the who - who's next - denver, colorado 2000

the who always seemed like a bunch of jokers to me, and i found them to be obnoxious. i was a pink floyd freak, of the roger waters variety, and rock 'n roll, i believed for quite some time, should be serious business. in january of 2000 i arrived in boulder, colorado. i couldn't keep a job and i was having some episodes of mania and some paranoid delusions, and again wound up living in my car. i got fired from one job and went to work for a pyramid sales scheme selling mass-produced fine art prints to businesses, door to door. one of the people i worked with (we worked in teams, sometimes) left a cassette tape of who's next in my car. i never would have bought it myself, up until then. i was familiar with the record, having listened to it a few times in high school and hearing the major hits on classic rock stations. at first i was annoyed, riding around with this co-worker and having to listen to such tired classic rock radio favorites as "baba o'reilly," "behind blue eyes," and "won't get fooled again" over and over. but after he quit, or i quit, or whatever happened, the tape got left in my car, and somehow out of boredom or good faith one day i decided to listen to it again. the tape stayed in the deck for days at a time while i absorbed all of the grandness of the record. it wasn't a cohesive story, like tommy or the wall, but i definitely felt like there was a thematic concept to the album. i listened to it driving around the mountains, homeless and unlicensed, and "going mobile" became my personal theme music. "my wife," while not very relevant to my situation, also seemed like good "on the lam" music. "bargain" and "love ain't for keeping" were to me, two of the most sublime love songs i'd ever heard. and slowly i started to reinterpret "behind blue eyes" to be about my own mental and emotional instability, rather than just some overplayed rock song.
one day i found myself broke and nearly out of gas in littleton. i pulled into the parking lot of a strip mall and began to go door to door, not looking for sales, but for a real job. i got hired at a juice place in that same strip, and worked there, sleeping in the parking lot, until i could get enough money to go somewhere other than colorado. a few weeks earlier my sleeping bag had been stolen, so i just blasted the heater before i went to sleep, and slept under a wool peacoat. some nights it would get too cold for me to sleep all the way through like this and i would wake up and start the car again to get warmed up. usually, who's next was playing, and i would sometimes accidentally drift off to sleep listening to "the song is over" before waking up to shut off the engine.