KATHY SHAIDLE ON ONE OF THE GREATEST ROCK & ROLL DOCUMENTARIES EVER MADE:

That’s the last scene in The Kids Are Alright (1979.)

“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry,” Emily Dickinson said. That was the effect watching that rather roughshod documentary about the Who had on me when I saw it at the Broadway in Grade Nine.

The first scene, in particular, was a felicitous choice:

It was 1967, and the show was The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, whose titular twits were your typical self-important 1960s show biz liberal, “anti-establishment” blowhards. The guy on stage with the Who, Tommy Smothers, is a particularly vicious human toothache of long standing.

The Who had considerable, nasty fun at Smothers’ expense, treating this “radical” hipster with far more naked contempt than they did any straight-laced mainstream hosts they’ve ever appeared with.

Read the whole thing. For a brief time shortly after Keith Moon died, The Who finally got to live out their original managers’ dream, and became a film powerhouse: here’s my take on the follow-up to The Kids Are Alright, their 1979 cinematic adaptation of Quadrophenia.