It might be hard to believe, but back in their early career, Slipknot once supported a jazz band in their hometown of Des Moines, Iowa. Recalling the incident, singer Corey Taylor said the jazz musicians “were so stunned with the madness” emanating from Slipknot’s brand of masked metal.
At least that’s how the frontman remembered it to BBC Radio 1’s Daniel P. Carter during a recent interview picked up by NME. But while the jazz group may have been shocked by Slipknot’s presence, the two bands had no problem hashing it out when it came to the nitty-gritty of tour life. Listen to some of the interview — a joint chat with Beartooth‘s Caleb Shomo — down toward the bottom of this post.
“It was a gig-trade because [founding Slipknot percussionist] Clown owned a bar in Des Moines,” Taylor explained. “They all, like, stared at us like we had shit in our hands and had thrown it at them. They were so stunned with the madness. And then driving home, both vans broke down in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of winter. So some of us stayed, some of us walked to call a tow truck. That’s what you did.”
The Slipknot vocalist continued, “And I can remember constructing cardboard ventilation for the heater just to get some back. We all huddled our gear as close as we can to this weird cardboard ventilation system — it was brutal. And then having to get up the next day and go to work.”
The jazz ensemble in question goes unnamed by Taylor. But talk about a memorable tale. Imagine showing up for a gig in Iowa, and finding out your show hosts are none other than members of Slipknot!
Presumably, the metal act won’t need any makeshift cardboard ventilation when it sails the high seas for the inaugural Knotfest at Sea cruise, scheduled to cast off next summer, Aug. 10-14.
Eighty years ago today, Anne Mae Bullock was born in Nutbush, Tennessee. The daughter of a poor farm worker, Bullock moved around the country a lot in her early years, eventually winding up in St. Louis where she met a charismatic bandleader named Ike Turner in 1957. He invited her to join his group, changed her name to Tina, and eventually married her.
The horrific physical and emotional abuse she endured during her two-decade relationship with Ike has been documented in several books and the 1993 biopic What’s Love Got to Do With It. But as Rob Sheffield points out in his essay commemorating her 80th birthday, she managed to launch an incredible solo career in the Eighties. Against all odds, she enjoyed enormous success even though she was a good two decades older than most everyone else in the pop world.
Tina Turner’s tours after the release of Private Dancer in 1984 packed stadiums all across the world, especially in Europe. She launched a farewell tour in 2000 that truly seemed like the end of her live career, but in 2008 she went back out at the age of 69 to celebrate her 50th anniversary in music. It was a show that would have exhausted someone half her age, but Turner got through 90 shows and amazed every single night.
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The run wrapped up May 5th, 2009, at the Sheffield Arena in Sheffield, England. Like every show on the tour, that concert featured a cross-section of songs from her entire career, including “Proud Mary,” “River Deep, Mountain High,” “Goldeneye,” and “Private Dancer.” She finished off the night with the relatively obscure “Be Tender With Me Baby” from her 1990 LP Foreign Affair. Here’s video of the big moment captured by a fan in the audience.
In the years following this tour, Turner survived a brutal bout of intestinal cancer and kidney failure. She survived the latter ailment because her husband, Erwin Bach, gave her one of his kidneys, and she’s currently thriving. Another tour, however, remains very hard to imagine. But with everything this woman has survived, it’s impossible to totally rule it out. If anyone on this planet can strap on high heels in their eighties and hit the road, it’s her.
James Taylor told us he was a “handy man” way back when, but his Twitter is the ultimate reminder. His “Handy Man” fix-it posts are rife with important lessons and tricks.
Although the singer-songwriter uses the account for professional purposes — like announcing upcoming performances and hinting at new music — his tweets can also be lighthearted and humorous. He excels at hashtags (see his photos of his adorable pug, festooned with #puglife) and hilarious photos that read “Caption this!”
Most important are his fix-it posts, because, after all, he’s not the kind that uses pencil or rule. Most of the videos are shot at TheBarn, Taylor’s home studio in Western Massachusetts — where he’s currently recording his upcoming audio memoir. From making buttons out of pennies to inventing tools for callouses, here are five practical lessons we learned from his Twitter.
1. He vastly improved the boot jack. Taylor gives a modern update to the boot jack, a device that’s used to remove the shoe by the heel. He lines it with speaker cable for a better grip — and also to prevent tearing the boot.
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2. He invented a callous tool. Every guitar player needs to keep their callouses in shape. Taylor made the ultimate DIY tool by drilling old guitar strings against a piece of wood. It’s especially helpful for new guitarists, who build stronger callouses with time. “You keep it in your pocket,” Taylor advises. “Work on your thing!”
3. He’s partial to an extreme flashlight. Taylor sheds more than a little light with a ginormous flashlight. He explains his co-manager Michael Gorfaine’s quest to find the flashlight with the largest amount of lumens, and sends Taylor one with a whopping 100,000. It even comes with its own cooling system. “What is it used for?” Taylor asks the camera, before testing the device on his driveway at night. “Aircraft carrier landings, football games, forcing trees to go into bloom…I think he’s outdone himself now!”
5. He crafts the perfect setlist — literally. Taylor constructs his setlists with an industrial paper cutter. He arranges individual cards with his songs on them and puts them on a wall. Famous tracks like “Mexico,” “Steamroller” and “If I Keep My Heart Out of Sight” can be seen in the clip.
