The Who marks 50 as the endless wire continues

Pete Townshend sure got tired of having that one song thrown back in his face.

“I write the same old song with a few new lines, and everybody wants to cheer it,” The Who proclaims in “New Song,” from 1978.

Oh, not that one?

Well, there’s “Music Must Change” from the same album: “The music must change, for we’re chewing a bone. We soared like the sparrow hawk flied, then we dropped like a stone.”

Just messin’ with you. We know your first thought was “My Generation,” which Townshend wrote on his 20th birthday and famously proclaimed “Hope I die before I get old.”

Now that song, like most of The Who’s catalog, becomes part of one big anthem to celebrate survival. The other songs are just chapter-stops to freeze moments of a long journey, which continues when The Who plays the Colosseum at Caesars Palace on Sunday.

The date — rescheduled from September after 72-year-old singer Roger Daltrey took ill — is now the last U.S. stop on the second leg of “The Who Hits 50!” tour. The tour was not billed as a blanket farewell, but more specifically as “the band’s final shows in many of the tour cities.”

Las Vegas doesn’t seem too likely to be one of them. The band’s ambivalence about the Strip, and a clouded history here, is likely to be overcome by the practicality of Las Vegas as a convenient gathering point for fans from all over.

Already The Who is returning to the United States for the classic-rock dream festival, Desert Trip, Oct. 7-9 (the iconic act plays on closing night) on the same Indio, California site that hosts the Coachella Valley Music and Arts festival.

If the classic rockers follow the path of the Coachella talent, there’s a chance some of them could make a side trip to Las Vegas on the way to or from the big weekend.

Either way, Desert Trip is a historic gathering of acts who shaped the baby boomer generation: The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan (who turned 75 this week), Paul McCartney, Neil Young and Roger Waters.

Collectively, they keep postponing the answer to the big question for the defining acts of rock history: How far can they take it?

A 50-year run was an impossible notion to Townshend, who turned 71 last week, at various points in his career. After the deaths of drummer Keith Moon and manager Kit Lambert, “Do we really have the right to celebrate a 25th anniversary?” Townshend remembered asking in his 2012 memoir, “Who I Am.”

The above-mentioned songs from “Who Are You?” were written when Moon’s alcoholism and mental issues made it a struggle to finish the album.

When Moon died in September 1978, Townshend surprised everyone who thought Moon’s death would be a logical stopping point. “My reaction was immediate and completely irrational, bordering on insane,” Townshend wrote.

“Instead of letting The Who gently fade … I confounded everyone,” he wrote. “The incredibly charged emotions around Keith’s death made me lose all logic. I was convinced that everything would be OK if we could only play, perform and tour.”

The Who did two more albums with drummer Kenney Jones and toured extensively until May 1983, when Townshend wrote in his journal, “I proceed to freedom.”

But the band was back in business as a touring enterprise by the end of the decade. Las Vegas was included on a 1996 “Quadrophenia” revival tour. Three years later, the MGM Grand Garden also hosted a 1999 show that became infamous as a failed attempt to broadcast full Internet video (interesting idea though), eventually released on home video as “The Vegas Job.”

In June 2002, though, bassist John Entwistle died at the Hard Rock Hotel the day before the band was to launch a tour in the hotel’s cozy venue The Joint.

Now facing double the skepticism of whether they could preserve any of the original band’s unique four-way chemistry, Townshend and Daltrey forged on further still.

The last Las Vegas visit, in February 2013, found them standing proud but literally bloodied and battered: Townshend stabbing his hand on his guitar’s whammy bar, and Daltrey going ballistic on someone who ignored a pre-show announcement that smoking would “shut my voice down.”

The Who’s last studio album, “Endless Wire” came 10 years ago, in 2006. Townshend and Daltrey would often perform its final song, “Tea &Theatre,” together as a final acoustic encore: “We’re older now, all of us sad, all of us free.”

But when Townshend answered email questions before that tour’s stop at Mandalay Bay, some of his comments seemed to anticipate the Desert Trip “Oldchella” gathering in Indio 10 years into his future.

“I think a lot of us are returning not to our life roots but to our old processes, partly because they allow us to exercise our old powers,” Townshend noted then.

Asked about the boomers’ sway on pop culture — which is now more a sway on concert-industry box office, with Sunday’s tickets topping out at $500 — Townshend mentioned two of the contemporaries sharing the limelight at the festival.

The boomers “have huge sway,” he acknowledged, “but why do we care? I think the folk, rock and R&B music of the ’60s changed the function of the popular arts,” he wrote.

“Hearing ‘Blowing in the Wind’ made me certain that we were all doomed, that it was not my fault, but at the same time that I had to try to be different to those who came before.

“Hearing ‘Satisfaction’ made me certain that mine was a generation who would never give up, if we ever happened to win a war, we would never stop wanting more: more love, more peace, more spiritual redemption.

“That huge group of people in the boom created a series of generational echoes that keep coming back like undertow waves to revive our thesis,” he added before mentioning a then-topical headline of Stones’ guitarist Keith Richards’ tumbling from a tree in Fiji and suffering a tour-canceling concussion.

“Even Keith Richards falling out of a tree, drunk as usual — or worse — at 63 years old, is pivotal because, guess what? He survived.

“We do die, of course, but we seem to be living a very long time.”

Read more from Mike Weatherford at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com and follow @Mikeweatherford on Twitter.