I hope I die before I get (that) old ...

[Basvarken]

Roger and Pete have lost the plot.

[doombass]

Roger and Pete have lost the plot.

Yes.

[uwe]

Old people are dangerous.

[Pilgrim]

Old people are dangerous.

I proudly resemble that remark!

[uwe]

Ringo chips in.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/jun/19/ringo-starr-roger-daltrey-little-man-zak-starkey-sacking-the-who

Daltrey always suffered from LSS (lead singer syndrome) if you ask me.

[gearHed289]

I'm dedicating tonight's set to Zak. 

[Pilgrim]

Ringo chips in.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/jun/19/ringo-starr-roger-daltrey-little-man-zak-starkey-sacking-the-who

Daltrey always suffered from LSS (lead singer syndrome) if you ask me.

As the old saying goes, "It ain't bragging if you can do it."  Daltrey could always do it.

[uwe]

Yet Made in Japan creamed Live at Leeds into the ground. It helps if more than one band member is good at what he does.

Steven Wilson has finally turned his attention and talent to the best untampered (yes, Dutch Lizzy-boy, UN - TAM - PE -RED) rock live recording ever.

Yet Jon and Ritchie are still the wrong way around ...  , but you get a lot more pick noise from Roger Glover's Ric, brilliant!

[Alanko]

Ringo chips in.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/jun/19/ringo-starr-roger-daltrey-little-man-zak-starkey-sacking-the-who

Daltrey always suffered from LSS (lead singer syndrome) if you ask me.

And a bit of a shortarse too.

[BTL]

Roger and Pete have lost the plot.

This sums it up for me as well.

[Dave W]

The Who stopped being The Who when Entwistle died.

[Alanko]

The Who stopped being The Who when Entwistle died.

When it was the original four they seemed to keep each other in check, even if none of them were doing exactly what they wanted the band to do. When Keith died Pete brought in a drummer with a far more sturdy internal metronome but none of the fireworks. When John died they brought in Pino. Highly competent but dull. The Who never worked as a live band because they were all highly skilled studio-grade musicians. The band wasn't solely a vehicle for Pete's weird esoteric philosophy and existential ponderings. They would at least throw in a surf cover or ancient rockabilly number!

I wonder if spending a lifetime singing Pete's songs, but having to conjure up the pathos and emotion as though you wrote them yourself, is getting to Roger a bit!

[gearHed289]

Yet Made in Japan creamed Live at Leeds into the ground. It helps if more than one band member is good at what he does.

  You are officially in the cult of Ritchie.

The Who stopped being The Who when Entwistle died.

Indeed.

[uwe]

Tom, I wasn't being quite serious, but DP is so much more than Ritchie - I think of Jon Lord and how Paice/Glover were a more cohesive rhythm section than Moon/Entwistle. This may be heresy to some, but Keith and John did not really work together as a rhythm section, they played over each other (with sometimes spectacularly beautiful results and sometimes also just plain uncoordinated). Very few The Who songs have a dance groove and where they did - Magic Bus - JAE would moan about having to play them.

And the legendary Live At Leeds is to me a bunch of 60s songs played at a 70s volume in a stripped down fashion. The sparse instrumentation forced on the songs by a small instrumental line-up doesn't really do them justice because no one in The Who really grooved and swung. Townshend is an angular rhythm guitarist and a very limited lead guitarist (plus a gifted songwriter with an endearing voice), JAE plays spectacular runs and has a sense of melody, but does his bird-of-prey-swoop-down-for-the-kill approach to bass playing ever swing or groove? He ain't no Mel Schacher for sure (to name someone who also played a lot of notes on bass and not just a root note player). Keith was the only one who had some swing, inaccurate as he was, but his drumming was at least lively and created - even in its chaos sometimes - a tapestry. Not a Ginger Baker, but similar in his role, even a bit jazzy.

I know, all that defies conventional wisdom and constitutes heresy in The Who pantheon, you may stone me now. 🤣

[Alanko]

Keith's drumming sort of joins in the scrap rather than give the band a grid to nail everything to. His playing sounds pretty intuitive and musical, like a hyperactive vocal melody or conversation written out across the drum skins. It breathes and stretches.

I find Ginger's Cream stuff authoritative but leaden. Too much upright jazz sensibility, but Ginger doesn't seem to really swing intuitively, just in a studied 'what would Art Blakey do here?' sense. This is what a real drummer like Gene Krupa would do in a filthy jazz club somewhere, not some pretty boy rock drummer playing a basic 4/4 pattern in a stadium.

Bill Ward and Ian Paice both added a delicious amount of swing to hard rock music without bringing that sort of stiff, dragging clatter that Ginger had. Ginger talked a good game, imbibed like a jazz musician, lived as a hermit and had the drive to seek out Afrobeat music before other rock musicians (though Fela Kuti had made it to the US in the '60s). I don't think that big band style of drumming really works in rock music, however.