It was important for me to introduce Dylan to that clip from The Concert For New York. Being 17 he's found many indie bands I'd never heard of - but has also discovered on his own some Velvet Underground, Bowie, punk, etc; Some real quiet things as well. He still likes various classical pieces.

I wanted him to see the real deal.

Dylan took it in rightly . Shocked and pleased at The Who. But you knew he discerned more than old guys still have it - this was greatness! He was truly amazed by Townsend ("that's the windmill", was one explanation comment to him).

I loved Daltry's mic taped up ('they do that cause he swings the mic around so much the cord could fall off - no wireless here." Even something like that gets the youngers' attention - Daltry couldn't do his theatrics/personality with the stupid cordless mic. It put a whole new meaning on the dif between "Trads" and the new).

It's cool to have a child - ya get so in sinc w/ em you can see their brains connecting everything all at once, cause you know them so well. And they know that you can see them connecting! As it's happening. 'Tis grand.

"How can guys DO that without being on serious drugs!?" he exclaimed.

"It's just them - they're sober." Somebody's got to be sober in there by now!

"OK - I saw the Goo Goo Dolls song - and they had so much energy...the guy running with his guitar. He was running with his guitar! But it wasn't like this...this is about more than music."

"...Once it connected w/ me or whatever, when I's real young, I knew music was about more than itself...Dylan, that's who they really are. You should see the clips, when The Who were in their 20's - Townsend smashing his guitars [i didn't even go into Keith Moon!]. OK, that's when no one was sober. But this really is how they are."

"The music, I didn't know where it was going! Where it was going to go."

I nodded. "Yep - that's the thing, people say bad stuff about the 70's, but the 70's, that was album rock time. They'd play a whole album on radio. And these bands, The Who, Styx, Yes, ELP, others, there were many songs which went somewhere, they were classical in that sense."

So that's the dirty little secret about the 70's: intelligent music did abound! Even dirtier, us listeners whether musically literate or not, GOT IT. People aren't stupid, they can follow complexities, they can love music like that. All the layers and movements and motiffs. I could see Dylan quite affected that that audience knew the movements within these long songs.

Gratitude for my "pop" formation has been renewed. For all the J5 (which was truly great...just the percussion and piano on 'ABC') there was Rundgren's Utopia - LIVE!!!!!!! We heard that stuff from our older sibs. Being 10 or 11 and stumbling onto Heart of the Sunrise by Yes... You know what I'm talking about. Even the creepiest ('DOA' - pretty bad for a 10 yr old kid) was always offset by something truly uplifting.

Now the anthems of British The Who - those NY fire and police & the whole of the Americans who got it including a couple little fellows - we're blood brothers with that. The world is not so big and the ocean between us not so far. I mean, Where is it? With Bowie (New York resident) opening with Paul Simon's America?

We recently saw a film that had a piece I'd forgotten about...omigosh hearing it again affected me. What is this, what is this?! he asked. "That's got to be the band King Crimson...the song Court of the Crimson King." You could see the boy making a note of that in his head.