It shares this with the debut My Generation. A Quick One gets a guernsey for the title track. Sell Out is higher than a listen would warrant for the sheer pluck of its concept of celebrating pirate radio. Then, leap over Tommy and land on the one that everyone claps, Who's Next. Who By Numbers is overshadowed by the inferior Who Are You as that is the final with band legend Keith Moon. Even the live album gets accolades and the first release of that was mostly covers. But Tommy? It had a film treatment and a complete musical overhaul as well as many stage productions and the band toured on it for years afterwards. These are far better known than the album at the spark end. But this ambitious offering that closed the band's first phase goes oddly unsung.
It really shouldn't, though, as it forms a perfect bridge between the cheeky experiments of the mid sixties and the stadium bombast of the seventies. Yes, it's a big concept that just seems to get bigger as it goes along, right up to the mass prayer at its close, and yet it is the most stripped back the band would ever be. This is an opera with choruses, arias and recitatives, introducing itself with a classical calling card and then crashing through into two fisted rock all on a bed of shining acoustic guitars and harmonies that sound like an orchestra imagined by someone who had never heard one. And even newer Who fans look at the blue latticed pattern cover art and think it's a version of the stage show.
So, what's it all about?
THE STORY
This isn't always clear from the music and lyrics alone but here goes. Mrs Walker hears of the disappearance of her husband on a military mission. She gives birth to their son, known henceforth as Tommy. He returns after the war and murders the man she has taken up with. When the pair see that Tommy has witnessed this they bear down on him with such force that his sight, hearing and speech all shut down. Cures are tried including a sideshow charlatan, a psychedelic drug dealer and a real doctor. The latter reports that the boy's senses are fine but that he needs his inner block broken. That's not so easy when he has left with a psychopathic cousin and paedophilic uncle. No wonder all he can do is stare into a mirror. And play pinball. That's important. His parents become so frustrated that one of them smashes the mirror and Tommy is shocked back into reality. Far from signing up to the local labour exchange he is hailed as a hero (he's already the pinball champion) and then, with a message of enlightenment, a kind of Messiah. He gathers a mass of followers but they come to spurn the commercialism of his ministry with its "pricey deals". They realise they don't want more or any religion and abandon him. At the peak of a life of lucky breaks and traumatising disasters he retreats into himself and sings the prayer we've already heard: Listening to you, I get the music ..... End.
Hokey? Sure, but that's a lot more plot than most operas get and it touches on a lot of the decade grinding to an end, heavy with gurus, drugs, excess and fatality. Like those other operas we might not scruple to take its events entirely literally. Townshend had embarked on his own devotion to the teachings of Meher Baba (whose influence would continue in Who songs not without some characteristic worldliness from his devotee). He had recently failed to be won over by acid but it had affected him deeply. Like Ray Davies, Townshend was intensely self-reflective and while he enjoyed his rock stardom never ceased to question it while still young. War, family dysfunction, hedonism, the assault of touring, the push and pull of swinging London: what did that add up to? Tell it as a story and see what comes out. That's Tommy.
What's also Tommy is the continued influence of co-manager Kit Lambert, son of a famous conductor, full to the brim with Euroculture and his suggestion that the early experiments with narrative and character in songs might be the only way of progressing. He had an orchestral extravaganza in mind. His protege had other ideas. But the notion was sound. The song cycle A Quick One from two years earlier is still a convincing musical story. Rael from the year before has less cohesion but hinted at the power of abstraction (and revealed more than a few musical figures that found their place in Tommy). The Sell Out album has great highlights but loses puff as a concept album. There were a few pointers on the road and Townshend took them.
First, opera. Rock opera. Not just a concept with a story with songs and narration like SF Sorrow or Ogden's Nut Gone Flake. But opera, with an overture, recitatives, arias and choruses, done as rock music. I won't be going through this double album track by track but there will be stations that require some examination. Like the Overture.
THE ALBUM
From the big tolling chords of the opening to the cymbal crash of the last chord the Overture to Tommy is remarkable for a number of reasons. First, while it does run through themes to come it doesn't play them as a quilted medley as composers of third tier opera had. Nor does it play as a more textured indication of the mood of the tale (Mozart's sprightly overture to The Marriage of Figaro screams great big comedy) with figures that begin and end there. And it doesn't just set the scene programatically like Wagner's preludes: the Ring cycle begins with a long pedal note over which the orchestra expresses the strengthening and widening of the Rhine. But it is very classical in structure. The booming opening chords are from 1921. The sprightly guitar and drum interplay is from Go To the Mirror, the blinding organ chords at the end are those of the prayer Listening to You and the coda is a portent of Pinball Wizard but none of this is a series of instrumentals waiting their turn. The chords of one piece will serve the melody of another, the strident French horn figure of We're Not Gonna Take It is easily supported by the chopping rhythm of The Hawker. And so on. This is not a quilt, it's a weave presented by a composer who wanted the piece to serve as a welcome as well as intrigue his listeners.
