Roger Daltrey Talks New Tour, Thoughts on Broadway’s ‘Tommy’ and Future of The Who 

Roger Daltrey. (AP)
Roger Daltrey. (AP)
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Roger Daltrey Talks New Tour, Thoughts on Broadway’s ‘Tommy’ and Future of The Who 

Roger Daltrey. (AP)
Roger Daltrey. (AP)

As Roger Daltrey hits the road on a short solo tour this June, he’s unsure if fans will ever see another tour from The Who.

“I don’t see it. I don’t know whether The Who’ll ever will go out again,” he told The Associated Press over Zoom.

The 80-year-old rocker has a “use-it-or-lose it-mentality” when it comes to his singing voice, so he finds it necessary to perform as much as possible, with or without The Who.

Recently, Daltry spoke with The Associated Press on the future of the band, his solo tour and his feelings on the Broadway revival of The Who’s seminal rock opera, “Tommy.”

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

AP: What do you think of the “Tommy” Broadway revival?

DALTREY: I’m glad the album is still out there; it means a lot to me. It’s the best opera ever written. I don’t particularly like it (the musical). It’s been altered and changed. I can’t imagine cutting some of the music in “Madame Butterfly,” or some other great operas.

AP: So, you think of it as a straight-up opera, as opposed to a rock opera?

DALTREY: It’s a fabulous opera. It was tongue and cheek at the time that we called it an opera. We did take a lot of chances with it. But since living with it and playing it on stage, and having seen lots of grand opera, I saw I had one in my hands. So, I’ve come to conclusion that it’s the best opera ever written.

AP: Tell us about the tour.

DALTREY: I’m bringing a band over from the UK of eight people, a very different sounding band with different instrumentation. No synthesizers. It’s just about having a lot of fun playing different songs, and obviously some Who classics. But we do them different. So it’s just something I love to do. And people seem to like it when I take it out there. So, I’m just going to put my toe in the water.

AP: So you’ll play solo material and The Who stuff?

DALTREY: Having a band like this gives me an opportunity to do a lot of things that I’ve done over the years with different artists, like the stuff I did with Wilko Johnson 10 years ago. I will do some solo stuff, plus some covers of other people that I really admire to make a night of entertainment and fun. So many people are retiring. All the good old boys are retiring and it’s very thin out there.

AP: Is getting out there in front of an audience what keeps your voice intact?

DALTREY: That’s always been the impetus for me ever since I had my voice problems out. You’ve got to keep using it. Just like anything else in the body. You stop walking, you lose the muscles in your legs. The voice is a similar thing. If you stop using those muscles in the voice box and the vocal cords, they’ll go soft on you and you’ll lose your voice. Mine is remarkable for my age.

AP: Simon Townsend is performing with you — not his brother, The Who’s Pete Townsend. What is it like supplementing one Townsend for another?

DALTREY: Simon Townsend is always in my solo shows. Simon has always been with me. Well, he’s a totally different guy than Pete, though he’s got very similar timber to his voice that suits my voice in the harmonies. He’s a great musician, fabulous guitarist and a great guy. You know, I’ve known him for 60 years.

AP: What’s the difference being touring with The Who and hitting the road solo?

DALTREY: It’s a lot less weight on my shoulders by myself. The Who feels like, I don’t know, heavier. It’s always much more relaxed and solo shows.

AP: There’s less pressure with a solo gig?

DALTREY: Because it’s the responsibility with The Who — there’s heritage and history to maintain that always need to be in a good light, so it puts a lot of weight on your shoulders. But with this band, I’ve discovered that I can go out there and have a good time and play any kind of music that I want.

AP: Can you give me an example?

DALTREY: I was doing some solo shows on a cruise, and I got this terrible allergy just before the first show. I ended up in hospital and didn’t know whether I’d make the cruise. But I did make the cruise. Anyway, I ended up having to do three shows back-to-back, and I’m thinking I was not able to have a sound check. I’m not going to get a rehearsal. But at least these three shows I can do.

Soundchecks are very important when you’re on the road. And I thought, “I know what I’ll do, I’ll show the audience a rehearsal.” And that’s what I did. I did the show as a rehearsal and talked about what’s going on the stage, what the roadies were doing, and what everyone was doing. And they really enjoyed it. If you can get away with that, you get away with anything.

AP: With a career that began in the mid-1960s, what has been the biggest change you’ve seen over the years?

DALTREY: Age. (Laughs.) I mean, see the elders growing up with us out in the audience, but equally, we have got an enormous number of young fans, which I’m astounded by. So, it changes all the time. But obviously our audience, they’ve grown up with us, so age is the thing you notice most.

AP: Mick Jagger is on the road with the Rolling Stones at 80 years old. Will The Who ever tour again?

DALTREY: I don’t see it. I don’t, I don’t know whether The Who will ever go out again. I don’t know. I don’t think like that. If we’ve got something to do, something which was progressive and interesting and there was a reason to do it, then we would go out. But at the moment I can’t see it.



