THE WHO frontman Roger Daltrey recently revealed to CBS Los Angeles that he went through a cancer scare only weeks before the band played Super Bowl XLIV:

“Suddenly my voice wasn’t behaving in a normal way. It was becoming hard work to sing,” Daltrey said.

Six weeks before the Superbowl, where he was to perform one of the biggest shows of his career, he was told it could have been the end of it.

Daltrey went under the care of Dr. Steven Zeitels, Director of the Mass General Voice Center and a professor at Harvard Medical School. Daltrey is among one of Zeitel’s celebrity patients, including Julie Andrews and Steven Tyler.

“When he came in there were changes that were the typical ones we would see, but then there were other changes on his vocal chords – evidence of pre-cancerous dysplasia,” Zeitels said. “It could have been cancer.”

It was the week before Christmas when Daltrey went in for surgery to treat the area in question. At first he didn’t want to think about what could happen if things went wrong.

“I got depressed after surgery, during what I call the big silence, that’s when I realized what it would be like to not have a voice,” Daltrey said.

But he was lucky. The symptoms that were causing him so much trouble were from extreme voice use. It was a Christmas he will never forget.

“I had two weeks of silence,” Daltrey said. “Silence and no drinking. How’s that for a good Christmas. So, you know, it was the strangest Christmas I’ve ever had.”

Fortunately, weeks later, he improved and he was able to sing at the Superbowl.

“What was great about it was that it was like the early days of rock and roll. For me it’s very much about, ‘It might be the last time you do it so give it all you got,’” Daltrey said.

Click here for the complete interview.

(Thanks RockAAA.com)