Word: townshend
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...individualistic as those Townshend compositions are, they remain a group statement. Townshend, who has no use for modesty, insists, "I can still use The Who more effectively to speak to people heart to heart than I ever could on a solo album." Daltrey observes, "Did you ever notice that nobody ever does Townshend's songs? The Who are the only people who can play them. That's one reason we've survived. None of us is very good on his own. It's only as part of The Who that we're great...
...little bit of nasty," as Daltrey calls him. Moon died of an overdose of Heminevirin, a drug he was taking to combat his alcoholism. Moon's passing forced a crisis within the group, the three surviving members re-examining their loyalty to rock, and to each other. Daltrey told Townshend: "Keith's life and death were a gift to the group. A sacrifice to allow us to continue." Townshend recalls thinking at the time, "How can I agree with something as 20th Century-Fox as that? But I felt it too. That besides being a sacrifice, Keith's death...
...bass that looked like a football boot with a neck sticking out of it," and recruited Entwistle on the spot. Soon after that, Daltrey decked the Detour's lead singer and took over the vocals himself. Now the Detours needed a rhythm guitar player. Entwistle mentioned his school chum, Townshend, whom Daltrey recalls as "looking like a nose on a stick...
...greatest bloody triumph of my schooldays was when Roger asked me if I could play guitar," Townshend recalls. "If he had ever said, 'Come out in the playground and I'll fight you,' I would have been down in one punch. Music was the only way I could ever win. But I've despised him ever since...
...were from a working-class background in London. Daltrey's father was a clerk, Entwistle's a mechanic. But both Townshend's parents were dance-band musicians. "My dad's a great player," Townshend says. "Not a cowboy, but a great player. My mom was a singer. She was a bit of a cowboy." The band found its own cowboy, or show boater, one night when a half-drunk rowdy took the stage, displaced the drummer and gave an uninvited audition that ended when he kicked over the drum kit. Keith Moon was a member of the band...