The Dukes

My wife and I saw this show on September 6th at the St. Paul Fairgrounds. I have been marinating on writing about the Dukes' performance for a long while. The Dukes of September is a road band highlighting the music of Donald Fagan (62), Boz Scaggs (66), and Michael McDonald (58). The rest of the band was made up of younger studio session players: Jon Herington (guitar), Freddie Washington (bass), Michael White (drums), Michael Leonhart, Walt Weiskopf and Jay Collins (horns), Jim Beard (keys), and background singers Carolyn Escoffery and Catherine Russel.

As a hint toward the oddness of this set, Fagan does a Dan-influenced version of the Dead's "Shakedown Street" that put most of the geriatric audience on its feet dancing. We were an old crowd, too. The (real) Donald hinted at that when he continually called the audience "you kids." The band did covers of the O'Jay's "Love Train," several Motown/Stax R&B favorites, Chuck Berry, Aretha Franklin, Muddy Waters, a few hits from all three of the stars, and what seemed to be a random assortment of fun tunes from the 50's & 60's. The trio shared songs from The Band and each picked a tune that closely fit their style and tastes; Fagan - King Harvest, Scaggs - Rag Mama Rag, and McDonald - The Shape I'm In. I had Richard Danko flashbacks, seeing him wrestling his bass into submission in the backline and hearing his strained voice in the harmonies.

Fagan, McDonald, and Scaggs go a long way back personally and professionally. Before his stint with the Doobies, McDonald was a Steely Dan "member," if such a thing exists other than Becker and Fagan. When Scaggs Lido Shuffle came out, I first thought it was a Steely Dan hit. The three headliners hit the stage together after a brief classic 60's R&B-style introduction by the backup band. They sing harmonies on each other's tunes and swapped leads on every song. It was obvious that they were having a great time, especially Donald who channels Ray Charles when he really gets into a show.

"This is so much fun that there's the danger that the music will be like what they say about sex: We may be the only ones enjoying it," says McDonald, 58. From reading some reviews, Michael was right. A lot of people expected a night of predictable hits reproduction. Instead, they got a loose R&B band that locked into a groove and pounded it into submission on every one of their unpredictable song selections.

I can't say enough about the sound company and FOH engineer for this show. It was as close to a perfect job as I've ever heard in my life. There is some evidence that Michigan's Thunder Audio did the sound for the tour and, if so, they absolutely deserve their nomination as "Sound Company of the Year" and a Parnelli award. There wasn't a moment in the show that got out of control and the mix was as close to record-perfect as possible.

Stepping Backwards

For most of my "career," I've been driven by a corporate demand to "stay current"; to use the most up-to-date technology. I've worked for small companies and Fortune 500 corporations that had IS departments who automatically updated the software I used, regardless of security, function, or need. The school where I currently work has the same policies. Like some sort of braindead robot, I have followed suit personally.

Not any more.

My current office computer came with Win7 and Office 2007 installed. I put up with those two user-hostile programs for as long as it took to complete my 2009 taxes and a couple of pressing projects that had been held up when my last office computer died. Once those tasks were out of the way, I reformatted my OS hard drive, installed WinXP SP3 and Office 2003. I'm done with "upgrades" for the rest of my life, most likely. My production computer, a Mac PPC tower, is probably my last Mac, too. I can do anything I need to do on that machine. Apple has decided to obsolete the PPC machines and their support, so I can't upgrade my software even if I had a reason to want to upgrade my software. So, I am motivated to stick with what I have. The upside to this is I'm done spending money and have nothing left to do but do work.

Win7 wasn't terrible, but it isn't particularly compatible with Office 2003 or many of my other programs. The real reason for moving backwards was that Office 2007 is a joke. Almost every function I regularly use in MS Office has been buried in a completely obscure menu structure. I have no good reason to spend time learning a brand new software layout. The one I used for decades works fine. If MS had its head out of its ass, the company would have left users with a "classic" option. They didn't and because of that I'm more inclined to mess with a completely different program (like Open Office) rather than figure out the new organization of MS Office.

The same goes for Apple's new Intel machines. Rather than buying new, expensive equipment from a company that has a long user-hostile history, I'm tempted to build a Hackintosh and avoid Apple whenever possible. Since my PPC is working and doing the job, I'll put that off for a while but it's the logical option.