“I never settle for anything but complete success or, in this case, victory,” artist says of his diagnosis and his planned return to the stage this winter
On a late Monday afternoon, Dave Mustaine is feeling good at his Tennessee home. His neighbors’ cows are mooing at each other — loudly — and when he gets on the phone with Rolling Stone, he reports, “I’m just dealing with life.”
In May, the Megadeth frontman was diagnosed with cancer and needed to step away from the spotlight. The band subsequently canceled all of its 2019 touring plans, including an appearance on their own MegaCruise, and the outspoken Mustaine stayed uncharacteristically quiet for most of the year. Still, doctors told Mustaine upon his diagnosis that they hoped for a 90 percent success rate.
In September, he released a statement saying he was almost done with his final round of treatment and that his physicians remained positive. Now that he has been through what he says was the worst of it and will be reuniting with his Megadeth bandmates for their upcoming winter trek through Europe with Five Finger Death Punch, he’s ready to tell his story.
“I’m on the other side of the majority of the treatment, and I feel really strong,” he says. “After the radiation, the guy said all of my test results looked amazing. ‘You look like you’re in a stage 1 and you’re supposed to be in stage 3 right now.’ And then the oncologist said the same thing: ‘You look really strong.’ So we kept moving through the process.”
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Mustaine says he’s had two bad days since his diagnosis. And even though he’s not officially in remission, he recently finished the necessary treatment and has started rehabilitation. Mustaine’s ordeal made the band pause work on their new album (they’re planning on releasing a few new songs in advance of the tour), but at the moment he’s most looking forward to getting back on the road. “I’m so excited,” he says of the upcoming tour, “and I can’t wait to fire up my guitars.”
But that should be no surprise, coming from the man who wrote vicious declarations of perseverance like “Peace Sells,” “Victory,” and “Holy Wars … the Punishment Due.” “I figured, I’m not gonna let this beat me,” he says without a hint of worry in his voice. “I’m not gonna let this even scare me.”
How did you find out you had cancer? I was on tour, and I just had some dental work done when I was at home. My teeth are really, really, really sensitive, because I’m a redhead. When I had a temporary crown replaced with a permanent one, I told the dentist, “It feels like they broke off one of those little pointy tools in my gum.” It just felt like something was wrong in my tooth area. So the dentist goes, “Well, you should go see an oral surgeon.”
So I see the oral surgeon, and he was such a cock. I was in the chair, and he looks at me and then he takes off. And I’m sitting there, and I’m waiting and waiting and waiting, and he comes back in and he goes, “It looks like the Big C. You need to go see an ear, nose, and throat doctor.” I was just stunned with his bedside manner; he was just such a dick. So I went out into my car and I was obviously very upset. And then I went back out on to the Experience Hendrix tour.
“I thought about every single trick that I had learned about healing my body.”
The friend of a guy I have an endorsement deal with is an ER guy, and he came out on tour to look at my throat. And he goes, “Oh, I see this 20 times a day. There’s nothing there. Just get it checked out when you get home.” And I went, “Thank God.” So I went and played the Hendrix stuff. I was having a blast. So when we were playing Florida, we go see an ENT and get checked out. Two weeks go by. I thought, “No news is good news, right?” So I finally get him on the phone, and he goes, “Oh, yeah. You have cancer.”
How did you handle the news? I went, “Fuck.” And I thought, “OK, Mustaine. You can do this.” And we commenced kicking this thing’s ass. I thought about every single trick that I had learned about healing my body and the things I’d learned from martial arts, and I did everything that the doctor said to a T, and hopefully this is the end of it and I never hear of it again. But I feel great.
So you got cleared to tour? Well, they didn’t say that. But they’re freaking out over how well I’ve healed. I’ve got people around the globe praying for me. I take good care of myself, and I don’t know how anybody can expect any other outcome than this, knowing me. I never settle for anything but complete success or, in this case, victory.
What specifically did you learn from touring and martial arts to help you through this? I’ve always been physically active and interested in martial arts. The key for us is not to get better once we get sick; it’s to not get sick. Eastern medication, treatment, and philosophy is to prevent stuff from happening, whereas the Western approach to deal with it after it happened. So when the doctor was telling me what happened, they were freaking out, telling me all the stuff that could go wrong. “If you don’t eat, we’re going to have to give you a feeding tube. And if you don’t do this, we’re going to have to chop your head off and blah, blah, blah.” All right, I’ll do it, I’ll do it.
They said, “You have to keep weight on.” I think I had two-and-a-half days of nonstop, all day long, being sick. And I went to get weighed. My normal weight was anywhere from 185 to 190 and I’m at 171. And they’re freaking. “What’s happened? Are you sick?” “Yeah, I felt kind of sick.” I went home and I figured, “All right. I feel better now.” I just did my normal routine. I went back there, I was back to 185. They go, “How’d you put on so much weight?” I said, “I ate.”
I wasn’t trying to be like, “Oh, boohoo.” The last thing I wanted to do was go in there and be a puss. All the stuff I’ve gone through in my life has gotten me prepared to face anything. Even this.
Did you ever find out the cause of the cancer? They don’t know what the actual cause is. They know what kind of cancer it is. It’s a squamous cell carcinoma on the base of my tongue. It’s a tumor that you get in your mouth, and it had gone from one side of my mouth, and it had also gone to two lymph nodes. So it was pretty serious.
