Roger interview from the Cleveland Plain-Dealer

["Brian Cady" <cadyb@home.com>]

Thanks to David Allen for pointing this out.
Available on line at:
http://www.cleveland.com/music/index.ssf?/music/features/0929who.html

Never say never

18 years after their 'last' tour, and with Ringo's kid on drums, the Who
return to the concert stage

Friday, September 29, 2000

By JOHN SOEDER
PLAIN DEALER POP MUSIC CRITIC

Roger Daltrey can't explain why the Who has come out of semi-retirement for
yet another tour. Or can he?

"We just decided life's too bloody short," said the lead singer for the
legendary British rock 'n' roll band, speaking by phone from his home in
Sussex, England, before the Who hit the road this summer. The group
headlines Gund Arena tomorrow.

"We're having a lot of fun playing our music," he said. "We enjoy doing it."

For those keeping score, this is the Who's third post-farewell tour.
Daltrey, guitarist Pete Townshend, bassist John Entwistle and then-drummer
Kenney Jones mounted what was promoted as their "last" tour in 1982.

"We never, ever said it was forever," said Daltrey, 56. "We just said we
were going to stop touring. And we did."

For a while, anyway. The Who (minus Jones) was back on the concert trail in
1989 for a 25th anniversary outing that found these Rock and Roll Hall of
Famers performing the rock opera "Tommy" in its entirety. Seven years later,
they returned to the road to re-create another high-concept opus,
"Quadrophenia," from start to finish.

"Before we did the '82 tour, we'd been on the road for two-and-a-half
years," Daltrey said. "We were getting sick of it. ... In that sense, it was
a farewell tour. But you never say farewell to a band. That would be, uh,
stupid. I never, ever said that.

"At the moment, we really feel like being in a band, a small band like when
we started out, without all the embellishments that we had from '82 on,
really."

Accompanying mainstays Daltrey, Townshend and Entwistle this time around are
longtime touring keyboardist John "Rabbit" Bundrick and drummer Zak Starkey,
Ringo Starr's son.

To hear Daltrey tell it, the Who sounds as intense as it did during its
equipment-smashing, hotel-trashing prime in the '60s and '70s. "The band
hasn't been this raw since Keith died," he said.

Drummer Keith Moon died of a drug overdose in 1978. He was replaced by
Jones, formerly of the Small Faces, for the Who's final studio efforts,
"Face Dances" (1981) and "It's Hard" (1982).

"Kenney Jones, although he's a great drummer, was never the right drummer
for the Who," said Daltrey. "With Zak on the drums now, we can get back a
lot of fire that has been missing for so long in the band. His style is very
similar to Keith's. Obviously, (Starkey) can't make up for (Moon's)
personality and the humor. But if you close your eyes, it's so similar
musically, it's uncanny. It's eerie. It probably has something to do with
Moon teaching (Starkey) to drum in the first place, I suppose."

Daltrey said his voice is "good as ever." He still swings his microphone
like a lariat onstage, too.

"Why not?" he said. "Should I just stand there like (motionless Oasis
vocalist) Liam Gallagher? No, thank you."

On the side, he continues to pursue an acting career. Daltrey recently
landed a small part as the king of Hungary in a forthcoming film about Vlad
Dracula, the real-life Romanian prince who was the inspiration for Bram
Stoker's "Dracula" novel.

Middle age may not have mellowed the Who much. But the relationship between
Daltrey and Townshend, the band's chief songwriter, has become less
volatile. They fought often during the Who's heyday, sometimes coming to
blows.

"Our relationship has developed so much, even in the last five years,"
Daltrey said. "We found that we really missed each other.

"I missed the camaraderie of the band. We're really going back to our roots
now. ... We share dressing rooms. We have fun. Those are the bits of being
in a band that we're rediscovering and enjoying a lot. I think we owe it to
ourselves to do that."

If Daltrey has his way, the Who will road-test some new material, although
he said there are no firm plans to record another studio album.

"I've written about four (or) five new songs," Daltrey said. "I have three
that would potentially make good Who songs."

One of the tunes, "Crossroads Now," grew out of a jam in the middle of a
9-minute version of "My Generation" found on "The Blues to the Bush," a live
double album recorded last year in Chicago and London. It's available
exclusively on the Internet at:

http://www.musicmaker.com

"I'm hoping we can come to grips with some of this work in progress on the
road," said Daltrey. "That's where all our best stuff came from in the past.
People who have followed our career will remember germinations of songs
happening onstage that would appear on our next album as complete songs.

"If we create anything new, we want to make the music organically. ... If
things happen anywhere, we want them to happen on the road."

E-mail: jsoeder@plaind.com
Phone: (216) 999-4562
©2000 THE PLAIN DEALER.

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