Moon lived and played in a state of exuberant torment. … It just took things up to the next level. It’s all mathematics, isn’t it, drumming, but his mathematics were from another planet. He joins the band for a version of Bo Diddley’s “Road Runner”: “Halfway through, he started to do his syncopations. … They were flash chords and he knew it.”) And then, during a show at the Oldfield Hotel in Greenford, “ginger-topped after a failed attempt to go Beach Boy blond,” Keith Moon arrives. (“He knew all these clever chords that were diminished, missing thirds here, adding sevenths there, all strange shapes. A few months later they auditioned a kid they had seen around school, a tall boy with an “impressive sneezer”: Townshend. Daltrey and Entwistle connected first, in the summer of 1961. The singer, as noted, was a species of turbo ventriloquist the guitarist, the brainiac, drove the thing forward with massive, slashing chords and the rhythm section was composed of two uncontrollable soloists: the prolific John Entwistle, whose bass offered arch intra-musical commentary at heavy metal volume, endlessly raising its eyebrows and doodling in the margins, and on drums the feast of acceleration, the rampage of allegro agitato, that was Keith Moon, stampeding ahead of his tics like a character in a fairy tale. The dynamics of the Who were uniquely molten. I walked out of school and I went home, feeling completely empty.” Later, he would know what to do with that space inside him - but not yet. I looked ahead … I had years of this to go. “It was break time and I was in the playground, alone, trying to look busy, trying not to look alone. Horses for courses.”) As a boy he got in a lot of fights, cultivated “a kind of rabbit sensitivity,” suffered from an infected facial fracture that left him magically anesthetized - “after the jaw got better, I never felt any pain when someone punched me in the face” - and was the victim of some serious bullying. (On his unreadiness for math: “Algebra? Trigonometry? Sin, cos, tan and all that stuff? Do me a favor. That’s what we grew up with.” The Daltrey style, as you can see, is short-fingered and London-inflected. I’m sure he was shellshocked for the rest of his life.” The men of his father’s generation, Daltrey writes, were “knackered”: “They were strangers in their own homes. … My dad just wanted quiet and that never changed. …” Daltrey’s father did come home: “He was a gentle man, but kind of empty. “Captain Walker didn’t come home / His unborn child will never know him. Kibblewhite” begins where the Who’s rock opera “Tommy” begins: in grayness, in the muffled trauma of post-World War II England. “Empathy, that’s the root of it all,” he writes at the end of his book. Kibblewhite”: the long arc of life-learning whereby a working-class brawler, a delinquent tea boy in a sheet metal factory, discovers within himself the psychic-emotional circuitry to conduct some of the rarest electricity in rock ’n’ roll. So this is the hero’s journey of “Thanks a Lot, Mr. Vibrations by Townshend, fibers by Daltrey. And yet, without Daltrey’s prowess and powers of interpretation, his nervous capacity, no Who. Is he a frontman or a sideman? He’s written virtually no Who lyrics, composed virtually no Who music, and in his various Who phases - long-jawed hard-nut mod sneerer, psychedelic crooner/teaser, bare-chested super-rock blusterer - he has essentially enacted the visions and mood swings of the band’s prodigious guitarist and songwriter, Pete Townshend. Same thing, at this distance.ĭaltrey has been singing for the Who since 1964. Sixty years later, with the title of his new memoir, Daltrey offers a tip of the hat. Kibblewhite, nemesis-like, as he expels 15-year-old Roger Daltrey from Acton County Grammar in West London. “You’ll never make anything of your life, Daltrey,” promises Mr. God bless the evil headmasters: the deformers, the belittlers, the squashers of dreams, the ones who leave their oppressed subjects in such a condition of churning anonymous rage that the only possible remedy, post-school, is greatness. KIBBLEWHITE My Story By Roger Daltrey Illustrated.
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