The Kids Are Alright.

I WAS NEVER a huge Who fan. At my high school, they were claimed by those geeky boys who wrote poetry, generated single-sheet underground school newspapers, and knew their way around AV equipment. The very idea of a rock opera seemed like just the kind of thing a prep school misfit could get with: an inflated concept that skipped, windmilled, and duckwalked hand in hand with high GPAs, extra credit, and the high-low tastes of the future cultural elite. I was more interested in punk and new wave – aggression coupled with ambiguous sexuality in the case of Iggy Pop, raw power tethered to smart, roughneck politics as with the Clash, or the proto-pussy power of Blondie or even the Go-Go's. I preferred the Who's copycat mod revivalists, the Jam, because, like an abridged porn tape, they were all about the "good" parts: seamlessly fierce and stern aggro pop, without the eyeball-rolling experimentation, human frailties, or hippie veneer of Woodstock.

Still, girlie friends who had aspirations to become just like those smart, hip boys – or start dating them – usually shoved a Who tape into the video player at their slumber parties, and we'd studiously watch Tommy, Quadrophenia, and yes, The Kids Are Alright until we hit something ludicrous (Tommy's gathering of the tribes montage) or tedious (most of Quadrophenia) – and our willing suspension of rock disbelief buckled and we were jettisoned out of Shepherd's Bush or Brighton and back to the suburbs and clothes and homework and parental injustices. Our teenage wasteland.

So when I knew I was going to look at The Kids Are Alright once more, I thought it might be enlightening to check in with one of those Who boys from high school, filmmaker Jon Moritsugu. Now a film instructor at San Francisco State University, Moritsugu made his name with pop deconstructionist films like Der Elvis, Mod Fuck Explosion, and of course, My Degeneration. He remembers the 1979 Who movie fondly. "Actually, I saw it first on cable TV – I loved it so much, I watched it four times in the next couple weeks. It was on the cable circuit," he said. "One of the appealing things was their aesthetic sensibility. The Who had this cool dynamic going on. They weren't really four really handsome guys – there were a couple of misfits thrown in there. I liked that there were some freaky weirdos in the band, like Keith Moon or Pete Townshend. I loved it, and at the same time, listening to the Stooges and Black Flag, it smeared together and made sense to me."

After recently seeing the film again, I'd go even further. The Kids Are Alright makes an almost overwhelmingly strong case for the Who as the greatest rock band of their time, despite the fact that nowadays they sometimes seem like the dustiest and least relevant of the British Invasion rock icons. Part of that freshness is tied to the film's loose, intuitive pastiche, part to the reemergence of drummers as the focal point in many an indie/underground rock band, à la Greg Saunier and Zach Hill of Deerhoof and Hella, respectively. In any case, The Kids Are Alright seems to perfectly presage MTV and VH1 and their endless stream of Behind the Musics and artist bio specials – with none of the cheese narration or sleaze angles. It's as powerful as Townshend and Moon's violent outbursts on their equipment, as playful as Moon's pants-dropping Benny-Hill-as-rock-star shtick, and as lovingly conflicted as "Behind Blue Eyes."

Cleanup crew

But then perhaps you knew that. What's different here are all the enhancements, widgets, and doohickeys attached to the double-disc special-edition Pioneer DVD of The Kids Are Alright. In an accompanying documentary on the restoration of the film, senior producer John Albarian talks about how the VHS version was reproduced from a print rather than a master, resulting in milky, faded image quality and bizarre speeded-up sound. This director's cut edition of the film corrects those "mistakes," attempts to simulate the theater experience down to certain shots' composition and the now high-definition and more noticeable grain of '60s TV clips, and restores truncated portions – such as the Keith Richards intro and the minutes sliced from the Who's performance of "A Quick One, While He's Away" in the Rolling Stones Rock 'n' Roll Circus (rumor had it the entire song was edited out of the original 1968 TV special because the Who upstaged their hosts, the Stones). Included are an "interactive" tour of the Who's London stomping ground, trivia questions, a Q&A with Roger Daltry (though where's Townshend?), isolated bass tracks via "Ox Cam," and a chance to view the last time Moon performed with the Who – in live concert footage shot specially for the film at Shepperton Film Studios – from multiple camera angles.

It's fascinating stuff, though it's definitely not the same grainy, bleached music film in flat, nonsurround stereo. Isn't the deterioration of the film a bit like the "auto-destruct" antics that followed the Who's performances? Yet I particularly enjoy the audio commentary and interview with director and writer Jeff Stein, an obsessed fan and first-time filmmaker who somehow managed to convince the band he could tell their story, show all their stages, and be entrusted to expose the follies, foibles, and greatness – all on the strength of a 17-minute reel of odds-and-sods clips of the Who on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and Shindig!

That's because, unlike today's tabloid-tinged bio programs, The Kids Are Alright is notable for its lack of narration. There's no explanation, say, for the Who's otherwise inexplicable "Barbara Ann" cover (which, thanks to the audio commentary, Stein discloses as the first live session he filmed of the band: a treat for Moon, who was a Beach Boys maniac). The nonlinear structure of the film seems enhanced by its very lack of information – about chronology, concert locations, or footage origins. Less a history than a collection of parts dealing with various stages and ideas associated with the band, the film works on an intuitive logic that might jump-cut from an idea or comment. Daltry's quip "We're the horrible Who, the worst rock 'n' roll group in the world. You couldn't pick four more-horrible geezers that make the worst noise you ever heard in your life," for instance, leads into the clunky power riffs of "Road Runner" played in 1975 at the Silverdome in Pontiac, Mich., a show that firmly placed the band amid the bloat of arena rock with their record audience of 78,000.

Bright side of Moon

Moon also stands out. Though he died only a few weeks after he saw the final cut of the film, nothing was changed, no sentimentality or reverence was inserted regarding the man described as a "mutant" by the director and "unlike anyone I've ever met" by Townshend. Mugging, holding his head between fills, and whipping his neck back in mid pummel, with the weirdest combination of dainty bent-wrist gestures and multi-limbed fury, Moon still comes off as a remarkable, expressive drummer. The fact that he also drove his car into pools and foyers, as Ringo Starr nonchalantly recounts, and drove his bandmates batty, seemed like part of a deliberate campaign to save the Who from overweening self-importance. He was the band id that bit back even as interviewer Russell Harty queries in the film, "What strains have you suffered together over the years?" "Aaah!" Townshend yells when Moon takes an unprovoked chomp on his leg. "Seems like it's just beginning!"