Phil sat murmuring in the corner twirling his headphone wire. His left arm slumped into the shadow of an overhead projector cart, which his fingers danced across like braille. Gangly, perpetually rumpled, he was a head taller than most teachers, and spent our music appreciation period leaning on the wall at such jarring angles that it looked like he was trying to melt. Every few minutes his crow-black bangs would tumble down his brow, so he’d flip them back with a reflexive jerk of his neck. Staring into the dim eyes of an electrical outlet, he bobbed his head to a rhythm only he could hear, muttering lyrics in a low, atonal incantation that was part whisper, part moan. I’d come over to tell him that he’d missed the bell. He was oblivious that a dozen others had already slipped their backpacks on and slunk away, dreading equations, the storming of Normandy, or the knots their friends left in lab aprons and sometimes, as a joke, pulled tighter with their teeth. Plays by sense of smell, he repeated, zipping up his JanSport. How the hell do you play by sense of smell, he kept asking the hallway’s bank of dented lockers as I jogged to keep up. It was his first time hearing Tommy. This was my introduction to the Who.

On the last day of seventh grade, Phil lent me Who’s Greatest Hits on compact disc for the entire summer. I held the jewel case in my hands like a reliquary containing bone shards from a saint. At the time, I owned one CD (R.E.M.’s Murmur, if you must know), so the idea of anyone allowing me to borrow a disc for months on end left me inarticulate with gratitude. I got a Discman for my birthday just so I could play it. Mornings at my father’s house, I’d lie in the pale light streaming through the basement’s sliding door while he slept upstairs, keeping time against musty couch cushions that billowed dust each time I patted my hand. I didn’t comprehend it then, but Phil had discovered albums, so he had no use for a partial and poorly-made MCA compilation. I still wonder: Why was it so wildly achronological? For that matter, if you had to select a baker’s dozen Who songs to represent their oeuvre to the uninitiated, why would you include that one-chord sex joke “Squeeze Box”? Intentional or not, Who’s Greatest Hits made the underwhelming argument that here was a band that sounded like the Kinks for a while, then got heavier. Luckily for me, I was oblivious to rhetoric. I listened to “Magic Bus” on repeat because it was a cartoon and I understood cartoons. Dust motes swirled with Moon’s woodblock. I tried to hum the outro’s primal wail.

Each time it happens I hate the Who a little more. Currently, it’s “Eminence Front” shilling GMC trucks. I try to imagine the scene: a balding, mid-level ad executive in a shimmering board room, wearing a suit worth more than my station wagon, his construction site storyboards propped on an easel. And then we drop a bunch of bricks into the truck bed. And then the truck crests a mound of gravel. Pete Townshend likes to joke that “Eminent Front” was what it felt like to do cocaine. Monotonous and brooding, it’s the only passable song on 1982’s It’s Hard, an album I wish I could unmake. What did Kurt Cobain write in his journals? I hope I die before I become Pete Townshend. But now I’ve got ahead of myself. If you wait long enough in America, every dream devolves into a jingle. This piece is supposed to be about beginnings.

Before I gave up on symbolism, I bought My Generation, the Who’s debut, at the Virgin Megastore in Piccadilly Circus and listened to it on a double-decker bus during a Tube strike. For years, it was the only album in their catalog I didn’t own, and though I had all of its songs in other formats, guilt finally compelled me to get it. “The Kids Are Alright” and “My Generation” are its definitive tunes, and represent the two warring impulses at the band’s core: harmony and growl, composure and noise, Apollonian and Dionysian. “The Kids Are Alright” captures pop music at its best, with its jangly chords, tight arrangement, and understated lyrics masking their complexity. After all, what kind of jilted teenage lover leaves a dance, resigned that class consciousness and another suitor have bested him, only to wistfully opine, “better leave her behind, the kids are alright”? The song’s emotional sophistication, worldliness, and innuendo foreshadow the coming operatic masterpieces A Quick One, Tommy, and Quadrophenia. Bristling with bravado, “My Generation” snipes at the hypocritical social order and allows the unrivaled talent of Entwistle and Moon to overshadow Daltrey’s stuttered delivery and Townshend’s twangy power chords. Its cacophonic finish lays the foundation for the band’s greatest work, Who’s Next, an album for which, right now, as I type this, here on planet Earth, some soul slurping their third drink at the bar is making the rapturous claim that nothing else comes close. And who can blame them? It’s hard to conjure another record with such swooning melodies and chiaroscuro dynamics where the band grinds their guts out, only to have their singer triumph. The curious, if less memorable, tunes on My Generation, such as “La-La-La-Lies” and “A Legal Matter,” reveal the band’s cheeky humor and self-depreciation that would later result in The Who Sell Out. “The Ox” remains a titillating one-off—part surf song, part blues jam—that suggests what could have been, had Entwistle and Moon conspired to contain Townshend’s ego and let their superior musicianship shine. Time hasn’t done any favors for the album’s three R&B covers, particularly James Brown’s “Please, Please, Please,” which strikes my adult ears as a prelude to sexual assault. Its refrain doesn’t plead, it demands, just like the drunk I saw stagger into a subway car the week after the Tube strike ended, who put up his fists and slurred who wants some of this?

