Parenting & Family Quote by Roger Daltrey

Daltrey’s power move here is how quickly he refuses the romance of exceptional suffering. He starts with the specific - Pete, appearance, a “hard time” - then deliberately widens the frame: “But don’t all kids have a hard time?” It’s not a denial of pain; it’s a demotion of pain from mythology back to biography. In rock culture, the origin story often gets packaged as destiny: the wounded kid becomes the genius, the scars explain the art. Daltrey doesn’t let that script stand unchallenged.

The subtext is both protective and corrective. Protective, because he’s speaking about Pete Townshend with a kind of pragmatic loyalty: yes, it hurt, but let’s not turn him into a freak show or a saint. Corrective, because he’s also talking to an audience trained to treat male misery as a credential. His “God, I had a hard time, too” is less a bid for sympathy than a reminder that hardship is common, and that commonness is precisely why it cuts so deep. The detail - “little with bow legs and rickets” - is blunt, unglamorous, almost anti-rock. No metaphors, no mystique, just the body in public.

Context matters: Daltrey came up in postwar Britain, where toughness was expected and humiliation was a social sport. “I used to get picked on like everybody used to get picked on” lands as weary truth-telling about a culture that normalized cruelty as character-building. He’s not excusing it; he’s indicting how ordinary it was.