Saturday, June 15th, 1968

Melody Maker's Bob Dawbarn reviews "Dogs" and interviews Roger

 

 

Transcript:

At 18s 3d in the £, the Who find it’s hardly worth working

IT looks as though we may be seeing a full Pete Townshend opera as a Who LP. Pete has written most of it and it may run up to two hours. Roger Daltrey told the NME this week. “We will probably do it on a complete album and it is more than likely we might do a live performance as well.”

Actually, Pete has been writing these operas for some time and a lot of our hits have come from them. “I’m A Boy” was from an opera he wrote about living in the year 2,000 when there is a machine that helps you select the sex of your baby. That song was about a woman who couldn’t believe that the machine had made a mistake and she’d got a boy instead of a girl. “Happy Jack” was from another opera he did.

“I don’t think it will be our next LP. We will probably have to get one out fairly quickly and that means it will be just a set of different songs. When we come back from our next American tour we will really get down to the opera thing.

“But one main thing on the Who’s collective mind at the moment is their new single, another Townshend original about a greyhound called ‘Dogs.’”

“Why have we been so long between singles?” Roger echoed my question. “Mainly because we didn’t have anything worth recording. We’ve been touring so much there hasn’t been time to get it together and we feel it isn’t worth doing a single unless you have something worth releasing.”

The group is off to the States for a new tour on June 26 and seem to be looking forward to it.

“Last time there were tensions,” agreed Roger. “You have to tour for at least six weeks over there. The first three weeks pays your fares and all the expenses. The fourth week pays for your road managers. The fifth pays for your manager. The sixth is profit for us. In our sixth week Martin Luther King got shot. There was no business, and we came back with nothing.”

“And please don’t think we’ve forgotten about Britain. We all love working here, but what is the point with the tax we pay? It’s stupid. We pay 18s 3d in the pound so it’s hardly worth working. At the moment we are doing two gigs a week, mainly at universities. Roger doesn’t agree that, musically, it’s all happening in the States now.

“The Mothers Of Invention and Moby Grape are marvellous,” he said, “But the rest are a lot of rubbish. It’s time somebody told the truth about the American scene. Really, most of their groups really don’t know where it’s at.

“Their material is good. They have this environment which seems great for writing songs. But the groups themselves are nothing on stage. Part of the trouble may be that people don’t take groups seriously over there.

“We naturally want to keep moving. Like our stage act — we’ve been doing roughly the same act for a year now. It’s so tight. It’s fantastic for people to watch. But we want to change it because we want to do something different.”

 

Who go to the dogs and back a winner!

THE WHO: "Dogs" (Track). This should sell a million at the White City and Shawfield — it's all about a real greyhound called "Yellow Printer," the fastest thing on legs since Wendy Potts.

Seriously, though, folks (as they say on Radio One) it's another Pete Townshend original with tremendous instant appeal.

There's a lot of hilarity, notably chunks of Cockney, dog-lover's chat from Pete and John Entwhistle.

Not exactly the Who at their most progressive but this deserves to make the top five — and no doubt it will.