![]() He and bassist John Entwistle, who died a year ago last month, left the Who’s preening and higher artistic ambitions to Townshend and drummer Keith Moon (who died in 1978). Although he puffed out his chest and swung his microphone in sync with guitarist Pete Townshend’s string-breaking windmills, although he still wears that knowing smirk when, during “Baba O’Reilly,” he looks out on the crowd and pronounces it a “teenage wasteland,” Daltrey always was unpretentious. For an unwillingness to show off or speak too much about himself has always marked this Hammersmith laborer’s personal style. “They were extraordinary people, these explorers.”īut Daltrey is just being modest or, as he would put it, unpretentious. wooden boat!” says Daltrey, who splits his time between Los Angeles and England, where his wife and eight children and eight grandchildren live. In the latest segment, they paddle up the Colorado River in a 19th century-style wooden boat a la John Wesley Powell. To participate, he took a break from “Extreme History,” a History Channel series he’s hosting in which he and a camera crew revisit the exploits of adventurers through the ages. His agent suggested him for the part in late May - Daltrey says he auditioned the Bowl people say the part was his for the taking - and before he knew it, Daltrey was aboard, only eight weeks prior to show time. Doolittle, the drunken London dustman and moralist, in a one-night-only performance Sunday of Lerner and Loewe’s 1956 musical at the Hollywood Bowl. Of the musical itself he adds, “I love the music and I love the writing.”ĭaltrey will play Alfred P. days! That’s dangerous! That’s when you’re most alive,” he says, during a break from rehearsal last Saturday. And no, the song’s lyrics - “There’s just a few more hours / That’s all the time you’ve got” - don’t strike him as particularly weighty, given his age. That he happens to be rehearsing “Get Me to the Church on Time,” a number from “My Fair Lady,” is, Daltrey insists, nothing to be surprised about. And at 59, Daltrey, who in the era-making Who anthem “My Generation” once stuttered “Ho-ho-hope I die before I get old,” seems in better physical shape than most of the men in their 20s dancing behind him. His neck muscles still bulge and his blue eyes scream. He’s still every inch the musician, giddy one moment, sullen the next, though he never appears ready to ram a snare drum through the wall. In Burbank, Daltrey still is wearing his tight jeans and a dirty shirt (or at least a shirt made to look dirty) and cursing like a London metalworker, which is what he happened to be before he became a rock star in the mid-1960s. The once and future frontman for the Who and a bona fide rock demigod, Daltrey seems only slightly dulled from that summer 34 years ago when he belted out “I Can See for Miles” at a little concert called Woodstock and permanently redefined the way rock singers were supposed to work. Stomping and strutting like a peacock around a rehearsal space on a shabby corner in Burbank, Roger Daltrey looks like nothing less than the eternal youth of rock ‘n’ roll embodied.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |