COVER STORY

Who knew?

DALTREY, TOWNSHEND TOUT HARMONY AT LAST

BY DAVID HINCKLEY

Of The New York Daily News

NEW YORK

Watching Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey together raises the distinct possibility that for all the grumbling they've done about each other over the past 40 years, they get along.

That ruins a lot of good headlines, though it does have the small advantage of explaining how, 42 years after they started making good music together, they're still doing it.

Sitting in the studio of Sirius Satellite Radio, which has been running a whole channel dedicated to Who music and conversation, Townshend spoke about how pleased he is to be back onstage with Daltrey for a Who tour.

The tour has now been joined by the long-awaited new Who CD, "Endless Wire," which blends material Townshend has been assembling for years into the band's first new album since 1982.

It's an ambitious record, partly acoustic, and one thing Townshend and Daltrey said they find encouraging is that audiences seem to be willing to listen to it — not, as is the case with many classic rock audiences, simply drumming their fingers until they hear the hits.

"I can only remember one time when the audience got restless," Townshend said. "I was explaining one of the new songs, probably at more length than I needed to, when someone yelled, 'Shut up and play.'"

"That was me," Daltrey interjected.

Daltrey and Townshend have arguably been the core of The Who since the band came together in the early '60s as the High Numbers and finally parlayed Townshend's intense, singular, introspective and often quirky vision into a series of classic songs like "Can't Explain," "Behind Blue Eyes," "My Generation" and "Pinball Wizard."

Yet after legendary madman drummer Keith Moon died in 1978 of unnatural causes, Townshend in particular expressed concern over whether he took The Who with him, because his spirit was so much at its core.

Even though bass player John Entwistle died in 2002, Townshend now expresses no such concern for the band.

"To me, this record and this tour feel the most connected The Who has been," he said. "This isn't Roger and I deciding to do a tour to help save John, to give him something to do. We're not doing this out of a sense of duty. It's because we've really hit on something."

Townshend has wrestled for years with the musical ethics of playing a show that mostly reprises past hits. On the one hand, he's perpetually working on new material. On the other, as Daltrey said, "People love the classics. I love them, too."

This tour, said Townshend, finds a balance he can live with. He gets to play the new songs and, yes, the band can be compensated for what it's created.

"I was thinking about the kind of fans who used to follow the Grateful Dead," he said. "They'd go to some place and have to eat and put themselves up for three days, so they'd end up paying like $500 a show. And I was thinking, '[Expletive], that's a lot of money.' So what you pay to see The Who doesn't seem too extreme."

What he won't guarantee is a note-perfect show, nor does he want to.

"To me, as a fan, it's as interesting to see a show that's a disaster as a show that's perfect. I remember seeing the Clash, and sometimes they'd be great and sometimes they'd be awful. That's just how it is with live shows."

The Who still have off-nights, said Townshend, but that comes from taking chances, not from any lack of chemistry.

"I'd say that 99.9 percent of the time, Roger and I are connecting onstage," he said. "After all these years, there's a telepathy between us. I know what he's going to do next, he knows what I'm going to do."

"When we're onstage," Daltrey said, "and I'm singing and Pete's playing the guitar, it's like there's this little space between us — and that space is The Who."

The Associated Press

IF YOU GO The Who, 7:30 p.m. Monday at Giant Center, 950 W. Hersheypark Drive, Hershey. Openers are The Pretenders. Tickets: $204.75, $99.75, $79.75 and $54.75. Information: 534-3911 or www.hersheypa.com.