"Woodstock wasn’t peace and love," The Who's Roger Daltrey says

As the 50th anniversary of the original Woodstock approaches, plenty of events, exhibits and screenings are helping commemorate it (but not a certain cancelled festival). The New York Times began a series of “Woodstock at 50” articles, which previously included an op-ed about the festival’s legacy from Lucy Dacus. They also talked to The Who‘s Roger Daltrey about his Woodstock experience, which, as he’s written in his memoir Thanks a Lot Mr Kibblewhite, was not exactly positive.

From New York Times:

New York Times: What kind of mood were you in when you went on at 5 a.m.?

Roger Daltrey: Tired! You build yourself up for a fight. We were determined to make our music count. “We’re going to beat this one, we’re not going to let it beat us.”

NYT: The Who may have been the only band at Woodstock that felt combative.

RD: You’ve got to remember, by the time we went onstage, we’d been standing in the mud for hours. Or laying in it, or doing whatever in it. It wasn’t actually that muddy backstage, but it wasn’t comfort, let’s put it that way.
…
NYT: You’ve said it was the worst gig the Who ever played. Do you still think so?

RD: It was a particularly hard one for me, because of the state of the equipment. It was all breaking down. I’m standing in the middle of the stage with enormous Marshall 100 watt amps blasting my ears behind me. Moon on the drums in the middle. I could barely hear what I was singing.
…
NYT: Can we do some Woodstock word association?

RD: Er, I don’t know about that. Go on.

NYT: Peace and love?

RD: Woodstock wasn’t peace and love. There was an awful lot of shouting and screaming going on. By the time it all ended, the worst sides of our nature had come out. People were screaming at the promoters, people were screaming to get paid. We had to get paid, or we couldn’t get back home.

Read the interview in full here and watch The Who play “See Me, Feel Me” at Woodstock below.

We caught The Who earlier this year when they stopped at Madison Square Garden on the first leg of their orchestral “Moving On!” tour, and they begin a second leg this fall, including NYC-area shows at Jones Beach on September 15 (tickets) and MSG on September 1 (tickets).