The dynamics of the Who were uniquely molten. The singer, as noted, was a species of turbo ventriloquist; the guitarist, the brainiac, drove the thing forward with massive, slashing chords; and the rhythm section was composed of two uncontrollable soloists: the prolific John Entwistle, whose bass offered arch intra-musical commentary at heavy metal volume, endlessly raising its eyebrows and doodling in the margins, and on drums the feast of acceleration, the rampage of allegro agitato, that was Keith Moon, stampeding ahead of his tics like a character in a fairy tale. Daltrey and Entwistle connected first, in the summer of 1961. A few months later they auditioned a kid they had seen around school, a tall boy with an “impressive sneezer”: Townshend. (“He knew all these clever chords that were diminished, missing thirds here, adding sevenths there, all strange shapes. … They were flash chords and he knew it.”) And then, during a show at the Oldfield Hotel in Greenford, “ginger-topped after a failed attempt to go Beach Boy blond,” Keith Moon arrives. He joins the band for a version of Bo Diddley’s “Road Runner”: “Halfway through, he started to do his syncopations. It’s all mathematics, isn’t it, drumming, but his mathematics were from another planet. … It just took things up to the next level. The final gear.”

Moon lived and played in a state of exuberant torment. He could be very funny, “but that,” Daltrey comments ruefully, “was only about 20 percent of the time. The rest of it, the pranks, the explosions, the general devastation, there was usually someone at the other end of it having a pretty miserable time.” Entwistle was a dark rock ’n’ roll character — “John had a very spiteful streak” — and he liked to wind Daltrey up. But the largest presence in “Thanks a Lot” — because it is almost an absence — is that of Pete Townshend. “The thing was,” writes the long-suffering Daltrey, “I recognized his talent.” In 1966, as part of a projected rock opera about gender reassignment called “Quads,” Townshend writes “I’m a Boy”: “I’m a boy, I’m a boy, but my ma won’t admit it.” “Bloody hell,” confesses Daltrey. “I found this very, very difficult.” In 1969, Townshend introduces “Tommy” to a preview audience as “a story about a boy who witnesses a murder and becomes deaf, dumb and blind. He is later raped by his uncle and gets turned on to LSD.” Incredibly, “Tommy” becomes a great success — and not incidentally another vehicle for the artistic emancipation of Roger Daltrey. “Everything I learned to do with my voice came from ‘Tommy.’ … I just changed.” However, 1971’s “Lifehouse” project, which features people in “experience suits” all linked up on a great “Grid” of leisure (hello?) — this is too much. Too soon. Too intuitively futuristic. Everyone is bewildered. “I’ve said it before, and I mean it in the nicest possible way, but talking to Pete could be like walking through a minefield wearing a pair of clown shoes. And a blindfold.”

Daltrey’s favorite Who album, revealingly, is “The Who by Numbers” (1975): the most sozzled, vulnerable and desperately libidinous set in their catalog. “I saw the lyrics and I thought, this has to be sung.” And that’s what he does, singing on “How Many Friends” about the “handsome boy” who buys him (Townshend) a brandy and compliments him (Townshend) on his (Townshend’s) clothes, provoking sexual confusion and tristesse. “He’s being so kind / What’s the reason?” The tender emphatic lapse, the little downward drunken swoop or sigh, that Daltrey achieves on that word “kind” — it’s one of the Who’s greatest, quietest moments.

Moon dies; Entwistle dies. Daltrey and Townshend endure. “Years passed.” It takes a robust lack of vanity to include that sentence in your own autobiography. But Daltrey’s peculiar swaggering selflessness is the key to this book, and a key (one of four) to the Who. “Most of those songs were written from a place of pain, as well as spirit. I struggled at first to find that place and you can hear the struggle. But then I inhabited it.” Cripes, as Daltrey might say. Cor blimey. How many rock memoirs actually have a meaning?