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On until midnight, but an audience of 6000 stayed.

Nobody in the group got any sleep, John said, and when they arrived in Philadelphia with no hotel rooms, it became a shattering sequence of calamities. "We were all so tense from the past few days that even when we got a chance to sleep, we couldn't. I couldn't fall asleep until 7 Wednesday morning."

America has caused the break-up of many popular English groups, Keith noted. "It's what got Cream to split up."

John agreed: "If we played in America for more than a month, the Who would break up too. It's not that we can't stand each other, but we really get homesick being in America. Our families are all back in England and we're here just to work."

The Who weren't ever really compatible personalities from the way Keith and John describe their early days when the group was known as the High Numbers.

"But we were all incredibly sure the band would be a success," Keith smiled. "That's what made us stick together. We were all holding together until we were going to make it."

"I've been playing in bands with Pete Townshend since we were 14," John said. "We met each other when we were in school together. Pete and I first were in a band where I played trumpet and he played banjo."

What kind of band was it? "Very bad," John laughed. "Pete was just learning to play banjo then, but we had three banjos in the band, so nobody could tell how he was playing. Roger, the lead singer, met John and Pete when they all attended the same school, but wasn't then in the group. "He was big, bad Roger," said John, "the leader of the Teddy boys."

Keith joined the group when he was 16 and the others were 18. The Who worked with a session drummer then. "And he was costing us half of our paychecks," John interjects. "Some friend of Keith's staggers onstage while we were playing and says 'my mate can play better than your drummer.' The Who took him up on it and Keith sat in on drums.

"I broke this fellow's bass pedal," remembered Keith, "one he'd had for 15 years or something." He's been breaking up drums with the Who ever since.

John's never had that quality of violence and insanity that the rest of the group displays onstage because he feels he can't play the bass properly when he's jumping around. "But I do want to dispel some rumors," he said. "I am human. I do breathe on stage — occasionally."

When the Who finish their current concert tour of America in about two weeks, they'll return to England to finish their next album, which John thinks will be released in the Fall.

"It's not going to be another Tommy," said Keith. "We can't do another one of those. This'll just be some songs. Of course, we could call it 'Son of Tommy' or maybe 'Tommy's Third Cousin By Marriage.'"

In another room, Peter Townshend, composer of "Tommy" and murderous guitarist, was out of earshot, sleeping the sleep of total exhaustion, hopefully forgetting all about bombs, airlines, the FBI and the Eastern Star.

Roger Daltrey