The diagnosis made me really aware of the little kids that get this disease. When I was in San Diego, I went down to the children’s hospital with the Navy down there, because I was really involved in doing charity work when I could down in San Diego. And I’ll tell you, when you see it, you see the people that have that disease, it’s scary.
“All the stuff I’ve gone through in my life has gotten me prepared to face anything. Even this.”
Did your faith help you keep a positive mindset? I don’t want to joke around about this, but you’ve seen everything Kanye’s doing right now with his message [releasing the album Jesus Is King]. For me, I think it’s great that he’s doing that. I’ve been praying for a long time, and when this whole thing went down, I prayed a lot. I don’t force it on anybody; I never would do that. But I prayed about it, and I believe that that was the whole reason I got healed so fast. A lot of people’s asses are probably going to grow together right now that I said this, but the truth of the matter is, everybody has their own things that they believe. And I believe that taking good care of myself and being physically fit, as well as spiritually fit, got me back to this point.
Who supported you through this? My family, especially my wife, is such a rock to lean on. It’s the greatest thing. If I have something that’s going wrong with me, I can turn to my family.
When you announced your diagnosis, there was an incredible outpouring from your fans and peers. That had to have felt good. It did. It came as quite a surprise. A lot came from people that I knew but I didn’t know cared. Most notably, I got a text message back from my old brother, James Hetfield, and I was so, so happy to hear from him. Contrary to what anybody says and contrary to any of the act that we put on, I love James and I know that James loves me and cares about me. You can see that when the moment of truth is here and I’m telling the world that I’ve got a life-threatening disease. Who comes to stand next to me? James.
And I got a text message from Ozzy, and one from Paul Stanley. It was great to get one from Ozzy; I didn’t expect it from Paul Stanley. That was super bitchin’ because in the beginning, when Kiss first came out, I was just a kid and I loved them.
I’m really grateful for everybody. Even the people who have a hard time with my behavior and my big mouth, I’m just so grateful for them showing care for me. Like they say, at the end of the day, all we’ve got is each other here in this crazy metal community.
Yeah, the encouragement, especially from your fans, was overwhelming. I am so extremely grateful, and I don’t know how to ever really make it up to everybody helping me get through this. I would love to say, “Everybody who sent me a tweet, come to a free concert.” But that just seems so trivial. I would love to tell them face-to-face, “Thank you. I love you. You helped me get through this,” and give them a hug. But even that, too, just seem so short and insensitive.
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I honestly want to say, “Come here. Sit down. Put your pajamas on. Let’s watch TV for a little while, and I’ll tell you all about it.” But I think some of the people would say, “OK, Dave. I’m a 30-year-old guy, and I’m not gonna put my pajamas on and get in bed with you.” I didn’t mean that, I meant, “Let’s sit on the couch with a blanket and we can eat popcorn.” Don’t get weird on me or anything.
Dave Mustaine in 2018. Photo credit: Chiaki Nozu/WireImage
It could be a campfire party. Yeah, get some s’mores and some flashlights and goofy stuff like that.
Was it hard for you to miss your band’s MegaCruise? I was so disappointed that my condition had caused me not to be well enough to go. But my red blood cell count was down, and all it would take is one wrong guy that was sick with something – some dude that may have a flare-up of something that he had in the past – and that could be the end of my singing days. So it was so difficult to say, “I’m not gonna come on the cruise,” but I knew that the fans would understand, and they rallied around me in such an incredible way.
We got a [cover band] from Canada called Mechanix who did Megadeth songs, and we had some of the fans sing karaoke with that band. I even think Junior [Megadeth bassist David Ellefson] did one of the songs with them. But it was a tremendous success, and I think that everybody had a famously good time. I’m thinking, “You had a great time, this time; imagine what it’s going to be next time, and I’m there, and we get to have fun and throw down and I get to tell you all the crazy stories and we get to rub elbows and shake hands and all that good stuff.”
Are you going to have to live your life differently now on the road? I might have to. I know that there have been some changes that have been made right now that are going to change things for me. I hope that the fans realize that if I’ve had to modify anything, it’s only so I can keep doing my job. It would never be to do anything shitty like some of these other groups out there.
What do you mean? You see all this stuff with more lip-syncing and I keep thinking to myself, “Aren’t you ever gonna learn?” These guys just go, “Oh, it’s very demanding to go out there and dance.” Well, then lift some weights, you slob. If you’re a pristine athlete and you can dance and sing at the same time, then you deserve that multimillion-dollar, high-priced ticket. If you can’t, then don’t go and cheat the fans and complain like, “Poor me, I’m up here getting paid so much money to dance and not sing and be a phony.”
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“I hope that the fans realize that if I’ve had to modify anything, it’s only so I can keep doing my job.”
Have you started singing yet? No, I didn’t sing yet. I spoke with Bruce [Dickinson] from Iron Maiden, and he said when he had his disease [a cancerous tumor on the back of his tongue], after his treatment was done, he was told that he needed between three to six months of rest. He said to me that he didn’t listen and had a little bit of trouble, so then he realized he needed to listen. So he did and his voice came back stronger than ever. I care so much about Bruce; he was another really supportive brother to me during this whole thing. He explained to me how he did it, and it really helped. I’m just looking forward to if there’s ever a circumstance where this happens to another one of my peers, I can return the favor and help them. It’s a tricky disease, but they’ve got doctors all over the place that are figuring this shit out.