It was mild for October. Walking behind the dorms, I saw dozens of American flags framed in windows with overlapping strips of scotch tape. Reinforced diagonally at the corners, some doubly thick over riveted seams, they faced the train tracks behind Keister and Funkhouser, where patches of rust shimmered like koi in the sunset. I wondered what it would look like to some bleary-eyed conductor hurtling past, all those taped-up flags blurring to smeared specks in parking lot glare, like a painter’s rag daubed with smudges. When I arrived, my friends were already sipping drinks and talking anxiously about “The Concert for New York City.” It would broadcast that night on VH1, though I was clueless, having spent another week trying to escape the fog of national tragedy buried in the library. In those pre-social media days, people forgave each other for being oblivious, so I was excited rather than embarrassed to hear the all-star line-up Paul McCartney had assembled to raise funds for first responders. But as the night’s beer and grief wore on, I sank further into my seat, listless. How many ways can celebrities wince into the camera’s eye, murmuring from a teleprompter, as if collective pain at last was theirs to bare alone, as if scripted sympathies could bridge us over fear? Then the Who roared out. Vociferous and raw, tour-tight and lean, Townshend, Daltrey, and Entwistle were in rare form, backed only by Zak Starkey on drums and Jon Carin on keyboards. At the time I had seen the band in concert twice, but they played with such defiant urgency I could hardly believe it. Here they were, our prodigal older brothers, returning to destroy our nemesis. Some firefighters wept down their collars and waved their helmets, half-forgetting why they were there. That effervescent snarl from 1965 was back, if only for an hour, to remind us that the soundtrack to survival is a scream. It was the last time I believed rock ‘n’ roll might save us after all. I cheered the shock and awe. The Afghanistan invasion was on day thirteen.

The dumpster stank of oily dough and spoiled tomato sauce. I stood beside it, waiting for my ride, as line cooks fizzled out to smoke and bullshit. One guy liked to tell the story about how he leapt from a Honda in third gear after arguing with his girlfriend, unopened beers in his front jeans pockets, and neither bottle broke. They nicknamed me System because at fourteen I was the best dishwasher they’d ever had. Pre-soaking pots in one sink, chiseling plates in the other, I ensured no one, not even management, touched the pristine stacks on my four shelves. By the second hour of each shift, suds would soak through my apron to my shirt, and by closing, my $20 Payless shoes—bought to be destroyed—would squish when I fetched the mop. I could eat for free as an employee, but after a few weeks I could no longer stomach the grease, so on my breaks I’d run to the liquor store next door for pretzel rods and ginger ale. I’d stash what I couldn’t finish on the top dish rack, next to a flour-flecked Radio Shack boombox that was so tinny it sounded as if it had barely survived submersion in water. My favorite station played “Baba O’Riley” religiously every night, and about once a month they would spin “Bargain” or “The Seeker.” I forked over the bulk of each paycheck to my parents, but by fall, I had enough cash to buy the Who’s four-disc box set Thirty Years of Maximum R&B. It was a career-spanning retrospective and included a massive T-shirt that billowed down to my knees. On the last warm dusk of the year, I slept over at my grandmother’s house and stayed up past midnight creasing the glossy booklet again, trying to decipher all the mysteries beyond me: mods, pirate radio, Shepherd’s Bush. With my window cracked, over the crickets’ susurrus, I heard for the first time a freight train creep through the center of town. When I put my headphones on, the train sounded like a seal wrapped in chains being drug across a frozen pond. Reader, even the bones from that world are gone.

—Adam Tavel