Happy Birthday Roger Daltrey

Happy Birthday to Who frontman, Roger Daltrey, who turns 69-years-old today (March 1st). Last night (February 28th), Daltrey along with the Who, performed along with Elvis Costello at Manhattan's Theater At Madison Square Garden for the Teen Cancer America Benefit. Over the past four years, Daltrey has reignited his solo live career performing the Who's Tommy along with assorted Who and solo classics.

Daltrey has been wowing crowds on the Who's just-wrapped North American leg of their Quadrophenia & More Tour, which caught Daltrey singing better than ever after undergoing throat surgery in recent years. Daltrey's tour-de-force lead vocal on Quadrophenia's finale "Love Reign O'er Me" is one of dozens of examples of him taking a Pete Townshend song and completely reinventing it as his own: "That's what I used to try and do is to leave people with a mood in a note, and a passion in the song. That in somehow or the other, either went against the lyric, or took the lyric to somewhere where you didn't think. . . It's like 'Love Reign O'er Me' for instance. Pete never, ever saw that as a loud screaming plea, the way I sang it. He saw it as a quiet song -- which obviously you can do. In the terms of the way Quadrophenia was, I saw it as that scream of desperation from the street. He didn't like it. He didn't like what I did with it (laughs) probably still doesn't!"