Do you view your next tour as a victory lap? I don’t know so much that we would go out and do a victory lap. Without sounding like I’m faking humility, I think it’s a bit pious to go, “Hi, I made it. Here I am. Thanks. I’m so glad I’m here to save the day for you.” Because there are gonna be a lot of people who go, “God, I thought we got rid of you.” As gnarly as that sounds …
Has it been strange for you to see bands like your peers in Slayer doing retirement tours, when you just want to keep going? No. It doesn’t make me feel weird so much. But I’ve seen some of these bands that have been on retirement tours for 20 years. It just kind of becomes a joke. If you’re on a retirement tour and you make it five years long and you come out of retirement and go back into retirement and so on and so forth, you stand the risk of being fileted by the fans. If they go out and buy a bunch of your merchandise and your swag because they think they’re never gonna see you again, and then you say, “Oh, by the way, I changed my mind,” be prepared to face their wrath.
Mötley Crüe just announced they were coming back, so it will be interesting seeing their fans’ reaction. No, they didn’t. No, they did not. I knew it. I knew it. I knew it. I fuckin’ knew it. Gosh. I can’t believe that. OK. Next question.
“There’s no way I’m gonna act like I can’t do this. I can do anything if I set my mind to it.”
You sold a lot of guitars recently, and one man bought them all. What did you make of that? It’s pretty commendable. I’m willing, if I ever meet him, to sign them for him.
He said he was going to have them so people could play them. He’s not just hoarding them. That’s good. There were 140 items at that place, and I think they sold everything except for 15 things the first day. It was an enormous success.
So what have you been doing to keep your mind busy through all of this? We were planning on making a new record, but because of the cancer visiting our camp, we’ve had to recalibrate things. The management had suggested we record a few songs prior to going out with the Five Finger Death Punch guys. They had suggested we record three songs as “early offerings.” The other thing, too, is I’ve been going over my new book with my cowriter Joel Selvin. We’re talking about the making of Rust in Peace. So I’m reliving that and listening to the music. So right now, I’m bleeding Rust in Peace. That’s one of the reasons why I can’t wait to get ahold of my guitar because I’m just so excited and so thrilled that I’ve got this adrenaline stuff that’s going on right now like crazy. I just finished the part in the book where I started doing the whole skydiving, and I don’t know if you’ve ever skydived, but what a fun thing to do. What a rush.
It sounds like your head really is in a good space right now. I’m not letting the cancer get me down. I have to thank the fans and obviously my family and God but there was no way I was going to let this take me down. When [Black Sabbath guitarist] Tony Iommi got cancer, I thought, “Oh, my God, he’s gonna die.” And I actually cried. I wept, because they had said it was stage 4 cancer. And then, when I got it, I thought, “Oh, my God. I’m gonna die.” Because I didn’t know how bad it was. I thought of the fans and how sad everybody was gonna be. And I thought, “I have to beat this.” No matter what, there’s no way I’m gonna act like I can’t do this. I can do anything if I set my mind to it.
Are you looking at life differently now? Hmmm. I guess I could if I wanted to. I’m not doing that, though. I think it’s real easy to play a victim. Because people go, [cloyingly] “Oh, how are you? How are you doing?” And I feel like sometimes I should go, [using the same tone] “Oh, I’m really good. How are you?” with the same kind of sound as “Are you gonna die?” I’ve tried to stay upbeat about it.
Somewhere inside every album Beck has made since Mellow Gold — his 1994 surprise attack of slippery irony and hip-hop bravado — is the solo folk-blues singer caught on that year’s One Foot in the Grave, writing about despair with a surrealist edge while turned toward hope. That is the Beck who jumps out here in “Saw Lightning,” in looping spasms of acoustic, skidding Delta slide guitar.
Most of the song’s apocalypse comes in contemporary kicks. Beck sings of great fire and flooding, praying for rescue in a strident android’s tone — like Skip James in Auto-Tune — and overdubbed layers of galactic doo-wop. Pharrell Williams, Beck’s chief accomplice on Hyperspace, drums in martial-funk time and speed raps like a digital assistant in a rush. But that seesaw of antique blues and modern artifice sums up this album’s perfect storm — the raw fear of time running out and darkness closing in, rendered in pop beats and colors. In songs like “Die Waiting” and “Dark Places” (the titles tell you plenty), Beck combines the exuberant studio mischief of 1996’s Midnite Vultures with the sumptuous introspection of 2002’s Sea Change to eccentric, genuinely compelling effect.
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While Beck started as a lone ranger on the anti-folk circuit, his records are typically collaborative affairs. He shared writing credits on Odelay with the Dust Brothers, his co-producers, and on 2017’s Colors with multi-instrumentalist Greg Kurstin. Williams is just as embedded on Hyperspace as co-producer, co-writer, and musician on seven tracks. The hip-hop auteur plays the totally Eighties synth sounds that frame the fleeting satisfaction in “Chemical” (“Found a love, just a fantasy/Beautiful and ugly as a night could be”), and it’s a good bet that Williams is responsible for the otherworldly gauze on Beck’s voice in “Uneventful Days,” which is like David Bowie’s Major Tom checking in from distant orbit.
Beck spreads the work around. Kurstin returns for “See Through” (with weirdly playful vocal choreography suggesting a boy band trapped underwater). Adele veteran Paul Epworth and producer Cole M.G.N., who worked on the Colors hit “Wow,” chip in too. But Beck, for all of his vigor for partnership, is a solitary classicist, a singer-songwriter wrestling with the dynamics of desire and emotional commitment. Hyperspace is grounded in that realism. The keyboards in “Chemical” may sound like they’re on loan from Vangelis, but the acoustic jangle and finger-snap percussion bring the song to Earth. “Die Waiting” is starlit folk rock with a campfire-siren cameo by Sky Ferreira, and “Stratosphere” (featuring Coldplay’s Chris Martin) is practically garage rock: rough strumming in a plaintive glow.