Also, this was the era of concept albums with big ideas. It was the epoch of Days of Future Passed with its grand orchestral soundscapes and grave poetic narration. Apart from some guitar overdubs, piano reinforcement and big percussion, The Who could play Tommy down the pub as a four piece. The sole orchestral instruments on the album could be played by Entwistle (French horn and trombone) and Moon (gongs, kettle drums) but really, the band would do. Would? Did. The Who spent the next few years playing most of the opera as a good half of their stage show. The sense that, after the hyperbolic responses to things like Sergeant Pepper, this band could rock an opera anywhere they'd fit.
The Overture ends with a bang but from under its dying cymbals comes a pretty acoustic guitar figure which gets strident as Townshend sings about Captain Walker's disappearance and then meanders and glitters until settling into what I'll call the birth theme (slow F# two beats G and D one beat each and D for two beats) which will resurface whenever Tommy comes upon renewal or discovery. Townshend in choirboy voice announces the birth of Mrs Walker's son.
1921 begins with the big tolling chords of the Overture but settles into a jangling major key base as Mrs Walker and her new man declare mutual love and look forward to the future. Enter Captain Walker. Murder! "What about the boy? He saw it all." The parents bear down on the child, scaring him into a sightless, deaf and mute state.
The narrator returns for Amazing Journey. Roger Daltrey in very smooth voice tells us over music that rises and falls like waves that Tommy is not as poorly off as he might seem as his inner life is rich and exploratory, finding wisdom in the disturbance of his illness and even has a vision of a sage or god. And as sickness takes the mind where minds can't usually go we cross a bridge of lovely grinding psychedelia into the instrumental Sparks which plays like an extension of Amazing Journey but progresses further into aural rooms that just seem to get larger. The birth theme plays on acoustic guitar as Entwistle's boomy picked bass brings things back down to earth in an increasingly gentle landing procedure.
The Hawker starts with bright guitar arpeggios before kicking into a strident four on the floor rhythm with a gigantic kettle drum punctuation as Daltrey screams in praise of his woman. He claims she has miraculous powers. This song is accredited to bluesman Sonny Boy Williamson although the musical setting owes a lot of Townshend's reimagining. Tommy's parents are trying religion to cure him. There is an instrumental section which suggests a ceremony or process and it features a tremolo style electric guitar rising between firsts and fifths before the preacher takes over again, letting us know the only thing working around there is his opening pitch.
Christmas bashes into gear with a solid Daltrey vocal backed by powerchords a choral harmony augmented by some very clever tape delay. The day brings both guilt and frustration to the parents who try to coax the boy back to awareness with an increasingly shrill and desperate plea: Tommy can you hear me? And then we hear for the first time the See Me Feel Me response that only Tommy can hear, bright in a clear high pitch against solemn chords before it's back to the parental screaming and a final verse of continued frustration.
Cousin Kevin torments Tommy. A sweet guitar figure plays under equally sweet harmonies that tell of tortures while "the grown ups have all gone away". This is one of two songs that bass and brass player and resident ghoul-humoured member John Entwistle contributed. Coming from his gothic nursery rhymes and proto-metal riffs in earlier albums with songs like Silas Stingy and Boris the Spider, Entwistle imagines the bully as having the confidence of the sneak. Musically, it travels from the glee club opening to some very curly and modal harmonies as the band in choir mode. It's nastier for its sweetness.
Tommy gets lobbed along to the Acid Queen a West End psychedelics dealer and maybe sex worker (it's intentionally ambiguous here) who induces a trip by way of treatment. The lyric about tearing souls apart and twisting bodies is terrifying but the music of the verse is jangling soft rock arpeggios and a five-quaver figure in the chorus to add a little (and really just a little) force. Townshend's vocal approaches a nasty break but never quite gets there. The song sounds solemn rather than scary. There is a tremolo guitar figure in the break that is unmistakably similar to the one in The Hawker. Subsequent interviews with Townshend have revealed that he not only linked the two figures but suggested that the woman of the earlier song was the Acid Queen. Why would they be so far apart in the overall sequence, then? A foreshadowing? No idea but it's an intriguing notion.
