The Who returns one last(?) time to the Hollywood Bowl

Sixty years ago the British invasion was in full swing — beyond the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, bands like the Kinks, the Dave Clark Five, Herman’s Hermits and the Animals were all touring across America.

The Who were a late arrival, not reaching these shores until 1967 despite a slew of destined-to-be-classic singles. But the band — despite singing “Hope I die before I get old,” being famously fractious, and enduring the deaths of two key members — are still out there rocking.

More than four decades after their “farewell” tour, the band returns one last(?) time to the Hollywood Bowl on Wednesday and Friday. It’s part of their “The Song Is Over” tour, which is an actual farewell tour … Kind of … Probably.

Guitarist and songwriter Pete Townshend says that for now he wants to savor the moment. “I want to enjoy doing the best work I can on stage and to celebrate the music.”

While he and lead singer Roger Daltrey have been discussing this final tour, health issues and potential for future projects in one interview after another, they relished the chance to look back at what America and California have meant to them since that first trip.

“It came quite late for us but it was something we’d longed for and a huge adventure,” Townshend said in a recent interview, featuring long, thoughtful and detailed recollections of those early days.

“We were born in the Second World War, 1944 and we had rations — we were living on suet and you were living on steak here,” Daltrey said in his own interview. “For anyone born in those years, their whole dream was to have success in America. It was our dream world. In our early days, all the music we were playing was coming from America — we were mimicking it.”

Townshend agrees (this doesn’t happen often), saying that both as music lovers and musicians “we owed so much to America —the blues, the Motown scene, the New Orleans scene, the jazz scene, the folk music scene and then the Beach Boys with the miraculous ‘Pet Sounds’ album was out and shaking the walls.”

The Who made two American visits in 1967, playing New York in early spring and then returning for a full tour during the Summer of Love that included multiple shows in California.

“Being in New York, staying in a fancy hotel called the Drake that was quite posh with filet steak for fifty bucks felt like the high life,” Townshend says. “It felt like a different world to us.”

The band was playing four shows a day and were on the same bill as Cream so Townshend hung out with Eric Clapton — “he was with the beautiful girls, of course. Roger was too. Keith [Moon] was busy blowing things up.”

Townshend said he made lifelong friends in those two weeks and that “to this day New York feels like a second home.”

Then came the “fantastic indoctrination into the West Coast scene,” Townshend says of hanging out with Jimi Hendrix and the Mamas and the Papas. “It was so different from what was going on in the UK.”

Roger Daltrey speaks during the 39th Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony on Saturday, Oct. 19, 2024, at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse in Cleveland.

(Chris Pizzello / Invision / AP)

They played the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco in June and then smashed up everything at the Monterey Pop Festival; they played in Anaheim that September shortly before they became a sensation with an explosive — literally — performance on “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.” Keith Moon, conspiring with the Smothers Brothers’ stagehands, loaded his drum kit with a charge of explosives (equivalent to a stick of dynamite) and set them off at the end of the performance. Townshend later blamed that incident for his hearing loss and tinnitus.

Daltrey says “the days of flower power and hippies” was an eye-opening experience, but the biggest impact was the drug culture. “It was a big change in my life because the others [Townshend, Moon and bass player John Entwistle] took quite a liking to the drug culture and someone had to keep them in order, which fell on my shoulders.”

That November they returned for their first show at the Hollywood Bowl as part of the Festival of Music. It was a memorable one. It started on a high because they were supporting the Everly Brothers, Daltrey says. “Their harmonies had been with us from when we were teenagers, so that was exciting.”

Then, as was typical with the Who, things got amped up.

“When I was smashing my guitars, we liked to pretend that everything was catching fire, so Bob Pridden, our road manager and sound man, would set off smoke bombs,” Townshend says.

But, Daltrey notes, they didn’t understand that its location meant the city took safety precautions seriously. “Imagine all this smoke coming up out of the canyon,” he says. “The fire marshal came in and arrested Bob and took him to jail for the rest of the day.”

Additionally, he says, there was a moat in front of the stage (where there are now seats) and in a moment of, call it inspiration, Moon “threw his drums in there and then jumped in after them. It was quite a Hollywood Bowl debut.”

Both Daltrey and Townshend say they’ve retained a romantic view of America since that first trip.

“America has always been so good to us,” Daltrey says. “No matter how many times you hear America being criticized now, it’s still better than most places — every country’s got their problems.”

And while Townshend notes that franchises and chains have made many smaller cities feel alike, he still loves cities like L.A., “where you can walk down Sunset and it’s pretty much as it was years ago — the vibe hasn’t changed. I keep coming back to the word ‘romantic.’ It has a romantic feeling to it.”

Pete Townshend

(Yui Mok / Press Association via AP Images)

Townshend says the Bowl has vastly improved its sound over the years, and that he also likes playing the Greek but also feels indebted to Angel Stadium, where they played before 55,000 people in 1976, which he says marked an important step in rock’s transition from arena to stadium tours.

The band played Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum on that first farewell tour in 1982, which Townshend knew in his heart wasn’t a farewell from the start.