In “Everlasting Nothing,” Beck is back in space with Williams. It’s a finale of echo and choir but a blues all the same. “Friends I’ve known/Come and gone…. Still I’ll try/To get back home,” Beck promises like a man with one foot in the grave but the other still on the road to another day.
They bicker. They stay in separate hotels and record without ever being in the same room. But Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend can still conjure old magic
Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend have known each other for 60 years. They love each other. “I used to say that I love him, but with my fingers crossed,” says Townshend of Daltrey. Townshend, gangly and hunched, his angular face having grown into his long nose, sits in a Dallas Ritz-Carlton suite wearing gray clothes on a white-hot day. “Now, I like him too. I like all his eccentricities, his foibles, his self-obsession, and his singer thing. Everything about him.” Daltrey feels the same. He sits in a comfy chair later the same afternoon. “I’ve always kind of known Pete cares for me,” says Daltrey, crossing his legs in blue cargo shorts. He’s a little impatient because my time with Townshend ran long. “I hope he realizes I care about him. I think my actions through our career have shown that.”
Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend have known each other for 60 years. They tolerate each other.
Daltrey and Townshend have a new album, simply called Who. It’s only the second album from the band in 37 years. Through the magic of modern technology, Daltrey and Townshend recorded it earlier this year in London and Los Angeles without ever being in the same room. (Townshend says they were once in the same building. Daltrey isn’t so sure.) Townshend wrote and recorded demos and sent them to the singer. During recording, they communicated through their individual personal producers, both with the first name David, which must have been confusing.
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Separately, Daltrey and Townshend express excitement for the new songs. (Daltrey told me it’s the Who’s best work since Quadrophenia.) They’re back on the road, playing with a 48-piece orchestra. The refrain I heard from multiple learned attendants of the tour was “Wow, that show was way better than it had any right to be.”
The same can be said for the record. Daltrey’s weary vocals, particularly on the back half, are marvelous, and Townshend’s ability to write an anthemic earworm remains intact. It’s enough to make you regret all the music the two have not made together over the past 30 years.
But there is a reason for the long breaks. The two remain detached, if not estranged, from each other. Townshend, 74, is engaged in modern music and still capable of jackjawing a listener into submission about any subject from climate crisis to the shelf life of teen idols. Daltrey? At 75, he’s happy to churn out low-key solo albums and live offline on his country estate.
At a show in L.A., Daltrey chatted with a sound guy about his vocals while Townshend joked with bassist Jon Button. Whenever one of them hit the other’s magnetic field, they bounced away. They never made eye contact. It reminded me of when an ex-girlfriend and I worked together and made ostentatious attempts to avoid each other at holiday parties.
Things don’t change that much when the lights go up. “If you watch Roger onstage, he goes through a lot of visual phases,” says Townshend. “Sometimes, he can’t stop himself looking over at me. It’s irritation.” He arches his eyebrows. “It’s irritation that I’m even there.”
Daltrey is also unsatisfied. He wants to change the set list, maybe add some lesser-known songs, but says it is a no-go. “Pete doesn’t remember words much,” says Daltrey, “and he doesn’t remember chord shapes, and he finds it hard to change the show on the road.”
Later, Daltrey talks about the role he has played in Townshend’s songwriting. Since 1964, Townshend has been the band’s primary songwriter, and his creative dominance has tended to overshadow Daltrey’s contributions. Townshend might have been an editor at Faber & Faber, but Daltrey has been his editor. Well, according to Daltrey. On the new record, Daltrey toned down what he saw as irresponsible political rhetoric, deleted a rap, and changed pronouns. Now, I ask if he thinks he should have gotten more songwriting credits over the band’s half-century history. “I wrote all the ad-libs,” says Daltrey with a smile. “I should have, but I can’t be bothered to make a fuss about it now. It’s fucking bollocks.” Daltrey trails off. “If he needs the money…”
Daltrey and Townshend grew up in the same West London area, but Daltrey claims he’s hardscrabble while Townshend is a poseur. “Well, I’m Shepherd’s Bush, and he’s Ealing middle class,” says Daltrey. (Their homes were about 300 yards apart.) Sure, but what about Townshend’s solo song “White City Fighting,” talking about all the scrapes and bloodshed he got into as a kid? Daltrey smiles. “Well, he likes to think he did.”
On it goes.
“We ended up living parallel lives,” says Townshend. It’s true. Today, Roger Daltrey, for reasons unknown, has checked out of the Ritz-Carlton and moved to another five-star place 100 yards away. Now, a traffic light and a Shake Shack separate the two men.
I traveled to London, Dallas, and the Hollywood Bowl to see and talk with the Who. It gave me plenty of time to think about Townshend and Daltrey. One concept kept coming back to me in Economy Plus: They give zero fucks. This should not be mistaken for not giving a shit. They still share a devotion to their music and a caring for their careers that some rock-veterans-turned-Vegas-acts long ago abandoned.