I know guys who are running productive, profitable recording studios on OS 9 machines. I know a couple of authors who write on Win for Workgroups 3.11 and make a boatload more money as authors than I'll ever approach. A fair number of authors still use Wordstar on MSDOS machines, for that matter. Upgrading isn't even a question for these people. They are too busy working. I'm going to try to follow their example.

Public Address

The "PA system" (public address) is damn near as old as me. Maybe older. When I was a kid, an auditorium PA system was often a 15W Bogen tube amp and one or two Shure Vocalmaster columns. Some folks used Shure's mixer/power amp, but anyone who did that produced awful noises that couldn't be identified as either human or musical. The PA system has grown up in the last 60 years. It hasn't become better but it's definitely louder.

When I worked for QSC Audio in the 80's and 90's, we grew from a small company that made extremely solid, dependable, and reasonably good sounding amps to a major competitor in the pro audio field. During that period, pro audio went through some changes that it is still suffering from; the smaller and lighter is better movement. To be honest, the company that started that trend in power amps was Carver; with the PM 1.5. This POS amp was hyped as being able to drive 750W per channel into a 4 ohm load and weighed 16 pounds. When it clipped, it made exploding noises that often took out drivers. When it didn't clip, it was harsh sounding. If you pushed the amp hard, it would thermal cycle or die. Regardless, because it weighed a fraction of amplifiers with similar specs (more evidence that "anyone can write a spec sheet") the sound companies loved it. At QSC, we almost went broke before a few of our old customers came back to us after their Carver experiment.

Twenty years later, the whole industry is driven by Carver-style components: amps, speakers, consoles, and most of the signal path. Amps are multi-stepped or digital and weigh less than a 1960's microphone. Speakers are arrayed and tiny and sound like rejects from the Bose consumer product line. Consoles are digital and so menu-layered that most FOH mixers set 'em and leave 'em, regardless of how godawful the show sounds.

This week, I subjected myself to another round of suffering modern sound systems to get to see an old musical hero: Steve Winwood. Winwood was the intro act for Santana and I haven't seen Steven since Traffic. Since I had comp tickets (no concert sells out in 2010), the cost of seeing Winwood was whatever I paid for parking. Supposedly, the St. Paul Xcel Center is a great sounding room. I hoped that would be so for this show. It wasn't. As usual, the arrayed cluster-fuck of tiny horn boxes was tasked with the impossible duty of providing reinforcement for this large hockey gym. While the designers of the Xcel Center put a lot of work into deadening the room for musical performances, nothing those designers could do could have compensated for modern array speaker systems.

As best I can tell, the contract for all R&R concerts specifies a minimum volume level for shows. Nobody apparently cares how awful it sounds, as long as it is loud. In my 50 years in audio, I have never heard anything coming from an arrayed speaker system that is anything but painful and tonally irritating. Honestly, the theory behind these systems leaves me doubting the mathematical capabilities of the designers, but the practical application proves the theories to be flawed.

For the Winwood portion of the show, the system's resonances were somewhere between painful and obscuring. There was a pile of 70-400 Hz crap that the under-capable arrays failed to produce, so the system "engineer" (using that term grossly loosely) tried to correct with his subwoofer system. If you've read my take on subwoofers, you know how I am going to feel about this tactic. Winwood's bass came from the B3 petals. A B3's bass is one of the most totally cool bottom-end instruments ever invented, but you can't reproduce it with a pile of resonant horns. The sound is too complicated, too powerful, and too characteristic for a reproduction system that turns every LF note into "whoomph." So, the bottom end of the system was a muddy mess.

Winwood's voice was pretty well matched to the rest of the system's midrange capabilities, but everything else was reduced to OEM-quality car stereo fidelity and the FOH goofball's attempt to create top end from his garbage horns was painful, at best. I suspect the FOH doofus was running the system from his laptop, because I didn't see (or hear) anyone working the mix. It could be that he was at the audiologist's office getting his hearing aid battery replaced. If so, he didn't miss much.

Santana's set was about the same, only louder. He had a light show and a video screen to compensate for the lack of a sound system, but it wasn't enough. When my hearing protection was clearly failing to provide adequate protection, we left.

As usual, the show was about 1/3 attended with a substantial number of comp tickets given way to fill some of the empty seats. A lot of people gave up late in Winwood's set and left to save their hearing. When we were left, probably mid-way through Santana's set, we weren't alone in the parking lot.

