Roger Daltrey on performing the Who’s ‘Tommy’ with the Cleveland Orchestra, his new album and memoir

When the Cleveland Orchestra ventures into new musical territory Sunday, playing the Who’s rock opera Tommy in its entirety, it will not have to rely on surrogates, substitutes or stand-ins for the role of lead singer. It will be fronted by the original voice from the original album: Roger Daltrey.

The rock legend will be at Blossom Sunday night as part of the music center’s 50th anniversary celebration.

Daltrey is in the midst of an 11-city swing, performing Tommy with full orchestras and members of the Who Band. Blossom will host the tour’s finale.

“It’s a fabulous, fun experience,” said Daltrey via phone. “It’s a really good show. You never know with these things until you try them, but it’s worked out great. It’s a dream come true for me.”

He was calling from Chicago just before getting on a flight for Nashville.

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“I’ve been wanting to do this since the ’80s. We did Tommy, the original album, which is very simple but very classically written in a way. Someone made a classical record of it, which was OK. But it was a bit gimmicky. Then we did the film music with more synthesizers and all that,” he said.

“But I thought they’re missing the real beauty of this. This is a new kind of classical music. If only you could put an orchestra with a rock band with really good arrangements this could be something really, really, really special.”

The orchestra will be conducted by Keith Levenson. The music coordinator is John Miller. Daltrey will be joined by current Who Band members — guitarists Simon Townshend and Frank Simes, bassist Jon Button, drummer Scott Devours and keyboardist Loren Gold.

“We have been doing a series of rock shows out at Blossom the past few years,” said Ross Binnie, chief brand officer of the Cleveland Orchestra.

“But this will be the first time we’ve performed a full album, and with the star himself, the original Tommy, if you will. The album is just about 50 years old, and Blossom is 50 years old, so it’s a rare opportunity to combine both.”

Timeless ‘Tommy’

Tommy, the story of a traumatized “deaf, dumb and blind” kid who excels at pinball and eventually regains his senses and leads a messianic religion, spawned eternal hits like Pinball Wizard, I’m Free, We’re Not Gonna Take It and See Me, Feel Me/Listening to You.

The 25-track double-album was the brainchild of the great guitarist and songwriter Pete Townshend. He, Daltrey and original bandmates Keith Moon and John Entwistle worked on the record between Sept. 1968 and March 1969.

Tommy made a huge splash when it debuted in May 1969. No small feat considering that was the year of the Beatles’ Abbey Road, the Stones’ Let it Bleed and the first releases of a new band called Led Zeppelin.

The Who crossed Europe and America playing Tommy live more than 150 times, including a blistering performance at the era-defining Woodstock Festival in August of 1969.

Tommy went on to become many things. Daltrey starred in the Oscar-nominated Ken Russell movie in 1975, along with Ann-Margret, Jack Nicholson, Eric Clapton, Elton John and Tina Turner. There was the hit Broadway musical in 1993, which the New York Times called a “moving resuscitation of the disturbing passions that made Tommy an emblem of its era.”

I asked Daltrey, 74, what resonates with him today about Tommy.

“I’ve always seen Tommy as being everybody,” he said.

“I mean we’re all Tommy. We’re all kind of deaf, dumb and blind until we slowly wake up to the realities of the wonders of the universe. The characters within it are all different facets of the human makeup. We’ve all got the salacious Uncle Ernie side. It’s all in there. It’s whether it comes out and whether we learn to live with all of those things.”

Daltrey’s year

In addition to the Tommy tour, Daltrey recently released As Long As I Have You, his first solo album in 26 years. In October, Henry Holt & Co. will publish his long-awaited memoir, Thanks a lot, Mr. Kibblewhite: A Life.

“I’ve been doing the album for four years,” he said. “I started recording it, then the Who went on their 50th anniversary tour — you know, the never-ending, long-goodbye tour, which is still going on. So I walked away from it after recording about eight tracks.”

“Then at the end of the Who tour I got a really bad dose of [viral] meningitis and spent a month in the hospital. And when I got back to the record I just didn’t like what I had done. I thought it was rubbish. I wanted to completely shelve it.”

“Unbeknownst to me, the management sent the tapes to Pete. And Pete called me up and said, ‘Roger, this is fabulous. You’ve got to finish it.’ And he said, ‘I’d love to play some guitar on it.’ And that did it for me because, you know, he’s my favorite guitarist.”

The album is heavy on soul and R&B. Daltrey co-wrote some of the songs and also covers Stevie Wonder’s You Haven’t Done Nothin’, and Parliament’s Come in Out of the Rain.

“It’s probably the last album I’m ever going to make,” said Daltrey. “There really is no record industry anymore. I’m not into making the instant-gratification pop single.”

As for the memoir, he was reluctant to write it for decades. The title is a reference to the headmaster who expelled him from school at age 15. Daltrey got a job as a sheet-metal worker and started a band.

“I was offered — all us guys have been offered — huge amounts of money to write our memoirs. I didn’t want to write a memoir just because someone offered a huge amount of money. So, I thought, well, I’ll see if I’ve got a book in me. I paid a friend to work with me to guide me, and he interviewed me over long, long periods of time. He wrote down everything I’d said and juggled it about a bit like the editor of a newspaper. Then I wrote over it. And lo and behold, I think it’s a great book.”

It is not all sex, drugs and trashed hotel rooms.

“I had a very different experience of the rock world than quite a lot of the other people in it,” he said. “I did it relatively straight. I never took cocaine for instance. I was warned off it by someone very early on. So I avoided all those very, very hard drugs.”

“In the Who, I was the only straight man with three addicts in the band. So my journey was very much just trying to hold the whole bloody lot of it together. So I wanted to write more about of what it’s like to be inside the whirlwind, rather than parties, drugs, birds and all that. How many parties, how many hangovers can you write about? That hasn’t been my life.”

The Who have not performed in Northeast Ohio in many years. But Daltrey came to Cleveland last summer to visit patients at the Angie Fowler Adolescent & Young Adult Cancer Institute, part of University Hospitals Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital.

He has helped raise millions for Britain’s Teenage Cancer Trust and co-founded Teen Cancer America in 2011. “Cleveland is part of the vision of what we’re trying to create with every major hospital in America,” he said.

Daltrey has been adding three encores to the Tommy tour. Two Who songs, Who Are You and Baba O’Riley, and an orchestral ballad from his new album. “It’s called Always Headed Home. It’s a very spiritual song that I co-wrote with a friend of mine back in 1992,” he said.

“There’s something spiritual about it. It’s not a religious song, I’m not a religious man, I’m a universalist. But there’s something magical about it.”

Clint O’Connor covers pop culture. He can be reached at 330-996-3582 or coconnor@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @ClintOMovies.