1965 – The Who’s pre-recorded appearance from the Marquee Club on May 25 is broadcast on “Ready, Steady, Radio!”
1965 – The Who play The King Mojo Club in Sheffield, Yorkshire
1966 – The Who play at the Sincil Bank Football Ground in Lincoln for the Whit Monday “Top Pop” Festival. The Kinks, the Small Faces, and the Yardbirds are also on the bill.
1966 – Pete is in an auto accident on the M1 on his way back to London after the Morecambe gig the night before. It is incorrectly reported in the Netherlands, Germany and France that Roger has been killed in the crash and Polydor is inundated with calls.
1969 – The Who play in Chicago at the Kinetic Playground with Buddy Rich and His Orchestra & Joe Cocker and The Grease Band
1970 – An interview with Roger appears in New Musical Express. Roger calls the way Tommy has taken over their live set “a bit of a monkey.” He says the upcoming shows at New York’s Metropolitan Opera will be the last live performances of the rock opera.
Transcription:
Slowly, Who go forward step-by-step
Roger Daltrey talks to NME`s Richard Green
It`s not all that often that a carton of “Big Value Bounce,” a stereoscopic viewer, three dogs and a joke machine that utters maniacal laughs play any sort of part in an interview. On the other hand, it is as infrequently that I visit the country seat of Roger Daltrey who looks like a contestant for the title of Pop Squire Of Hurst.
Roger has been living for getting on for two years in what is described as a cottage but is, in fact, a lot larger, in deepest Buckinghamshire. Jimmy Page doesn’t live all that far away but the locals don’t seem to have been unduly affected.
As befits his quieter-than-of-late-life, Roger was up a ladder fixing the roof over a rear porch when I arrived on a sunny afternoon. He descended in his wellington boots, old jeans and shirt and suggested an excursion to the Green Man. This turned out to be an ancient local inn where Roger is well-known and very popular.
Chuckles
The landlady showed us a thing called a bag of laughs that costs two quid and emits piercing chuckles and yells. Roger and I decided it was really impersonating Kit Lambert, the Who’s co-manager.
After recovering from the shock of the machine, we talked about the new album, “Tommy,” where the Who are at today and what surprises are up their sleeves.
“We could have done a better `live’ album if we’d done it over a number of dates,” Roger admitted. “But `My Generation’ and `Magic Bus,’ are just unbelievable, complete freedom, it just flows.”
Pete Townshend had played me some of the album on tape at his home and when I mentioned this, back at Roger’s house, he replied: “It’s best heard on tapes, I’m afraid albums are on the way out. Oh, It’s so untogether today. Let’s talk about Squidgy — Tricky Dicky.
“Do you want me to play the album, I’ve heard it enough. I’d rather play Simon and Garfunkel. Let’s go without sounds.
“Let’s see what drink we’ve got… out come the dregs. What can we offer you? Cup of tea? Right, one cup of Rosey. One thing you could put right, a lot of people have said that the audience must have been dubbed on the album but it’s not been. The only thing that’s been dubbed are a few voices towards the end where they got a bit weak.”
While various people tried to control an assortment of dogs who were intent on mischief and Roger went to organise tea, I had a look round the house. It is about four hundred years old and has ridiculously low beams everywhere — it’s rumoured that it was initially designed for Jimmy Clitheroe!
Sets of books with titles like “The World Of Children” line the shelves in the lounge and loads of amps and tape equipment litter the floor. An empty carton of “Bounce” dog food was on a chair and the steroscopic viewer — a kind of three-dimensional peep show — on a cupboard.
A lot of the furniture is of the old-fashioned variety which is so much in vogue and as a contrast, Roger has added an extension to the main building to be used for a bedroom and studio.
He is digging a pond and the well is covered with an old mangle. The olde-worlde appeal of the house if offset by Roger’s shiny American sports car standing in the drive.
The car has a Woodstock sticker on it and I told Roger that the Who come over very well in the film of the festival. That pleased him, but he wasn’t so enthusiastic about the event itself.
“It was a nightmare,” he groaned. “We got there at six and we didn’t go on ’til six the next morning! It was murder — no food and no water. Oh… “
Roger’s voice on the new album sounds to me a lot stronger than before and of this view, he said “I’ve been singing like this for a long time now, we’ve just not had it on record.
“We’ve been going into the studio and I haven’t known the songs – Pete doesn’t like to do songs on stage before we record them. He’s writing songs that suit my voice better, before I had to fit my voice to the songs.
“Pete’s writing better than ever now, he went through a bad stage after ‘Tommy.’ John’s writing a lot now as well, that’s coming on well. And the recording is so much better, we’re recording at Pete’s and he digs the engineering side so much.”