I think, if live music ever hopes to make a comeback, sound companies are going to have to give up on the fantasy that light and small and loud are more important than fidelity. I'm unconvinced that making customers suffer for musicians' "art" is a winning tactic. Most of the under-30 crowd that I know consider major concerts to be miserable experiences that they hope to avoid for the rest of their lives. I'm starting to think they are right.

A Tool?

I just finished a one day "experience" with Apple's iPad and I'm just short of amazed. I'm amazed that anyone could consider this product anything but a toy. As usual, I'm wrong.

When I returned it to the IS guy who is promoting the iPad as an "educational tool" and described my opinion, it was obvious that I'd offended his finer sensibilities. When I said, "I can't imagine a job so detail-free, so simple, that this thing could be considered a 'tool'." He replied, "I could do my job with it."

I'm clearly from another generation. My generation was one where IS guys wrote code, maintained hardware and software, and did stuff. This more modern version of an IS guy uses his "tools" to "go to meetings, maintain work-flow charts, and for simple email." Holy crap! Again, I have missed the career boat. I blew off systems management as a late-life career opportunity because I thought I'd have to learn stuff about stuff I don't care about. Obviously, any idiot can do the job if this POS is a tool of that trade.

Aside from that sort of realization, my opinion of the iPad is that it is a toy. If you want to watch movies or television or YouTube in low-fi resolution, via WiFi, the iPad is for you. If you're mostly interesting in purchasing and/or observing other people's content, the iPad is your vehicle. If browsing the Web without being able to produce any sentient content yourself is your idea of "work" or "recreation" you are going to love this thing. It's a really expensive toy, but a toy just the same.

Saturday Night Live did a pretty decent routine on the iPad back in January. In the end, they recommended a real computer for the few of us who have to do "real work." I totally agree. If you are a Y-Gen twit, the iPad will do a perfectly good job of allowing you to type in (at your usual 5 wpm rate) your idiot messages to your friends. You can watch YouTube and Netflix until your parents evict you from the basement and you have to find a bridge to live under and aspire to that Starbucks clerk job your $80k in college loan debt prepared you for.

In Times Like These

No particular reason for this entry, other than the fact that I love this song and this performance. Wish I'd have been there. Alan Price is one of my favorite 1960--70's performers. The low point in his career was as the keyboardist for the Animals. (Any time spent behind or anywhere near Eric Burton would have to be regarded as painful at best.) His follow-up band, The Alan Price Set, was terrific and his version of "I Put A Spell On You" is freakin' spooky. Last I knew, Price was screwing off on a beach in Australia. I hope he's having fun.

Acoustic Music Is Dead

A few weeks back, I ranted about a godawful Minnesota Orchestra pops “concert’ I suffered. This week, I recorded an electric/acoustic act that had pretensions of acoustic-ness that they didn’t bother to live up to. I mean, they didn’t attempt an acoustic sound.

Years ago, my partner and I rented out our sound company to a couple seasons of bluegrass festivals. We had a very high fidelity sound system with plenty of power to provide audio to several thousand outdoor rock and rollers and enough stage monitoring to keep most lead guitarists and screaming metal-head vocalists happy. With that capacity, we always found ourselves short on the necessary acoustic power to satisfy solo banjo pickers and the rest of the characters who qualify as “entertainers” on the bluegrass circuit.

The sound of a banjo picker whacking on the vocal mic, saying, “Can you hear this out there? I can’t hear a damn thing” still haunts my memories of doing live sound in that venue. Led Zepplin has nothing on a bluegrass quartet, when it comes to stage volume. Their hearing defect is the core to the problem with acoustic music. Fragile egos, hearing impairment, or ordinary poor taste has convinced almost every musician that deafening stage volume is a necessary component of every performance. With that as a given, delicate and sophisticated tonal character is sacrificed for the God of Gain over Feedback. A microphone doesn’t have a chance in hell of picking up a usable tone from an acoustic instrument in the midst of that atonal racket.

The problem is that tone and volume do not co-exist. Sound companies have been proving that for more than 50 years and the evidence is better today than ever. Every musician makes a choice before every performance, “Do I want to sound good or do I want to be loud?” The answer to that question goes to the heart of a musician’s reason for selecting a particular instrument, for practicing and perfecting technique, and for being a musician. The answer, too often, is the one that drives guitarists to select a pickup over a microphone or performing without amplification.
That was 30 years ago. Today, acoustic music is dead. I miss it and I doubt that it is resting in peace.

