Who's on first: the greatest rock band.

Last October, VH 1, which is basically MTV for people with intelligences higher than that of a breath mint, ran a full day of clips--including live performances not previously shown and interviews with members of the group--by The Who, which just a while ago, after nearly thirty years, declared itself once and for all disbanded. The occasion was to celebrate and of course hype (it's still rock 'n' roll, folks) the release by MCA Records of a massive compilation--seventy-nine of their classic and their lesser-known recordings--"The Who: Thirty Years of Maximum R&B," which is as close to a Who "canon" as anything we shall get.

And I use that heavyweight word, "canon," deliberately. If it was impossible not to watch the marathon--my plan had been to finish the Paradiso that day, but mi dispiace, Signor Alleghieri--it was also both exhilarating and melancholy: but not (or not primarily) as an exercise in nostalgia for the sixties. What emerged from the VH 1 program, and more over-whelmingly from the MCA collection, is the simple fact that The Who is the best rock band in history, and that as such it incarnates all the energy, genius, and, yes, wit that characterize the best rock altogether.

I trust that at this late date we need not concern ourselves with schoolmarmish prissiness about "high" and "low" culture ("Come away, dears: that's a bad painting!"). "Rock 'n' roll" is a deliberately vulgar, marketing phrase: so were "jazz," "the movies," and "the comics": so, until the mid-nineteenth century, was "the novel." Such terms help distributors move their product and, I guess, give the worst sort of academics excuses for not paying attention, but they don't have a damned thing to do with what's actually going on in the art. The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good rock record, must be intolerably stupid. That last sentence isn't me, exactly: it's Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey (1818)--except she says "a good novel." Not the least of the brilliance of Forrest Gump was its soundtrack, reminding us that rock has been not only the psychic background radiation of our collective life since the fifties, but also that so much of it is so good. If you have to distinguish between listening to Eine Kleine Nachtmusik or Duke Ellington and listening to, say, Elvis or the early Beatles, then you don't know much about music in the first place; and I'm sure Miss (not Ms.) Austen would back me up on this.

Elvis and the early Beatles, in fact, help locate the special and rather wonderful position The Who holds in the history of the music. I simplify, but I do not distort. In 1954, with the early triumphs of Elvis, the inchoate, highly eclectic music which had already been named "rock 'n' roll" found its first--maybe still its dominant--shaman, and an identity which would be its glory and its curses. It would be the music of revolt, but revolt of a highly focused and highly marketable sort: an imitation or a reenactment of the African-American music of disenfran-chisement, the blues; but a reenactment close enough to, safe enough for, the pop mainstream that it could be sold to young white audiences who wanted, essentially, to play at being outsiders. Like the poetry of the Beats, born about the same time, it was perfect fifties: user-friendly apocalypse, Nihilism Lite. (For example, an early hit had the innocuous title, "Dance with Me, Henry"; the original, recorded by a black group years before, was called, rather less innocuously, "Work with Me, Annie.")

By the early sixties, Elvis was in the Army, Buddy Holly was dead, Little Richard had got religion, and the music seemed doomed to terminal blandness. And then came the Beatles and with them the whole British Invasion. Complicating the already-curious origins of rock, now we had dissatisfied British kids reenacting the musical alienation of American white kids who had reenacted...well, you get the point. It was the impetus for the second, and so far the last, truly creative period in rock. And when the Beatles made their first American tour in 1994--ten yers after the Elvis-event--their opening act was a scruffy, little-known London band: The Who.

There were three great bands--if "great" means anything at all--to emerge from that time: the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and The Who. The Who, appropriately, was the last to achieve eminence, since they were by far the smartest. The Beatles, even in their later, psychedelic "Sgt. Pepper" phase, were basically pure pop, songwriters whose best stuff ("Yesterday," say) is as haunting as Cole Porter or Harold Arlen. The Stones were and are a purist-funky blues band--"Jumping Jack Flash" may be the best white-boy blues of all time--but oddly limited by the ferocity of their own genius. The Who was a little of both and more than either.

They were Pete Townshend, writer and lead guitarist, a scarecrow whose angry intelligence was etched on his face and who bounded about the stage, as a friend of mine once said, like a kangaroo on speed; Roger Daltrey, a Nordic beefcake of a lead singer who twirled his mike in great arcs and had a voice like a thick steak; Keith Moon, surely the most brilliant drummer in all of rock, incandescent and manic and dead from the booze by the early eighties; and John Entwhistle, who stood perfectly still and expressionless--what else was left to do?--and whose bass, as Townshend said, sounded like a twin-engine Vickers directly overhead and fifty feet off the deck. In the early years, they were famous for demolishing their instruments at the end of each concert in ironic Goetterdaemmerung, by Wagner out of Warner Brothers. They were the most throat-clutching live act in the history of the music.

But their stunning performances were, really, only an extension of the high and acute self-consciousness of their songs. I've said that there is something inescapably factitious about rock-as-rebellion. But "factitious" doesn't--or doesn't have to--mean "false." The Who's music, from the beginning, was exuberant, driving, and profoundly aware of itself as artifice, as the performance of defiance. It was, much as I hate the term, post-modern rock.

Take their first big hit, "My Generation": "People try to put us down/Just because we get around/Things they do look awful cold/Hope I die before I get old." Anarchic? You bet. But the lyrics are so deliberately jejune; and as Daltrey sings them, impersonating the defiant young mod, he deliberately stammers over every initial consonant. So that "My G-g-generation" is at once wonderful, strong music, keen-teen rebellion, and a wry, sly undercutting of the idea of rebellion as market commodity. If Elvis had had that degree of irony about what he really represented, he'd probably be alive today.

And that degree of intelligence characterized all the group's best work: especially their 1968 masterwork, the "Rock Opera" Tommy (now a smash hit on Broadway and also a successful movie), which seemed destined to become the one authentic rock 'n' roll myth. It's the story of a traumatized, deaf, dumb, and blind boy who, miraculously, is a wizard at pinball ("Ain't got no distractions,/Can't hear no buzzers and bells"). He becomes a popular sensation, a popcult messiah, until he is cured by his disciples' adoration of him. And then when he tries to teach the faithful to follow his own strange path of self-discovery, they turn on him ("We forsake you/Gonna rape you/Let's forget you, better still"). All this on two LPs with, mind you, some of the best rock ever recorded.

I'm amazed that no one that I know of has realized that Tommy is a brilliant and bitter little parable about media stardom altogether. "Messiahship" in a culture of perfect information is inevitably debased by the very means of its promulgation: a gospel as best-seller is, as best-seller, no gospel at all. Herbert Marcuse, in One-Dimensional Man (1956), observed that you can't have a real underground under perfect capitalism, just because as soon as you foment your underground, it itself becomes part of the market economy ("Authentic Red Guard blue jeans now at Sears--as low as $14.95!"). The Who knew it, too--and made thirty years of righteous, smart music out of it.

And that's why the VH1 Who-fest was so moving and so melancholy. Since at least the early eighties, rock--no one with an ear can doubt it--has become progressively cynical, Vegas-style showbiz or, if not that, progressively self-destructive and self-loathing about its own popularity. (Kurt Cobain, the brilliant leader of the group Nirvana, killed himself because, he said, he "didn't believe in the music anymore"--pathetic and heartbreakingly understandable). But Townshend, Daltrey, Moon, and Entwhistle--and so many others--for a while at least created something of real value, something that was both commodity and art, and that managed to assert the value of artistic intelligence even in our ironic age. It is an extraordinary accomplishment. To understand The Who, I think, is to understand rock 'n' roll--and to understand something about the perils and chances of the imagination in the age of the infonet.