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Another Roger interview in Dallas Morning News



Available on line at:
http://dallasnews.com/entertainment/155481_WHO27.html

Rejuvenated Who is out to prove a point
08/27/2000

By Thor Christensen / Pop Music Critic of The Dallas Morning News

"Won't Get Fooled Again" isn't just the title of the Who's 1971 anthem: It's
a concern a lot of people have about the British group's summer tour, which
arrives Sunday night at Reunion Arena.

One of rock's most remarkable bands in the '60s and '70s, the Who broke up
in 1982, three years after the death of madman drummer Keith Moon. But
instead of slipping quietly into the rock history books, the group has come
out of retirement for a series of controversial greatest-hits reunion tours.

There's no shortage of Who fanatics who'll jump at any chance to see their
heroes on stage. But there's also reason to view any new Who tour with a
major dose of skepticism after the group's bloated 1989 reunion concerts.

That was the tour in which one of rock's edgiest live bands turned into a
parody of itself - a slick, 15-piece Las Vegas-style show band complete with
some no-name electric guitarist hired to play the lead parts of Pete
Townshend, who stuck mostly to acoustic guitar.

Given that debacle, what is the Who doing back on the road with another
greatest-hits show?

For lead singer Roger Daltrey, it's a chance to prove the band hasn't lost
touch with the grit and fire of its early years.

"The Who's music did get cleaned up quite a lot [on the '89 tour], and the
reason why we're enjoying being the band we are now is that it's refreshing
to hear the music so raw again," the 56-year-old singer said by phone from
England.

"If you listen to the live album, The Blues to the Bush, it's still got that
energy. There's a wonderful passion that's still there."

The double CD - recorded last fall at two charity concerts and sold only on
the Internet at musicmaker.com - features the same no-frills five-man
version of the Who that's currently on tour: Joining the singer and Mr.
Townshend are founding bassist John Entwistle, longtime auxiliary
keyboardist John "Rabbit" Bundrick and drummer Zak Starkey, who also played
on the group's 1996-97 tour.

Sans the horn players and backup singers who made the 1989 concerts so
overbearing, this year's Who lineup "puts us back to where we started," Mr.
Daltrey says.

"We rehearse very little, because it's much fresher and exciting when you
don't. Do you want it slick? Or do you want it good? . . . We can be slick
with the best of them. But I'd rather have a bum note and a bead of sweat,
because I think when you fight for something, it makes it better."

But one battle the Who isn't yet willing to wage is producing an album of
new songs. It's been 18 years since it put out its last studio album, It's
Hard, and while Mr. Daltrey says the band is "trying and hoping" to write
tunes on the road, there are no firm plans to record new songs or play them
in concert.

In other words, you'll hear plenty of classics like "I Can't Explain," "My
Generation" and "Magic Bus" on Sunday night - but you probably won't hear
any bold new musical statements.

Pete Townshend summed up the tour recently by telling Newsday:"It's the kind
of thing that people do when they're retired, isn't it - they go on a cruise
with their golf clubs or something."

That said, don't expect to see a geriatric-looking Pete Townshend shuffling
around onstage Sunday night. The self-deprecating guitarist is famous for
saying one thing, then going out of his way to contradict himself.

In 1989, for example, he announced he was permanently switching from
electric to acoustic guitar because his ears could no longer handle the
decibels. But now "he's changed his mind and rediscovered the electric
guitar and he's back to winging it like he did in the '60s," Mr. Daltrey
says. "When you see him do it again, and it's mind-blowing . . . This piece
of wood with six strings on it suddenly gains a life of its own and comes
alive in the hands of this man. It's just extraordinary to see it.

"I said, 'Pete - you should never stop doing this, because this is what Jimi
Hendrix copied.' People forget that. Hendrix was the ultimate guitarist and
he was [expletive] incredible, but all that banging of the amplifiers and
the feedback stuff and all that was totally nicked from Townshend."

Aside from being the Who's lead guitarist, Mr. Townshend is also the band's
primary songwriter and the one responsible for putting Who songs into recent
TV ads for Nissan Maxima ("Won't Get Fooled Again"), Dell Computers ("Magic
Bus") and Gateway Computers ("Who Are You").

At first, Mr. Daltrey distances himself from the slew of Who-fueled ads: "I
have no say in that," he says curtly.

But prod him a bit and he will say he doesn't grasp why some listeners get
so irate when their favorite song becomes an advertising jingle.

"I really don't understand it [because] I don't associate the music with the
product. Music for me sits somewhere else," he says, adding that as long as
a song gets heard, the medium doesn't matter.

"In the '60s and '70s, you knew exactly where to find the music. There were
only a few FM radio stations or TV slots and four or five rock 'n' roll
mags. Now with it so spread [out], I think any way you can get the music
heard is valid."

The "sellout" question has long dogged the Who - a band which, ironically,
had once mocked the commercialization of rock with its 1967 album, The Who
Sell Out.

Unlike a lot of its '60s peers, the group set out to prove that rock 'n'
roll wasn't just another disposable commodity. Albums like Who's Next,
Quadrophenia and the rock opera Tommy were thought-provoking portraits of
the human psyche that helped blur the line between rock 'n' roll and art.

But even though the Who fought to get people to take rock more seriously in
the '60s and '70s, the band was blasted in the '80s and '90s for cheapening
rock with corporate tour sponsors and nostalgia-minded greatest-hits tours.
"There seems to be a different expectation from the Who than there is from
other bands. If we did half the things the Stones do - and charged the
ticket prices they charged - we'd get absolutely crucified," Mr. Daltrey
says.

"And I don't know why the expectations are so different. . . . Maybe because
we were pretty pretentious in the early days," he says, laughing.

"But I just think that now, sometimes people take it all a bit too seriously
and forget that we're just a rock 'n' roll band. The music's there to be
enjoyed and to have a good time to, and that's what we're doing on this
tour."
By Thor Christensen
© 2000 The Dallas Morning News

        -Brian in Atlanta
         The Who This Month!
        http://members.home.net/cadyb/who.htm