I can’t remember the last time I saw a folk, classical, or jazz solo guitarist who didn’t bring more amplification to a small club than would be needed to thoroughly overwhelm a small auditorium. Not only do they carry this crap to every living room jam session, but they feel compelled to use it.

It’s one thing to be an electric guitarist who happens to like the feel of a full-bodied acoustic instrument. It’s another thing to pretend to be an acoustic guitarist while depending on a few hundred watts to blast every audience into submission. Sometimes I suspect the real reason musicians pick acoustic instruments is that it gives them an excuse to sit while they play. It sure isn’t because they like the way an acoustic guitar sounds because nothing coming out of an overpriced faux-hi-fi amplifier supplied with the signal provided by a Mickey Mouse rubber band “guitar” pickup.

When I try to position a microphone in front of an acoustic instrument, the claim I almost always get from a guitarist, violinist, or bassist sounds a lot like, “You don’t need a microphone, my pickup sounds great.”

I can think of one instance that I found that claim to be half-true. Otherwise, I think all acoustic instrument pickups belong in rock and roll bands where sound quality is the dead last show concern. They no more sound like acoustic guitars than does a Les Paul plugged directly into a console through a DI. That’s the nicest thing I can say about the lot. Most piezo pickups make an objectionable sound that only a deaf modern musician could love. Their magnetic cousins just turn an acoustic guitar into an oversized electric.

The sound of the acoustic guitar pickup is one that I’ve been trying to find a home for in the mix for 40 years. Usually, the best thing that can be done for that tone is to treat it like a jazz guitar and bury it in delays, chorus, and behind every other instrument in the mix. Otherwise, it just sounds like that miserable noise Al Di Meola has been making since Ovation purchased his soul.

This is coming from someone who loves acoustic guitars. A well-mic’d acoustic guitar is one of my favorite musical instruments. An acoustic guitar, left to its own devices, with no electronics between its output and my ears is up there with any musical sound made by any instrument or voice. Pickups and guitar amplifiers just don’t have anything resembling the nuance to reproduce the instrument. I hate what they do to my favorite instrument and don’t have a lot of love for musicians who can’t hear the difference.

I’m no more fond of those abominations on violins, basses, or mandolins. They are just fine on banjos because there is no way to screw up the tone of that instrument. I guess it doesn’t matter, though. Musicians don’t have the ear, patience, or audience for acoustic music in almost every venue, so let’s just agree that acoustic music is dead and quit pretending that playing something with a hollow body is in any way similar to an acoustic instrument.

Vinyl vs. Bits

For some reason, I've toted around about 100 pounds of vinyl and a last-generation direct drive Sony turntable for the last two decades. It hasn't been much of an effort for the last dozen years, since the whole pile has lived, boxed, and sealed in my basement. Last week a friend loaned me his new turntable-to-USB toy and I decided to convert some of my old records into a format I might listen to. The experience has been eye-opening. 

No, I haven't been converted to an analog fanatic. Just the opposite, in fact. 

The more I listen to the magical world of vinyl the easier it is to understand why records vanished so quickly. Another friend who loves all things old and expensive is convinced that my dislike of the classic "snap, crackle, and pop" sound of records is overly picky in a world of crappy live sound systems, digital television dropouts, and grossly over-compressed CDs and other audio media. I admit that I do like the dynamic range of a 1968 LP. However, the max s/n of a record was somewhere in the 50-60dB territory and CDs easily exceed that range. 

The fact that modern mastering standards generate non-musical products does not condemn the technology. There is a boatload of crazy vinyl philosophy on the web. One of my favorite nutty claims is "Vinyl was custom made for the human ear." Vinyl -- like CDs, MP3s, and tape -- was made to generate a pile of money for someone. Several someones, at best. There is absolutely nothing about the RIAA equalization curve that bears any relation to the best function of the human ear. The incapacity of records to tolerate the sorts of phase oddities that surround us every day is another example of how poorly vinyl records and reproduces acoustic activity. The lack of dynamic range and LF capacity and the phonograph records inability to store and reproduce distinctly different information on the left and right channels is even more data for the "vinyl sucks" argument. 

And, of course, "snap, crackle, and pop" were still everpresent. Clean them, lubricate them with expensive concoctions, put them in a vacuum chamber and records will still contribute their irritating "quality" to the listening experience. 