Our chat was interrupted by the arrival of a pleasant young Irishman called Cecil McCartney, who brought with him his album, “Om.” He sat on the floor and immediately attracted the attention of one dog who discovered a melted bar of chocolate in his back pocket. Cecil’s pocket, not the dog’s.
Defended
Roger was gradually coming to and he sprang right on the defensive when I mentioned Pete smashing his guitar into the stage at Woodstock and then throwing it away.
“He gave it away,” he protested. “He has a game with it but he doesn’t smash it. Pete has no respect for the guitar, he uses it just as an instrument to make what he wants to do.”
Roger is, however, happy with the way things are going for the Who just now and he agrees that within the group all is a lot better. “We just know ourselves a lot better,” is the way he puts it. It’s certainly taken them a long time to find out.
The Who is a weird group in terms of advancement. Everyone knows how good it is but it takes a couple of hit singles and an album for the Who to be on everyone’s tongues.
Yet without this tangible success the Who can still go out for considerable money. There are “Who periods” and Roger knew what I meant when I mentioned them.
“‘Tommy’ was the next stepping stone from `My Generation,’” he conceded. “It took a long while but there it is. One of the basic problems of pop is there are too many analysts. They should either like it or not, if it does something to them or not. They don’t have to go into it. “I can understand people not liking `Tommy’ at all. Why not? That’s a difficult question. Mainly because… well, the actual recording of it at the time was fantastic — for us to get into something like that — but we’re past that now.
“We perform it much better on stage and it’s very hard to like the album after you’ve done it on stage. It was a real turn on before we did it on stage.
“The New York Metropolitan will be the last time we will feature it, though we may play parts of it, perhaps a bit different, other times. It’s becoming a bit of a monkey, like the breaking of the gear, people expected it.”
What, then, does Roger see as the next “stepping stone” for the Who?
“I dunno, really,” he replied. “Maybe we’ll do a five album opera on a torso called Deborah! The Who will always be a 3-D group, they always have been. That album — we’d been playing for two hours when most of it had been recorded. It was at its peak to most of the audience. The last four numbers on the album were the last four numbers of the act.
“On `Shakin’ All Over,` `My Generation’ and `Summertime Blues’ the voices can be a lot better, but to the audience it just doesn’t matter because we’re a 3-D group.
“Everytime we say we’re gonna sing `Summertime Blues` a big cheer goes up and it’s great to hear it because the voices aren’t that good by then.”
The Who are off on another American tour within the next couple of weeks or so and that should keep the Yanks happy for a while. If Pete is writing as well as Roger believes — and a track from the next album that Roger played me leads to believe that he is — then a comment that Pete made to me on the phone after our last chat may make sense after all.
Calling him about a concert, I said it was a shame that `The Seeker` wasn’t going up very fast. “It doesn’t really matter, does it?” he replied quite nonchalantly.
1970 – Live at Leeds enters the Billboard “Top LP’s” chart at #52. It would stay in the chart for 44 weeks, peaking at #4
1974 – The first day of filming of the “We’re Not Gonna Take It” sequence at Harry Pound Scrapyard in Portsmouth. Watch the results here
1975 – Roger’s disco-style single “Get Your Love” backed with “World Over,” both from his forthcoming solo album Ride A Rock Horse, is released in Britain. It fails to chart.
1977 – Official production of Who fan Jeff Stein’s movie of the band, The Kids Are Alright, begins. He had proposed the movie to Pete two years before. The first weeks of production are spent in New York scouring archives for rare Who film.
1981 – Pete plays a solo show at Brockwell Park in Brixton in support of a march against unemployment in Britain. He performs “A Little Is Enough” (twice due to bad PA mix), “Cats In The Cupboard,” “Big Boss Man,” “Substitute,” “Corrina Corrina,” “Body Language,” “Join Together” and “Let My Love Open The Door.” He is accompanied by Neil Abbott (guitar), Peter Hope-Evans (harmonica), Mark Brzezicki (drums) and Tony Butler (bass). Jim Capaldi comes out to do vocals for “Substitute.”
2001 – The John Entwistle Band plays at the Stone Pony in Asbury Park
2006 – Rachel’s In The Attic does a tribute to the movie The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. Pete is shown in session recording “Trilby’s Piano” for Endless Wire and on the show playing “Here For More” and “Sheraton Gibson”. The show ends with the cast recreating the underwater “tiger shark” sequence with Pete in the Bill Murray role.
2007 – The Who play the Peel Bay Festival in Peel Bay, Isle of Man
2010 – The press reveals that Pete Townshend has invested in Ashdown House, a National Trust property. Pete’s investment allows renevations to be made to the estate that had been built for the daughter of King James I and is now a tourist destination. You can learn more about the house here and here
2012 – The Who Sell Out (mono & stereo mixes) and Quadrophenia (original mix) are released on SACD as a limited addition in Japan
2015 – The Who play Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in New York
2019 – The Who play the PPG Paints Arena in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania