Re: Roger rises to it

The reviews so far have been about how great Roger was in the Quad shows.

My own experience from seeing the Who 19 times are this:

1)  The 1973 Quad tour was by far the best vocal performance I have ever
heard Roger give - and I mean EVER.  A friend of mine that went with me
called it right when he said afterwards, "man, Roger Daltrey was HELL!!!!!"

2)  second best vocal performances for him in my career are probably a tie -
the 1970 Tommy tour and the 1971 Who's Next tour.  He was excellent both
nights.

I think the bottom line here friends is simple - give Roger a big piece of
meat to latch on to and he delivers a knockout just about everytime.  The man
has always deemed the Who and its audiences worthy of every good performance
possible and, when given the better material to sing, he sang his balls
off!!!!!   He BECAME Tommy in 1969 and 1970 and it made him a rock star.
 From then on there was no turning back except when 1975 rolled around and
the band toured for a so-so LP and just basically did hits.  They were very
good then - but not the magical band of a few years earlier.  Roger still
sounded great but you could tell that a certain special something was missing
- - a sense of true purpose besides singing a collection of songs.  The problem
with the By Numbers tour was that they only did typically two new songs
(Squeeze Box and Dreaming From The Waist when I saw them) as opposed to doing
a lot of new songs (1971) and concept LP's (1970 and 1973) that also gave
them a lot of new songs to do.

When a band is sick of doing a certain song you can tell - the last good
version of "Baba O'Riley" I ever heard was in 1975!  They became locked into
a certain stage formula that they seemed not to be able to break out of. They
should have taken a page from the Kinks at that time.  When the Pretenders
had a hit with "Stop Your Sobbing" , the Kinks added it back into their shows
- - in the Pretenders arrangement!  Same thing when Van Halen and the Jam
covered Kinks tunes - the songs and arrangements showed up back in the set.
  The Who needed to do the same thing - very badly.

The bottom line seems to have been - give Roger some great tunes that are
fresh and demanding (which Quad certainly qualifies for) and he will deliver
tremendously.

Greg Biggs