Disney Didn’t Copy ‘Moana’ from a Man’s Story of a Surfer Boy, a Jury Says 

This image released by Disney shows the character Moana, voiced by Auli'i Cravalho, in a scene from "Moana 2." (Disney via AP)
This image released by Disney shows the character Moana, voiced by Auli'i Cravalho, in a scene from "Moana 2." (Disney via AP)
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Disney Didn’t Copy ‘Moana’ from a Man’s Story of a Surfer Boy, a Jury Says 

This image released by Disney shows the character Moana, voiced by Auli'i Cravalho, in a scene from "Moana 2." (Disney via AP)
This image released by Disney shows the character Moana, voiced by Auli'i Cravalho, in a scene from "Moana 2." (Disney via AP)

A jury on Monday quickly and completely rejected a man’s claim that Disney’s “Moana” was stolen from his story of a young surfer in Hawaii.

The Los Angeles federal jury deliberated for only about 2 ½ hours before deciding that the creators of “Moana” never had access to writer and animator Buck Woodall’s outlines and script for “Bucky the Surfer Boy.”

With that question settled, the jury of six women and two men didn’t even have to consider the similarities between “Bucky” and Disney’s 2016 hit animated film about a questing Polynesian princess.

Woodall had shared his work with a distant relative, who worked for a different company on the Disney lot, but the woman testified during the two-week trial that she never showed it to anyone at Disney.

“Obviously we’re disappointed,” Woodall's attorney Gustavo Lage said outside court. “We’re going to review our options and think about the best path forward.”

In closing arguments earlier Monday, Woodall's attorney said that a long chain of circumstantial evidence showed the two works were inseparable.

“There was no ‘Moana’ without ‘Bucky,’” Lage said.

Defense lawyer Moez Kaba said that the evidence showed overwhelmingly that “Moana” was clearly the creation and “crowning achievement” of the 40-year career of John Musker and Ron Clements, the writers and directors behind 1989's “The Little Mermaid,” 1992's “Aladdin,” 1997's “Hercules” and 2009's “The Princess and the Frog.”

“They had no idea about Bucky,” Kaba said in his closing. “They had never seen it, never heard of it.”

“Moana” earned nearly $700 million at the global box office.

A judge previously ruled that Woodall’s 2020 lawsuit came too late for him to claim a piece of those receipts, and that a lawsuit he filed earlier this year over “Moana 2” — which earned more than $1 billion — must be decided separately. That suit remains active, though the jury's decision does not bode well for it. Judge Consuelo B. Marshall, who is also overseeing the sequel lawsuit, said after the verdict that she agreed with the jurors' decision about access.

“We are incredibly proud of the collective work that went into the making of Moana and are pleased that the jury found it had nothing to do with Plaintiff’s works,” Disney said in a statement.

Musker and Disney's attorneys declined to comment outside the courtroom.

The relatively young jury of six women and two men watched “Moana” in its entirety in the courtroom. They considered a story outline that Woodall created for “Bucky” in 2003, along with a 2008 update and a 2011 script.

In the latter versions of the story, the title character, vacationing in Hawaii with his parents, befriends a group of Native Hawaiian youth and goes on a quest that includes time travel to the ancient islands and interactions with demigods to save a sacred site from a developer.

Around 2004, Woodall gave the “Bucky” outline to the stepsister of his brother's wife. That woman, Jenny Marchick, worked for Mandeville Films, a company that had a contract with Disney and was located on the Disney lot. He sent her follow-up materials through the years. He testified that he was stunned when he saw “Moana” in 2016 and saw so many of his ideas.

Along with her testimony saying she didn't show “Bucky” to anyone, messages shared by the defense showed she eventually ignored Woodall's queries to her and had told him there was nothing she could do for him.

Disney attorney Kaba argued there was no evidence Marchick ever worked on “Moana” or received any credit or compensation for it.

Kaba pointed out that Marchick, now head of features development at DreamWorks Animation, worked for key Disney competitors Sony and Fox during much of the time she was allegedly making use of Woodall's work for Disney.

Woodall also submitted the script directly to Disney and had a meeting with an assistant at the Disney Channel, which Marchick arranged for him, to talk about working as an animator. But jurors agreed that this didn't give them reason to believe that “Bucky” made its way to Musker, Clements or their collaborators.

Lage, Woodall's attorney, outlined some of the similarities of the two works in his closing.

Both include teens on oceanic quests.

Both have Polynesian demigods as central figures and shape-shifting characters who turn into, among other things, insects and sharks.

In both, the main characters interact with animals who act as spirit helpers.

Kaba said many of these elements, including Polynesian lore and basic “staples of literature,” are not copyrightable.

Shape-shifting among supernatural characters, he said, appears throughout films including “The Little Mermaid,” “Aladdin,” and Hercules, which made Musker and Clements essential to the Disney renaissance of the 1990s and made Disney a global powerhouse.

Animal guides go back to movies as early as 1940's “Pinocchio” and appear in all of Musker and Clements’ previous films, he said.

Kaba said Musker and Clements developed “Moana” the same way they did the other films, through their own inspiration, research, travel and creativity.

The lawyer said thousands of pages of development documents showed every step of Musker and Clements' creation, whose spark came from the paintings of Paul Gaugin and the writings of Herman Melville

“You can see every single fingerprint,” Kaba said. “You can see the entire genetic makeup of ‘Moana.’”