 But that's not the point of this rant. The real surprise for me was how often my old records had been mixed by crazy people. I'm not talking about the early "stereo" mixes that were just bastardizations of mixes that were intended for mono; like the early Beatles stereo records (instruments full left, vocals full right). No, I mean "modern" mixes intended for stereo records that are just nuts. At first I thought there was something wrong with the turntable. No one would be so careless with pan controls, would they? I was wrong. They would. A bunch of the Warner Brothers stuff I'd kept out of nostalgia is practically unlistenable because the mixer was clearly on crack. Guitars that swing from one side to the other, drums that vary their pan dimensions or are so obviously spaced mic recordings that are so radically spaced that half of the kit resides only in the left ear and the other half in the right. Of course the kick is buried in the limpid center and the bass mumbles around that same vicinity. 

The "obvious" advantage of records completely escapes me while listening to this mess. All this brings back nasty memories of my own record past. At Wirebender, we never found a mastering lab that did much more than not piss us off. When we had a budget for 3 or more mastering options, we selected the one that did the least damage to our master tapes. Never once did a record even approach the dynamic range, frequency response, or stereo image of the original final mixed tape. I remember the phrase, "I hate this one the least" as the closest thing to acceptance we ever managed. 

Finally, after all these years of lugging 100 pounds of vinyl around, I'm going to be able to clear out this section of the basement to make room for something useful. The next pile of junk I'm going to pare away is my collection of unstarted model motorcycle kits.

Busting Bubbles

Harold, dude, you're breaking my heart. At least a little. 

An old friend thought I was being too hard on Townshend and Friends for their Souper Bowl sellout. He tried to drag me into the sad, pitiful world of R&R reality by telling me that anyone in music can be bought for a corporate affair of some rich asshole's birthday party. Ok, it doesn't surprise me or disturb me that a washed up George Michael or John Mellencamp, Vegas divas Christina Aguilera or Elton John or Rod Stewart or Tom Jones, or even the crazy spending Rolling Stones can be bought for a few million for a night's work. If they'll play the "lost rock hero" club circuit, they're hard up enough to play for Arab princes, trust fund brats, and corporate brain-drain parties. 

Let's face it none of those acts can fill a mid-sized arena these days and they are probably supporting a collection of rock star bad habits. His claim that Dylan, Springstein, and anyone else you can name would tumble into the arms of any rich scumbag you can think of left me feeling somewhere between disgusted and depressed. If there was ever evidence that the top tax bracket is living far beyond their cultural value and that our tax system is totally screwed up, this is it. The idea that these giant douchebags are taking tax deductions for renting out rock stars for the entertainment of their royal elite is beyond disgusting. Obviously, there was good reason to "hope I die before I get old."

Technologically Stuck

I'm on my way to 62. I have most of the toys I want to own and more computers than I need. It's pretty easy for me to imagine that my current stock of computerized toys will suffice for the rest of my life; however long that may be. I'm not being depressive, although I have that talent. I, honestly, have all the tools I need to do the jobs I want to do. So, why would I buy new technology? 

 Two reasons: 1) The technology allows me to do something I suddenly need to do that I didn't need to do before or 2) the technology develops manners. 

The first reason is insanely unlikely. I have software and hardware that has produced music and video/movie material that is so far above the level at which I work that it is impossible to imagine that I will be able to reap the maximum benefits of the software/hardware I own. If that's true, adding new capacity to my already underutilized capacity is foolish. 

Honestly, I think the second reason is even more unlikely. I approach hate for the software I commonly use. The overriding impulse for programmers is to complete the task the programmer decided is most important, rather than apply a little hardware to observing what the user wants to be doing. Every time a piece of software takes off on some unimportant task, in total disregard for the signals I'm giving the software through the keyboard and mouse, I want to find that geek and push his head through a monitor. 

Manners are a vanishing commodity in today's technological society. People interrupt live conversations to check their phones for email, texts, or just to look at their Facebook page. Commercials blast over the top of program audio in an attempt to catch the viewers' attention, but mostly succeeding in pissing off potential customers. We drive in rage, interrupt each other without thought, and occasionally freakout and gun down our friends, family, and coworkers. Why would the concept of good manners find its way into software? 

No reason. It probably won't. 

Without either, or both, of those advantages, I have no reason in the world to buy a new computer or to spend significant money on new software. Apple, of course, banished guys like me to history with the move from PPC processors to Intel. I like my G5. It works and it's more than fast enough. Apple is done with the PPC generation, none of their current software will work on my machine. So, I'm done with Apple, at least as long as my G5 is working. Most likely, when it dies I'll just find another used G5 and carry on. 