But you have to be realistic. If you view their new album and tour as Daltrey & Townshend Play the Hits & a Couple of New Ones, their shows can be seen as a fuck-you to musical fashion and Father Time. If you see this as a continuation of the Who the way your teen self or your father knew them, you’re going to be disappointed.
Keith Moon, the band’s original drummer, died in 1978, and in the succeeding years the Who became less a creative enterprise and more a carnival of commerce, only accentuated after bassist John Entwistle’s death in a Vegas hotel room in 2002. There have been more farewell tours than new records.
Townshend says it best: “We’re not a band anymore. There’s a lot of people who don’t like it when I say it, but we’re just not a fucking band. Even when we were, I used to sit there thinking, ‘This is a fucking waste of time. Take 26 because Keith Moon has had one glass of brandy too many.’” You shouldn’t be sentimental. God knows Townshend is not.
Well, sometimes he is. Over the years, Townshend has lamented the long-gone Moon, and after Entwistle’s death, Townshend said, “Without him, I wouldn’t be here…. When I did look over and he wasn’t there, I wanted to die.”
Today, he’s feeling less charitable. The Who’s current shows feature two video screens full of vintage shots of mad, mad Moon and Entwistle in his bemused and haunting solitude. I asked Townshend if he ever got nostalgic looking up at the pictures of his fallen bandmates. He snorted like an old horse.
“It’s not going to make Who fans very happy, but thank God they’re gone.”
Because?
“Because they were fucking difficult to play with. They never, ever managed to create bands for themselves. I think my musical discipline, my musical efficiency as a rhythm player, held the band together.”
Townshend took on his bass player first. “John’s bass sound was like a Messiaen organ,” he says, waving his angular limbs. “Every note, every harmonic in the sky. When he passed away and I did the first few shows without him, with Pino [Palladino] on bass, he was playing without all that stuff…. I said, ‘Wow, I have a job.’?”
He was not finished. Moon is an easier target; he once passed out during a 1970s show in San Francisco, forcing the band to pull a drummer out of the crowd. “With Keith, my job was keeping time, because he didn’t do that,” says Townshend. “So when he passed away, it was like, ‘Oh, I don’t have to keep time anymore.’”
The word “happy” doesn’t really apply to someone as complex as Townshend. Yet there seems to be a sense of contentment brought on by his 20-year relationship with the composer Rachel Fuller. Still, he is fragile, and the death in July of his guitar tech of 40 years, Alan Rogan, left him in a bad place. (He described Rogan as “my guitar tech, friend, savior, and good buddy.”) “I was a fucking mess,” says Townshend. “Usually, I’m so unaffected by death. My mother, father, Keith Moon. Maybe because he was in a hospital bed and fighting back so hard. When he finally passed, I just thought, ‘Fuck.’”
He is alternately defiant and cheeky. I ask if he had left instructions on how to handle his voluminous archives and unfinished projects after he is gone. He leaned in close and quipped, “I’d really like to finish them.”
Townshend is a man who has suffered and has turned that suffering into great art. He was left by his mum to live with a mentally deteriorating grandma for two years. As a young boy, and then at around age 11, he was sexually abused. Seventy years later, he is still staring at the scars. His awakening has been incremental. During a rambling intro for the 1970 Live at Leeds version of “A Quick One, While He’s Away,” a song about a young girl molested by a train engineer, Townshend said, “John Entwistle plays the engine driver, and I play the Girl Guide.” It wasn’t a joke. Years later, Townshend admitted similar activities happened to him while in his grandmother’s care. “I’m not angry about it,” he says. “But I can’t process it. I did three years of serious therapy, and I’ve done loads of counseling and therapeutic work since.” It has helped, but not enough.
That ache has been processed through heartbreaking songs about maladjusted characters; namely the title character in Tommy and the Mod boy Jimmy in Quadrophenia. Still, Townshend’s ability to turn horror into magic doesn’t change his reality. He tells me about a friend who was kidnapped and sexually abused as a boy. A few years ago, the Who were doing a Tommy fundraiser show at London’s Royal Albert Hall. Townshend could see his friend in the front rows. When it came time for him to sing Tommy’s “The Acid Queen,” told from the viewpoint of a female abuser, he lost it. “I just blew the whole show,” remembers Townshend. “It’s on TV, you can see it. I look like I’m in pain.”
He’s hardly sung “Acid Queen” since. The lingering wounds have left Townshend a volatile mixture of empathy and cynicism. “Won’t Get Fooled Again” is an anthem against idealism that still drives him. Teen activist Greta Thunberg had been making the rounds when we talked, and he was troubled: “I worry that little Greta — I don’t want to patronize her, because she’s so fucking great — will be pretty pissed off.”
Onstage in September. The Who’s recent tour includes a 48-piece orchestra. Photograph by Devin Yalkin for Rolling Stone
Townshend relates her work to his involvement in the 1960s Ban the Bomb movement and how the Cuban missile crisis came and went and London was still there. It left Townshend wondering what the point was. “She says, ‘You stole my childhood.’ Actually, she’s stealing her childhood. That’s the thing, whether or not we steal our own childhoods by worrying too much about things that we can’t control.”
The endless whirring of Townshend’s brain has only gotten louder in the 25 years since he got sober. “What I know is that when I drank, I won’t say I was happy, but I certainly was unaware of the darkness that I was carrying,” he says.
Now he’s fully aware of the things that made him reach for the bottle. They could be incidents of abuse. They could be slights from his adolescence. “Living stone-cold sober, there’s no escape,” says Townshend.
