For example, Freddie Mercury's biography was tragic and filled with paradoxes, Bruce Dickinson's career as a rock star is only one facet of an extraordinary life: pilot, fencer, polymath, and poet. My latest rock and roll read is the autobiography of The Who's Roger Daltrey. It is shockingly frank and at times eyebrow raising - running the gamut from madness to the mundane.
Interestingly, he calls to mind an event that I was at, in which, as Daltrey explains, a once in a lifetime event became a twice in a lifetime event: the New Orleans Jazz Fest 2015. The emergence of the sun during "See Me, Feel Me," reprized the same remarkable thing happening in 1969 at Woodstock.
As I said, Daltrey is brutally honest in this book. And he has always been open about his disgust about Woodstock - which is often marketed as this triumph of love, peace, and music, but was really a terrible event of bad drug trips and sub-par musical performances.
One pages 118-119, Daltrey (who avoids drugs as detrimental to his ability to perform) explains how he was served a cup of tea unknowingly laced with LSD, tells of technical glitches, recounts people being injured, and calls to mind the organizers trying to renege on their contract (money that was needed to fly back to England). He recounts Woodstock and its New Orleans parallel occurrence:
After all the arrangements, the hallucinations, the mud, and the chaos, we were finally onstage, sometime after 5:00 a.m.
About a month earlier, I'd woken up from a particularly vivid nightmare. It was the kind you have when you're a kid. I was looking out on some barren, smoke-filled landscape. There were guard towers with searchlights scanning around and there were helicopters overhead. It was a subconscious approximation of Vietnam. Looking out into the pre-dawn gloom of Woodstock, making out the vague shape of half a million mud-caked people as the lights swept over them, I felt in my sleep-deprived, hallucinating state that this was my nightmare come true.
The show didn't feel like it went well. The monitors kept breaking. The sound was shit. We were all battling the elements and ourselves. It didn't help when a political activist named Abbie Hoffman climbed onto the stage at the end of "Pinball Wizard," grabbed Pete's mic, and shouted, "I think this is a pile of shit while John Sinclair rots in prison.!"
Naturally, Pete booted him off the stage before threatening to kill the next person who tried to take his mic. Music and peace.
Somehow, we kept going and every time we felt like we were losing it, we dug in a bit deeper. Then, shortly after six, we got to "See Me, Feel Me" from Tommy and the bleeding sun came up. Right on cue. You couldn't have topped it. After all the shit we'd been through, it was perfect. It was extraordinary. It was one of those moments you couldn't ever re-create if you tried. Once in a lifetime.
Except exactly the same thing happened again on April 25, 2015, a mere forty-six years later. We were due to headline at the New Orleans Jazz Festival and it had been pissing rain all day. A tropical storm had just been through and the whole place was drenched. It's always chaos when it's so wet. It plays havoc with the electrics and it's always disconcerting when you see an amp half-submerged in a foot of water. I got to the trailer, looked out of the window, and told Mitch, my assistant, not to worry. I'd sort it all out. He said, doubtfully, "Okay, Roger." Cynical young man. And I started shouting at the sky, "Stop it! Stop now! We've had enough of this crap!"
And it did. Right on cue. Like someone had turned a tap off. Mitch didn't say anything. I didn't say anything but, to be honest, I was just as shocked as he was."
The sky was dark gray when we went onstage. It stayed like that right until the end of "Pinball Wizard." As I opened my mouth to sing "See Me, Feel Me," the sun broke through. Absolute magic. That's what I love about live shows. Things can happen. Some of those things are bad. Some of them are good. Occasionally, they're magic. That was one of those twice in-a-lifetime moments.
As I said, I was at the show in New Orleans. I stood in the rain and mud for a couple hours. Grace and Leo wandered around the fairgrounds while I held our spot. I was as close to the stage as possible without paying the premium to be in the roped-off section. Grace and Leo joined me and humored my joy at seeing The Who perform. It is no exaggeration to say that I knew every lyric from every song.
In the video above, I'm a few people to the left of the two Canadian flags that a lady was waving. I'm wearing a white Concordia Theological Seminary sweatshirt.
And the sun breaking out at this time in the show was not lost on me, nor any of my other several thousand colleagues in attendance. It was a great moment.
It made the impression on Roger Daltrey as well.
And this show was also a twice-in-a-lifetime event for me. This was my second time seeing The Who. The first time was at the Richfield Coloseum near Cleveland, December 13, 1982 - by this time, Keith Moon was deceased and Kenny Jones was the drummer.
We had what was known as "nosebleed seats." But I was prepared. I smuggled in my Nikon FM camera body, wrapped in a sock and bound to my ankle underneath my bell-bottom jeans. Along with the camera body, I had a 300 mm telephoto lens, again wrapped in a sock, and placed in the small of my back under my leather jacket. I smuggled in my equipment by opening my jacket for the cursory pat-down by security. They did not check my back or my legs. I ran to the men's room and assembled my camera, and we scurried to our seats. It was, of course, a great show. I got a few good pictures, developed them, and wrote the date on the back.
I was 18 years old. Roger Daltrey was 38.
And so my twice-in-a-lifetime opportunity came on April 25, 2015, nearly 33 years later, as The Who (with Zak Starkey on drums, and Pino Pallodinoo on bass - as the legendary John Entwistle was also deceased by this time) appeared on stage in New Orleans. This time, I was close to the stage. And this time, photography and video were not prohibited.
I was 51 years old. Roger Daltrey was 71.
Here is a link to the complete 1969 performance at Woodstock. And here is a link to the complete 2015 performance at New Orleans.
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