Before I Get Old - Dave Marsh

Before I Get Old - Dave Marsh


1983 Hollen Street Press.
ISBN 0-85965-083-9

Dave Marsh was obviously a fan in the early 60s but lost the band post Tommy and that reflects in the make up of the book. I can never make up my mind about this book it varies between very good and terrible. Obviously well researched and includes interviews with families but there is just something that doesn’t feel right about it.

It is worth a read, but there are others that should be read first.

NME 1983
(reviewed jointly with Yardbirds Platt, Dreja and McCarty)


I remember the burst of excitement I felt when my two favourite boyhood bands, The Who and The Yardbirds (The Beatles and Rolling Stones didn't count because everyone liked them) teamed up to play the same live-in-paris special edition of Feady Steady Go. I also remember my disappointment when the sound was so naff that it completely jumbled up both bands sounds, and the arguments at school on Monday morning about whether The Who had really pissed in the street when they ran out of the studio under the closing titles.

A week immersed in these two books - with appropriate soundtracks - brings out the contrasts; Dave Marsh, the author of the only readable book ever written about Bruce Springsteen, weighs in well over 500 pages of heavy duty research and analysis, a work so painstaking that it makes most rock biographies read as if they were dashed off in a week and a half while the author was watching TV.

Every last quake and convulsion of poor old Pete Townshend's ultra sensitive psyche produces a faithful read out on Marsh's seismograph, and every last act of attention grabbing or petulant clowning from Keith Moon seams to be present and correct. Anybody who wants to know more about The Who than Dave Marsh tells them must have an obsession that long ago passed the pathological stage and is now heading for outright psychosis.

Concurrently with The Who, The Yardbirds broke down the barriers of conventional pop and blues song structure in order to explore pure melodic and rhythmic excess. To be more accurate The Yardbirds dissolved these barriers while The Who demolished them. Similarly they refused to be satisfied with the standard manufacturers and musicians notions of how guitars, amplifiers and microphones were supposed to behave, and that is where the resemblence ends. The Yardbirds had no ideology and less image; their vocalist the late Keith Relf had a flat nasal voice and decidedly suspect pitching. Up against Roger Daltrey's chesty assertive bellow and snarl, poor old relf sounded nothing but weedy.

The Who, of course made the most remarkable rock noise available between the respective arrivals of the The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix, but they reinforced it all the way with a total commitment to self mythology and theoretical framework. Pete Townshend's conceptual armoury has always mattered as much as much as the arm-swing and the A major crescendo - it was a very long time before groups got used to supplying as much of their own analysis and theory as part of the package - and therefore any biography of the band's haslittle alternative but to draw on Townshend's incessant ongoing commentary in order to tell the story. Before I Get Old seems weighed down by the myths if alternatively (and sometimes simultaneously) seeks to celebrate and debunk.

Perhaps inevitably, even the earliest stages of Marsh's telling of this hallowed tale seem ponderous and melancholy. No section of the book remains unshadowed by the death of Moon and the withering away of The Who's creativity. The end of the story finds the band at their most succesful and - at one and the same time - their most meaningless. This irony - a hard one to swallow for a band as obsessed with content as The Who - has certainly not escaped Dave Marsh, and it sours the book just as it soured the band.

Marsh has invested an awful lot of love, empathy, energy and skill in this book, but ultimately it is a failure. It is too insular: It concentrates on event's within The Who's bubble to the detriment of that sense of context which would have been gained by a wider view of the rest of the musical universe (and maybe even occasionally the non musical universe).

It is also partisan: it is clear that throughout much of The Who's history, Townshend regarded Daltrey as little more than an aggressive yobbo (just as Daltrey regarded Townshend as a meglomaniac middle class smart arse), but Marsh appears to buy the Townshend view too completely, though he acknowledges the validity of Daltrey's view of Townshend. Yet in a 1971 interview, Daltrey made the following observation, one far more penetrating than anything he is quoted as saying in the book: "Pete's got the biggest ego and we all feed his ego and none of us care about his ego. He needs it, and because he's got the biggest ego he writes the best material of any pop writer at the moment. If we can feed that, then I don't mind being the food. In fact I rather enjoy it. But Pete doesn't do it all so Townshend gets all the publicity; he does it for The Who.."

It would be unfair to hammer Marsh for failing to include one quote, it is simply that the Roger Daltrey he depicts would have been incapable of delivering that analysis.

Ultimately, though the one thing that Before I Get Old really lacks is the one thing that really made The Who; visuals. Richard Barnes' Maximum RnB is textually a far less ambitious and acute work, but it's dazzling photographic history of The Who blows away evenMarsh's most detailed and florid descriptions. The most vivid rock band of all time their magnificence beggared description just as it transcended vinyl. I know what I mean, but


Record Collector 1983

Over the 18 months that we have been reviewing the latest rock literature, it has been fairly easy to divide each new offering into one of two categories, quick exploitative potboilers and works of research, intelligence and information. Regular readers of this column will know which we prefer. With a few exceptions the rock market has produced little in the way of longterm classics, which perhaps is nothing more than a result of writing about such an ephemeral and changing world as pop music. Occasionally however we are presented with a book that not only doesn't insult its readers, but positively enlightens them, but doesn't just contain fresh information but opens up entirely new perspectives on a hackneyed subject. Such a book is Dave Marsh's Before I Grow(sic) Old The Story Of The Who, which is without a doubt the most impressive rock book to have been published in 1983.

Many readers may be familiar with Dave Marsh's biography of Bruce Springsteen or The Book Of Rock Lists and The Rolling Stone Record Review, both of which he co-edited. Before I Get Old doesn't break new ground for Marsh or for rock writing in general, but over 500 pages Marsh draws a spellbinding and utterly illuminating portrait of perhaps the most committed rock band of them all. To Marsh, rock music is still a matter of the greatest importance - as it is to Who leader Pete Townshend, and so it is fitting that one should choose to tell the story of the other. Marsh's approach is straightforward, a chronological account of the band's history from the Detours to the death of Keith Moon and the anti climax of The Who's final years. He writes aswell as ever, but without introducing any novel techniques or getting away from the use of interview material and traditional rock music criticism. What finally makes the book so impressive however is Marsh's innate feeling for the music, the times and the record business. His ability to set each stage of The Who's career in the context of the history of rock and the development of recordiing techniques, live performances and promotional gambits is almost unrivalled by any recent work in this field.

Perhaps the most fascinating element of Marsh's portrayal of The Who is the huge gulf between the sponaneity of much of the best rock music - which The Who at their best on stage have often exemplified - and the immense thought, struggle and intellectual endeavour which Pete Townshend has contributed to all The Who's major projects, often as Marsh shows, against the wishes of the rest of the group. The picture emerges of a group tearing daily at the bonds of friendship and held together only by the feeling that The Who is something more important and powerful than any of them. At the same time, Marsh examines the development of their early career, their attempts to break America and the battle to produce a rock opera. Of particular interest are the roles played by the band advisors - Kit Lambert, Chris Stamp, Peter Rudge, Shel Talmy and Pete Meaden - who all had their own individual vision of what The Who should be and where it should be travelling. Above it all - though never unaffected by the personnal conflicts and crises - is the band's music, something that Marsh has already shown his worthiness to discuss in his previous books. His comments on records as diverse as Tommy, Happy Jack and Won't Get Fooled Again are consistently illuminating and his ability to avoid hero worshipping the band or their music makes Before I Get Old easily the most objective - and involved - piece of writing about the band which we've yet come across. Obviously this is essential reading for Who fans; and even those of you who have lost interest in the band over the years may find your enthusiasm rekindled by this excellent biography, which is highly recommended.