Today, Townshend looks for nonalcoholic escapes. “It could be shopping. It could be time with my wife. We work together and have lots of fun.” Townshend pauses, and it seems like he worries that his “escapes” sound banal. He mentions an escape might happen when a beautiful woman mentions she liked a show.
“There’s that moment when you just think you’re young again,” he says. “That fantasy.” He becomes more animated, and his blue eyes light up. “Or embracing darkness. Thinking, ‘God, it would be such fun if I just fucking killed myself now. We’ve got Wembley Stadium tomorrow — God, it would just be so fucking great.’”
He pauses for a moment as if startled he said that last thought aloud. He wondered later, “I find sometimes I’ll be saying things and I think, ‘Do I really feel that, or is my mouth just fucking with me?’”
Roger Daltrey doesn’t dwell in the darkness. Well, except if you bring up Brexit. He then will rhapsodize about the gangsters in Europe ruining merrie olde England and how the Germans have an ironclad grip on the Euro.
Daltrey insists he’s been misunderstood all these years. This is sort of his fault for projecting an image of a West London bantam tough who once knocked Townshend out in the early 1970s with a single punch (Townshend started it). “I come across as kind of a hard nut,” says Daltrey, near a whisper. “But people got it backwards. I’m not. I’m a softy. I’m the softest person in the world.”
Daltrey was the only member of the Who to not abuse drugs, and that left him the grown-up in the band, drawing up set lists and making sure the trains ran on time. I ask if he ever grew tired of being chaperone to three very naughty boys. “I still am!” he says. “It always has been ‘Pete does the album, but don’t expect him to put the tour together,’ right? That’s always on my lap. It has all worked out very well. So I’m happy to shoulder that. I’m good at it.”
Daltrey has also had something that either eluded or did not appeal to the other Who members: a domestic life. (Townshend didn’t settle down until he approached 60.) Daltrey has been with his wife, Heather, for 50 years, pledging fidelity, when the band was off the road, at least. It’s worked for them while providing more heirs. (Daltrey has three children with Heather; one with his first wife, Jackie; and four out of wedlock, three of whom he fathered in the Sixties but didn’t learn about until middle age.) Almost 50 years ago, they bought Holmhurst Manor, a 400-year-old Jacobean mansion in East Sussex. Daltrey has done a lot of work on the house, and it has kept him sane.
“It saved me,” says Daltrey. While he enjoyed the rock lifestyle for a while, he was ready to get out before he was 30. “When you’re young, it was part of a movement. It felt really good, but I couldn’t wait to get out of it.”
Daltrey got into film. (He starred in Tommy and some other less-notable movies.) But he found that to be just a different type of nightmare. “I felt like a drowning penguin. I didn’t like being fawned over. I didn’t like being pulled at. We’d been pulled at all our lives.”
He tries to set a good example for the young folks. A few years ago, he did a charity gig with Babyshambles’ Pete Doherty, a puckish songwriter in the Townshend tradition and a longtime heroin addict. Daltrey tried to share a few stories of friends lost and lives ruined by hard drugs. Doherty was not receptive.
“You might as well talk to the wall,” says Daltrey with a shrug. And then he thought again. Doherty is still with us. “You only need a few words to go in that get thought about later on. You just start the key in the lock.”
While Daltrey is happily living the undiscovered life, Townshend continues to pick over the bones of his past. And it no longer is only in verse. He has just published an operatic novel, called The Age of Anxiety, after years of delays. (Like Townshend’s never-completed and now middle-aged Lifehouse project, the book is intended to be part of a larger multimedia project.)
There’s a character in the novel named Louis. He is an art dealer who happens to be the exact age as Townshend. He is accused of a ghastly sex crime on a drugged-out teenager that he may or may not have committed. It’s a stark echo of a deeply painful moment. In 2003, Townshend was arrested for paying to access a child-pornography site. He has always claimed that he was compiling evidence to go after child-sex-ring runners and the banks that processed their transactions. Daltrey valiantly came to his defense, and eventually Townshend wasn’t charged with any crime. Rather than leave that alone, Townshend has published a novel in which he dares readers to connect the dots.
“It made it feel real to me,” says Townshend in a quiet voice. He then re-enters his prideful zone: “But the interesting thing about that was I anticipated the MeToo movement. Louis is not based really on me, but there will be me in there somewhere.”
The novel also features a rock star who sells his catalog to a truck company, allowing him to retire and regroup his life. This one is easy: Townshend has taken crap for years for licensing Who songs to CSI, truck manufacturers, and other companies. (Baseball is playing in the background as I write this, and the synth opening of “Baba O’Riley” is pushing T-Mobile between innings.) He points out how the band was ripped off for its first 20 years and he had to make up for lost time. Today, he can’t be bothered. “I never gave a shit,” says Townshend. “I’ve always said the composer is king. It’s my music, not yours.” He doesn’t care if some musicians think he’s a sellout. “I knew that in the end they would be doing the same thing,” says Townshend. “One other difference between me and the Lou Reed and Iggy Pop smart-alecks of the New York art scene is that I fucking saw the internet coming. I knew music was going down the tubes, and they didn’t.”
The typical combination of hope and disgust is present in Daltrey and Townshend’s new work. There was a period when Townshend wondered if the record would happen at all; after he sent Daltrey the demos, it was months before Daltrey relayed his thoughts. Daltrey says there was a good reason for the radio silence: “These are really great songs, but what do I tell him? It sounds to me like a really great Pete Townshend solo album. What can I do in these to make them better?”