Microsoft wasted a lot of good will and energy with Vista, but that left me with WinXP for an extra three years and a total of 9 years on one operating system. After all that familiarity, why would I want to move just because Win7 has "Snap?" Win7 is bigger, slower, and requires new hardware. My hardware works fine. XP works fine. It's rude, but so is OS X. 

 I used to think there was an advantage in "staying up with the times," but now I'm uncertain. I know a couple of guys who are still using their OS 9 Macs and are doing perfectly well on that historic equipment. A couple of years back, I met a few folks who make a living recording live shows and they are all solidly WinXP & Nuendo v2.0 users. Steinberg has a list of reasons why those guys ought to "upgrade" to Win7 and Nuendo 4.2, but there is one overriding reason for the recordists to ignore Steinberg: reliability. The system they use works and has worked since 2003 and "new" means new bugs and troubleshooting. 

 I'm wondering if Moore's Law (data density doubles approximately every 18 months) will have less effect on consumer spending in the future? When the software doesn't provide any actual functional advantage, what's the point in buying it? For me, I think the answer is "it's pointless."

What's the Matter with The Who?

A friend jumped on the Who's Super Bowl XLIV Concert, knowing that I'm a long-time fan. He reported that "Commentary coming in seems to lean towards 'worst Super Bowl show ever.'” Of course, he's getting his data from wingnut talk radio, which is like getting a restaurant review from a McDonald's fry cook. "Taste" is a personal thing, but folks who exhibit a distinct lack of intelligence or common sense in all areas of life should keep their opinions to themselves. That means you, Rush and the rest of the ClusterFox crowd.

As far as being the "worst ever," I don't know how the 1976 Up With People noise-pollution could ever be topped. Awful is way too weak a word. That might have been one of the worst moments in musical history, let alone Super Bowl history. How about 1989's Elvis impersonator: Elvis Presto? Coke gave us that tacky Vegas crap fest. The New Kids on the Block in 1991, with the 3500 kids and foam guitars? That was pretty bad, to express as mild an opinion as I can manage. Garth Brooks and Clint Black in 1993 and 1994 introduced the NASCAR crowd of hillbillies to the rest of us. Fortunately, I skipped out on those games and only saw painful bits of the performances on the tube post-game. U2 turned in a performance in 2002 that reminded us all of how good our local U2 cover bands can be; compared to the real thing. Janet and Justin took a lot of heat for their sex club act in 2004, but they were actually the class portion of a show that included chronic musical catastrophes P. Diddy and Kid Rock. 2006, 2006, 2007, and 2008 coughed up McCartney, the Stones, Prince, and Tom Petty. Nothing particularly adventurous or even lip-sync-free there. In a single concert, Prince caused a gayness outbreak that was worse than three generations of petrochemical pollution and phthalates. The evidence was obvious from all the butt-slapping that went on during the 2nd half of the game (Colts-Bears). Speaking of which, why is displaying a little boob "pornographic" while grabbing a 300 pound lineman's butt cheek barely gets noticed?

Honestly, I don't know why the Super Bowl halftime has turned into some sort of R&R Hall of Fame moment. The only show I can remember actually liking was the 1979 Fleetwood Mac half-time performance and that was only because of the USC Marching Band. I could care less about the Mac, but the USC band rocked. The sound sucked, though.

It is true that 65-year-old Daltry and 64-year-old Townshend were beyond their prime by a couple of decades. Hell, half of the band is dead. What part of that doesn't scream "obsolete?" The problem is who isn't? And of those Who aren't, who wants to watch them? For that matter, among the suspicions that The Who's show was lip-synced was the obvious mediocre mix. If Daltry's voice was dubbed, why was the dubbing done after his voice was mostly gone? You'd think they would at least haul out a recording from when he could actually hit the notes. Townshend's guitar phased in and out of the mix through the whole show. I could not figure who who was singing the high harmony's, though. That bit was suspicious.

What about a pro football game would make fans want to watch a couple minutes of music, a fireworks show in the middle of the afternoon, and a whole lot of equipment rushed to and from a field? For all the hype, the whole concept is begging for ridicule and any band desperate enough to jump into that ring is bound to get hammered for the effort. Like working in Vegas, doing the Super Bowl is like conceding the point that your career is pretty much over and you're just in it for the money until that dries up.