Who is the Who

From  Pete Tonshend's just-out autobiography:

“I wasn’t trying to play beautiful music,” Mr. Townshend explains. “I was confronting my audience with the awful, visceral sound of what we all knew was the single absolute of our frail existence — one day an aeroplane would carry the bomb that would destroy us all in a flash. It could happen at any time. The Cuban Crisis less than two years before had proved that.” 

I know that this aspect of the band -- the smashed guitars and shrieking feedback -- was central to their status, and the social negation and nihilism was how they were understood, but I loved the band for things that to me were just as large a part of their work, which was I believe Tonshend's mostly:  the delicate wit, the careful crafting, the tenderness.  "Mary Anne with the Shaky Hands." "Armenia, City in the Sky." "So Sad About Us."  Above all, "A Quick One While he's Away," which as much as "Blonde on Blonde" convinced me that rock-based music was capable of being a personal art form (it already was and long had been an enormous force, of course.)   When the Who was to play the Fillmore East in 1968, I made up buttons that said "You Are Forgiven" and planned to hand them out (yes, free, 1968) at the concert, but it was canceled because of Martin Luther King's assassination.  I still marvel at it.  Watch the woman's grief enlarge in this stanza (if that's what you'd call it:)

"Along this street your crying is a well known sound --
This street is [quite?] well known throughout this town
This town is very famous for its little girl
Whose crying can be heard all 'round the world."

Which Roger Daltry sings in an obvious Bob Dylan parody mode.   Then there's "Ivor the Engine Driver" and the mock Grofe horse-cloppings.  Wikipedia calls the piece "a medley" which is absurdly reductive.