Townshend says what he really needed was a hiatus. He’d been in “bad shape, having trouble giving up booze.” (One tactic was using hard drugs. Didn’t help.) He was also finding it easier to write solo material like “Rough Boys” or “The Sea Refuses No River” than Who songs.

“But we had a big record deal — I think if you quantify for inflation, it’s equal to something like $300 million today,” he says. “Probably one of the biggest deals that’s ever been done. I’m sounding like Donald Trump. Sorry. I wasn’t going to mention his name. Anyway, where was I?”

So the band was going to tour to promote “It’s Hard,” which he was dreading as he tried to get clean. He wrote a letter in a British magazine saying he was leaving the band. There was no public reaction, which at first “disappointed” him. But then the marketing folks used it to bill the tour as the Who’s final one. “And then we were selling out f—ing everywhere.”

But it created a false impression. “I should have said I’m going to take a sabbatical, because I had no idea what was going to happen in the future,” Townshend says. “I really just needed 18 months.”

The future is obviously much shorter when you’re an octogenarian, but Townshend, 80, and Daltrey, 81, are still managing to send a few mixed messages about the farewell this time around.

One thing they’ve emphasized is that this is the final tour but not the end of the Who as a live act.

“Touring has become so expensive and it’s incredibly grueling, so it’s hard to justify now,” Daltrey says.

Townshend agrees, saying that in addition to writing songs and prose, he also needs “time and space to just go off with a sketchbook and draw birds or something. Space is really important. And when you tour, you don’t have any space.”

But they will reunite, he adds. “We’ll definitely work together, we’ll do charity shows together.”

Daltrey echoes that idea, which is no surprise. He snuck in some solo shows between Who gigs this summer and still loves performing live. “Music is one of the last true great freedoms we really have but you have to play it live,” he says, even as he acknowledges that he doesn’t know how much longer he can meet his own standards. “That’s the insecurity of the artist — you never know when it’s going to end. My voice is great at the moment, but it could go tomorrow.”

And while the band already postponed two shows early in the tour because of an unspecified illness, they sound astonishingly loud and fresh still, adding new vocal and instrumental flourishes and accents to classics like “Behind Blue Eyes.”

Townshend, who has long been sparing in praise for his partner, calls Daltrey’s voice “amazing.” “He has perfect pitch and he’s singing so great. Where he gets the power, I don’t know.”

(Meanwhile the guitarist had a knee operation this year and “like every f—ing rock star in the world, I got addicted to oxytocin”; he got depressed but found help and is now “feeling quite chipper.”)

But when Daltrey says “We’re not stopping being a band,” it’s clear the two don’t see their future the same way.

Townshend acknowledges this, predicting during our conversation, “Roger will refute everything I say.”

Daltrey responds by saying, “You’ve got to keep him on his toes. Otherwise he’ll just sleep on his yacht.”

And then he starts refuting. Townshend says of the decision to ditch longtime drummer Zak Starkey, “Roger didn’t want him in the band — they’re still good friends, so I don’t know what’s going on”; while Daltrey, in dismissing rumors of a feud with Starkey, avers that “both Pete and I decided we needed to freshen up our sound and Zak didn’t quite fit into that.” (Then, because a Who farewell tour needs some friction, after saying it wasn’t personal and that Starkey is “like a son to me,” he adds “Zak didn’t help matters…. He can be a bit of a loose cannon, you know.”)

Daltrey and Townshend were never as close as, say, John Lennon and Paul McCartney; Townshend says they were just too dissimilar and never really socialized much. (On stage now, they banter about their differences but joke about journalists who can’t understand their true connection.)

“He was my protector and he was my first boss,” Townshend says. “ I’ve tried to serve him with great songs and support, though I may have been a bit of a bully sometimes.”

Now, he’s curious to see if (mostly) retiring the Who can change the dynamic. “Maybe it’s time to let go of the Who brand,” he says. “It hasn’t belonged to us for many years — it belongs to the industry, the press, the fans. I wonder whether Roger and I will find something new with the Who legacy being lifted from us.”

To that end, he’d gladly write songs for Daltrey to sing as a solo artist. “It’s not difficult for me to write songs for Roger, but I think it’s difficult to write songs for Roger under the Who banner — they’ve got to be as good as ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again,’ ‘Behind Blue Eyes’ and ‘Baba f—ing O’Riley,’” he says. “And that’s not easy.”

While Daltrey is quick to say, “I love the man,” he’s also not having any of that, saying if Townshend wants to write for him, it would be for the band. “Listen, I started the bloody Who. I’m entitled to keep it going as long as I want.”

They could make another Who album if only Townshend would collaborate with him, Daltrey insists. “I can write songs. They’re just not Pete Townshend songs. But if Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey wrote songs together, they might be something special.”

He is even changing some of Townshend’s lyrics to “The Song Is Over,” which he also cut down for the tour. “It never worked on stage as a complete song, and the lyrics had to move on,” Daltrey says.

In other words, when it comes to the Who, both in terms of fighting and music, the song is not over.