Townshend rolls his eyes about this. Apparently, Daltrey had told a version of the story from the stage earlier in the tour. “He hadn’t actually really listened to it, I don’t think,” says Townshend with a chuckle.
The album dares you to push “stop” in the first 10 seconds. “All This Music Must Fade” begins with Daltrey growling, “I don’t care/I know you’re gonna hate this song.” “I hated it at first,” says Daltrey. “But it’s such a catchy song.” He’s clearly proud of his editing job. “On the demo, he had some rapping on it. Well, no fucking way I’m going to rap. No way. Let the youngsters wear those clothes.” When I mention to Townshend that the song was a tough entry into the album, he tartly replies, “It’s not a song for the listener, it’s a song for another songwriter.” He mentions a current song goddess’s battles to copyright words and album titles. “Watching Taylor Swift go through what she’s putting herself through at the moment is heartbreaking. She doesn’t own the fucking music. She doesn’t own the words. I think she has a financial right to it, but she shouldn’t screw herself up about this stuff. It’s just songs, for fuck’s sake.”
The best track is “Street Song,” about the Grenfell Tower fire in London that killed 72 people in 2017. Daltrey wouldn’t sing the original words: “It had a lot of political lyrics that kind of pointed fingers, and I thought, ‘This is not the time to point fingers until the inquiry is over and you can make a judgment along what really, really happened.’?” Townshend conceded, and Daltrey’s anguished vocal is among the more moving performances of his career.
“I was thinking, ‘Well, this is great, because I’m singing this,’?” says Townshend with a hint of envy. “And suddenly he delivered this killer vocal for it.” Townshend offers a historical anecdote as explanation for why he and Daltrey have been such a magnificent if excruciating pairing. “When we recorded Quadrophenia?.?.?.?this is brutal, but I didn’t care what Roger thought,” says Townshend. “And he did a version of ‘Love Reign O’er Me,’ which was like a wailing banshee scream. I turned to my engineer Ron Nevison and said, ‘This is a kid on a rock. He’s wet, he’s cold. He’s had the most awful day of his life. Everything’s gone. The last thing he’s going to do is scream out. He’s going to whimper.’?”
Nevison urged him to give it another listen.
“Roger was in a booth, I couldn’t see him,” says Townshend. “I was hearing it from the mixing desk. And I listened back, and I thought, ‘Fuck. He’s nailed it. He’s nailed it, because this is an internal voice.’?”
Townshend smiles and throws up his hands.
“He becomes an actor. It’s almost like he’s a late-Fifties, early-Sixties Method actor, who when you say, ‘Here’s the script,’ he goes, ‘Oh, uh…’ and the directors go, ‘For fuck’s sake, just say the words.’”
And then Townshend laughs.
I go to say hello to Daltrey at the end of the Hollywood Bowl rehearsal where the two of them avoided acknowledging each other’s existence. He’s wearing the same blue cargo shorts as in Dallas. The band had recently canceled some gigs after Daltrey’s voice gave out in Houston. I ask how his voice was holding up. He stops short.
“It wasn’t my voice,” Daltrey says coldly. “It was allergies.” After I apologize for the misunderstanding, he smiles. He points at the orchestra, which includes a golden harp and a cymbals guy. He gestures with his hands: “You can have all this.” He then touches his throat. “But without this, you have nothing.” He then disappears stage-right with a cup of tea.
The show that night was a blast if you took to heart Townshend’s words that they were no longer a band. Middle-aged couples ate picnic baskets full of carb-free meals and drank champagne that retailed for nearly $200 in the Hollywood Bowl concession stand. We were half a century and a few tax brackets removed from 1970 and the Leeds University Refectory. The set flowed beautifully, with Townshend’s brother Simon on guitar and drummer Zak Starkey maintaining a controlled-frenzy version of the Moon style. Still, there was never any chance that your ears would bleed.
Some decisions were questionable: Did “Eminence Front” really need a giant harp? Liam Gallagher, the ex-Oasis frontman and the show’s opening act, watched from the side of the stage. He had his arm around his son Gene, a young musician. They both wore parkas despite the October heat. Gallagher was coaching his boy, pointing out things he could learn from his dad’s idols. They shook their heads in unison like Wayne and Garth and grinned like kids on Christmas Day as Daltrey pulled off his millionth mic toss.
And our two friends? It was as advertised. Townshend barked at some overzealous security guards manhandling fans who had already qualified for their AARP cards. “Usually, I’m the one Pete is mad at,” joked Daltrey. Townshend shot him a look. “Uh-oh,” said Daltrey. “I’m in the doghouse.”
At times, Townshend’s duck walk and windmilling threatened to collide with Daltrey’s theatrics, but at the end of each song they returned to their own corners. Finally, the orchestra left the stage, as did the rest of the band. It was just Daltrey and Townshend to perform “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” still the best argument against idealism in the annals of Western civilization. As the only two humans on the stage, they had to actually look at each other.
Townshend had his doubts about the acoustic approach. “It feels like we’re throwing away one of the great, great pinions of anthemic rock,” he told me before the show. “It’s a song that, on its own, if we both just stood there like vegetables, would fill the room and do the job.”
Daltrey started it stomping out a beat. Townshend chimed in with some sublime strumming. The song still rose to a crescendo even if it was one that the crowd had heard a thousand times already. Then Daltrey growled.
