Top 40 The Who Quotes

The band that changed my life was The Who. It’s hard to pick just one album, but if I had to pick the one that really showed me how things could be done, it’s ‘The Who Sell Out.’ They really went to town on that, doing something that no one had ever done before.

Jimi Hendrix, the Who, the Dead, Zeppelin, the Beatles – I paint to this music all of the time.

It was pretty radical to go from the Eagles to being the only melodic instrument. You have to play a certain way. It’s like the Who. It was a great kick in the pants for me to get my chops up and to improvise a little more.

The Who on record were dynamic. Roger Daltrey’s delivery allowed vulnerability without weakness; doubt and confusion, but no plea for sympathy.

I think when I was a kid, and I was in England and it was all about The Stones, The Who, The Kinks and The Beatles and that’s what my dad was into.

When I joined Small Faces, we occasionally would bump into The Who. And Keith Moon and I became firm pals.

There is never going to be a band like The Who again.

But what was interesting about what the Who did is that we took things which were happening in the pop genre and represent them to people so that they see them in a new way. I think the best example is Andy Warhol’s work, the image of Marilyn Monroe or the Campbell’s soup can.

Imagine a music business where all the music press talked about, all day long, was cover bands of old rock and pop groups. Beatles cover bands, Rolling Stones cover bands, The Who cover bands, Led Zeppelin cover bands. Cover bands, cover bands, everywhere you go.

One of my first festivals was Oxygen 2006. It had this amazing lineup with the Arctic Monkeys on their first or second album, the Strokes, Kings of Leon, the Magic Numbers and then the Who and James Brown. I waited in the pit for a good eight hours to see James Brown.

I would love to play the drums with ‘The Who.’

What made me want to play drums in the first place was Led Zeppelin and The Who. My parents had their records, and I grew up listening to them with the stereo cranked.

I think the ’60s was a great time for music, especially for rock and roll. It was the era of The Beatles, of The Stones, and then later on The Who and Zeppelin. But at one point in the ’70s, it just kind of became… mellow.

I started to get turned on to a bunch of different bands when I was in middle school/high school. I was turned onto The Who and Black Sabbath and Yes, and stuff like that. But Rush I obsessed over. I wanted to have every album. I wanted to know storylines, read all the lyrics, learn the songs and everything.

I often explain it to people that if you listen to a Who record and then go see the Who live, it’s like two different bands. That’s how Humble Pie worked. We were definitely a lot more ferocious live because of the energy that the entire population of us had.

I think the first three Rickenbacker basses were imported around 1964. Pete Quaife, the bassist for The Kinks, bought one. Then John Entwistle from The Who bought one. As for the third one, I asked the manager of the store if I could get an employee discount. He said I could, and so I picked up that one.

I thought if I lost the band, I was dead. If I didn’t stick with the Who, I would be a sheet metal worker for the rest of my life.

What the Who is all about is exactly that and it always has been. If it exists today for this concert, it’s in response again to a function which is happening out there on the street.

It’s like this – these five members have been influenced of course by other groups, because that’s where this generation’s groups came from – an environment like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, and The Who. People like that.

For a while I was perfectly happy not performing with ‘The Who.’ From 1982 to 1989 I felt ‘The Who’ did not exist. I let the band go, in my heart. However, Roger Daltrey had other ideas. He would not let go.

People define themselves to some degree by the music that they listened to as teens. My mom had Elvis. Me, I had ‘The Who’ and later punk rock. Kids who came up in the ’80s had other songs and bands. It’s a way of placing ourselves culturally and temporally.

I listened to classic rock and roll, and punk rock. ‘Goon Squad’ provides a pretty accurate playlist of my teenage years, though it leaves out ‘The Who,’ which was my absolute favorite band.

The WHO is China-centric and panders to Beijing at every turn. There is no reason U.S. taxpayers should contribute more than $400 million annually to an organization that covered for China and failed to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.

We made The Who look like church boys on Sunday. We done things only fools’d do.

You see people who are 19 or 20 years old and they don’t even know who The Who is. It’s like, where have you been? Justin Timberlake? C’mon. Where are the roots?

The Who quite possibly remain the greatest live band ever. Even the list-driven punk legend and music historian Johnny Ramone agreed with me on this.

‘Tommy’ was my first Broadway show. Long Pause. I don’t know how you can surpass the excitement or get more excited or feel more on top of the world than when you are sitting in a room singing The Who, and Pete Townshend is sitting there tapping his foot.

Presumptuously, I speak for all Who fans when I say being a fan of the Who has incalculably enriched my life. What disturbs me about the Who is the way they smashed through every door of rock & roll, leaving rubble and not much else for the rest of us to lay claim to.

The Who, England’s most self-conscious band, have released ‘Quadrophenia,’ which in turn freezes in time our image of the mid-Sixties Mod sensibility.

I remember seeing The Who at the Top Hat.

When The Who first started, we were playing blues, and I dug the blues and I knew what I was supposed to be playing, but I couldn’t play it. I couldn’t get it out. I knew what I had to play; it was in my head. I could hear the notes in my head, but I couldn’t get them out on the guitar.

I don’t mind doing the Who tours when they come along but I want to get out there and play.

The WHO is the lead agency in health in the United Nations system, and clearly we have very important functions to play.

Well, obviously I wanted it to sound as original as possible. I suppose the influences that we had were probably from the actual power point of view we wanted to be like the Who. Vocally we wanted to be like the Beach Boys, whatever was good at the time.

When the mid-’70s came around, it looked like, ‘Oh-oh, here come the punks.’ But if you look closely at The Who and The Kinks, the anger and the frustration is there… There is, within me, just the same social discontent as I go through my career. But to be typecast as a singer of peace and love is fine.

As a kid, I wasn’t listening to The Who; I was listening to Frankie Knuckles.

Probably for drums, a guy I really enjoyed watching is Simon Phillips. I’ve seen him play with The Who and with Pete Townshend on his own – a really great drummer.

I had the opportunity to do a movie with Roger Daltrey of The Who. In the movie, I played a guitar student. Since I had to learn how to play somewhat for the movie, I was introduced to the guitar.

When I hit 11 so did the careers of Dylan and the Stones. A year later it was the Who and the Kinks.

I was obsessed with The Who. I would have accepted a marriage proposal from Roger Daltrey on the spot. I went to all of their shows in San Francisco and some in L.A. That was as close as I got to being a groupie.