we hear a bit about the dynamics of the band and learn about their recording forays. It becomes obvious fairly quickly that we are in for a Behind the Music kind of expose with a heavy reliance on talk about the relationships of the band's members and a paucity of The Who plying their trade. The parts which document the period through the Tommy – up to 1971 – did a half-decent job of talking about the music considering how little was shown. One of the biggest problems with the movie is that, starting with the Lifehouse debacle, The Who's music gets glossed over in favor of even more attention on the personal lives of the members. Much more detail went into the music during the sections chronicling the 60s. Their blues and R&B; influences were well-noted and we learn about their early singles such as "I Can't Explain" and "My Generation" as well as the mini-opera, "A Quick One While He's Away". On the album front, we get a vintage interview with Townshend explaining his ambitions for The Who Sell Out and there's a hefty good dose of Tommy. But, starting with 1971, music takes a back seat with Lifehouse being explained away in two sentences. We then learn that Who's Next came out instead and it's off to Quadrophrenia which is similarly given short shrift. This is a real shame as Who's Next was a seminal album with Townshend's use of keyboards being a watershed moment in rock's history. Plus the whole concept is something that he continued to revisit and still does to this day. Albums subsequent to Quadrophrenia are all but ignored, unfortunately.

It's not that there aren't live concert clips but they are generally no longer than 10-15 seconds meaning that no song is represented in its entirety or anything close to it. The footage of Keith Moon being carried offstage at the Cow Palace lasts longer than do most of the songs. The only tune to get some real screentime was "My Generation" and this was mostly of Pete and Keith destroying their instruments as opposed to the band playing it. I understand that the film is trying to tell a story about people and isn't a concert video but to shortchange the live footage is ridiculous considering The Who's live reputation and that Lifehouse (i.e. – Townshend's ambitions) heavily explored the audience-musician relationship. What makes this situation unforgivable is that the filmmakers dug up some incredible footage including the holy grail for Who fans: a bit of the show at Leeds University on 14 February 1970. Live at Leeds is certainly the best document of the band in concert and arguably the best live album by any rock band ever. We get to watch a bit of "Christmas" as a teaser and then suddenly – poof! – it's over. Plus the Who's Next tour wasn't, to my recollection, represented at all. I'm no live Who archivist but the filmmakers had 200+ hours of footage to cull from yet the whole reason for The Who's existence – the music – is remarkably lacking.

Aside from the fact that there's too much talking heads and not enough concert footage, another problem is the talking heads. I appreciated the interviews with former & current managers to embellish the story but Daltrey and Townshend get the overwhelming majority of interview time from band members. Kenny Jones got as much time as Entwhistle and more than Moon which makes no sense. The Ox died in 2002 and I am incredulous of the notion that they couldn't have found enough footage to give him a more prominent and perhaps almost equal role in telling the story. Were his feelings about Moon's death never filmed? Ever? As for Moon himself, there was one interview clip that I can recall. Was every interview with him just total goofing around devoid of information? Had he never recalled how he joined the band for a camera regardless of any antics he did? We get to know Entwhistle and Moon mostly through the recollections of others as opposed to seeing for ourselves.

In a similar vein, the vast majority of interviews were vintage the past few years. There's hardly a word from anytime between 1964-2000 so we cannot know how events were perceived at the times they occurred nor how the band members expressed their feelings back in the day. We're left with the views of two old geezers reflecting upon their lives and careers. While I find them sincere, they are talking about events that, in some cases, transpired more than 40 years ago. Drug-addled memories go hazy so why not give interview footage from the times various events transpired instead of almost always having people look back decades later? For instance, how did Townshend feel about Tommy in 1968-69? Viewers are left to ponder this because all we hear about it comes from interviews done after the album's success, after the film, after the musical – after it had already achieved notoriety and become a cultural fixture.

How you will perceive Amazing Journey depends on what kind of fan you are. The dedicated will no doubt feel let down by the whole thing. They're already familiar with the stories and many have most of the concert footage in their collections so they must be disappointed that the rare stuff is so incredibly sparse. On the other hand, there's always new people just getting into the band for whom the well-worn tales of trashed hotel rooms and expensive cars being driven into pools are fresh territory. But that the live clips are so short and no song is represented in its entirety will disappoint everyone. Whether you're a new fan or an old one, the reason you like The Who is because of the music and there's just too little here. With 200+ hours of footage to wade through including stuff donated by bootleggers to the cause, it's inexcusable that there is so little music. This also leads to yet another problem which is that the events which we hear about aren't related to much – they don't get related to the times from which they sprung nor do we find out how they reflect Townshend's life. To me this signals that noting that event A was followed by event B is important but providing context and meaning isn't. For instance, a bit of "However Much I Booze" is shown with Townshend singing, "It's clear to all my friends that I habitually lie; I just bring them down" yet I don't remember the film even attempting to explain why he would be singing those lines. That his life was coming apart due to tremendous pressures relating to The Who as well as drugs & alcohol is omitted. By not showing very much music performance and by not having many interviews which actually talk about the music, viewers learn very little about how the music was a reflection of the band or its times or why it has any significance at all.

The Who demand an extended tribute as an extra two hours would have done wonders. Apparently the original cut was 3.5 hours but honed down to 2 by the studio. This "director's cut" would probably relieve us of the problem of the lack of concert footage, but I must wonder if would alleviate the problem of trying to portray the music as having some meaning to both the musicians and the audiences alike. It's important to note that Tommy was tremendously popular but it's infinitely more interesting to try to explain why it was. That the Lifehouse project yielded Who's Next is history and must be included. But to avoid explaining what Lifehouse was supposed to be, to exclude Townshend's ambitions regarding it is to fail. What was it really about and what did this say about Townshend? How did the rest of the band feel about his metaphysical aspirations? He certainly had some grandiose plans which were in line with his views on the transformative nature of music, specifically rock music.

The Who's music is important to people but this is taken for granted in Amazing Journey and so you never find out what relationship the music has to those who wrote and performed it nor to those millions of people for whom it is a part of the soundtrack of their lives. Except once. It comes at the end when the band are playing on 20 October 2001 at the tribute show for the victims of 9/11. They are doing "Won't Get Fooled Again" and is one of the few times more than 10 seconds of a performance is shown. Watching those firemen and police officers screaming out the words, I realized that it's the only moment of the film in which you get the impression that The Who's music is actually important, that it's actually meaningful to the band and audience alike. And this is exactly why Amazing Journey fails. It's a journey alright, just not that amazing.