The Underture is no longer the joke title and space filling instrumental I first took it for. At over ten minutes it's the longest track on the album. Beginning with the birth theme played on a clean electric guitar and palm muted bass, it uses a figure from the previous album's Rael, this time augmented with powerful kettle drums over Moon's building momentum on the kit. Breaks include a creepy choir under a single note tremolo, frequent returns to the birth theme. This is maintained with this scant material against expectations. It took me a long time of skipping most of this track to realise that this is the trip the Acid Queen gave Tommy and the soaring flights of inner space exploration in Sparks are now fully fledged, dark and cathedral-sized, and expanding. I now think it's a magnificent piece, foreshadowing (for better AND worse) the excesses of prog rock by outfits like Yes or Genesis in the decade to come. The evocation of a mind growing beyond its bounds is certain and powerful, easily imaginable as cinema. An orgasmic triple blast of cymbals and dissonant French horn brings to the end of the first part, first disc, and leaves us with a Tommy as a kind of accidental god.
Do you think it's alright to leave the boy with Uncle Ernie? The next song answers in a profound no. John Entwistle's two contributions to Tommy were (I'm going by autobiographies here) due to Townshend's difficulties in approaching material about bullying and child molestation. Townshend claims he was victim of both. I'm going to believe him, for the record. But it's revealing that he gave them to the member of the band who was best given to the monstrous. Uncle Ernie's song Fiddle About is punctuated by a low growling trombone figure (contributed by Entwistle) and a high and unsettling solo vocal by the bass player. The power of the absence is never felt on this set as keenly as here.
Pinball Wizard begins with excited acoustic guitars that are quickly beefed with power chords and the rest of the band. Daltrey's vocal is forceful. Tommy's inner life is turning into pure power and it makes his parents think. So There's a Doctor follows with sprightly harmonies and hope.
Go To the Mirror is a marvel. The kind of growling amp distortion power chords that Townshend would soon be known for are here displayed in full flight. It's just an E and B-A E but boy does it work. Daltrey in the place of parents and doctor sing that the boy's reflexes are normal but not breaking through and is interrupted by Townshend in chorister mode singing "see me, feel me, touch em, heal me" ready to break through. Townshend as opera composer does this twice before a thrilling whole band imprecation that Tommy approach his mirror. And then, and this still sends shivers, one of the parents says they wish they knew what was happening in his head when the prayer Listening to You breaks out in full band thrust. But only Tommy has heard that. They are still no wiser.
The parents plead Tommy Can You Hear Me to an acoustic wash and lively bass backing to leave the name alone echoing into the void. Smash the Mirror bursts to life like the most potent soul records as the parents scream about his infatuation with the reflection. It ends with breaking glass ans a weird choral ahhh.
In the gentle acoustic rocker Tommy comes to awareness of his fame and miraculous recovery and declares himself a sensation. Note for the strident and lovely French horn accompaniment of the Ox, here. The song Miracle Cure is another chorus in choral Who style.
Sally Simpson is important but often overlooked. As a song it was pulled in from the repetoire as a comment on crowd violence at the live shows but appropriated for the album. Sally, in a narrated verse chorus, is a fan who reached too hard and was left damaged. But then, she did end up with a rock musician who came from California.
I'm Free does the old You Really Got Me trick of starting in one rhythm and continuing in another. Tommy declares himself free of his bounds in increasing passion (courtesy of Daltrey's increasing passion) until the soft to hard rock song ends in a choral descent through the Pinball Wizard riff.
Welcome is a strong emotive Daltrey vocal over a smooth acoustic backing, asking everyone in until too many take him at his word. But, not dismayed, he keeps the message going. Tommy'[s Holiday Camp is the song Townshend wrote for Keith that introduces us to the merch.
We're Not Gonna Take It is the sound of a crowd wising up to commercial snow jobbing. They reject the carnival spruiks and deals and leave him where he is. Alone he resorts to his plea to be felt, seen and healed and loses himself in the prayer Listening to You.
OR
He wins the crowd over and they sing the prayer.
Which do you think it was, children?
Me? I think he reverted and sank back into self immersion. Otherwise, you have to deal with a crowd wised up falling for another carnival trick.
THE BAND
As any account of the experience of this album is going to be work. So much is going on that one moment must have its performance celebrated and another its structure. It's complex but the thing is that after all that this still sounds like record made by a rock band. Actually, they sound more like a band here than on any record since the debut album. The mid '60s saw The Who extending themselves wildly into new sonic territory and Kit Lambert's production was growing ever more adventurous in itself. But Tommy had to be special. If they didn't want to get tagged with pretension or bombast they needed to serve this complicated story up as plainly as they could while still serving the concept. And that's what happens.
Townshend laid down a lot of acoustic guitar tracks with the intention of replacing them with electrics. But he found the effect of the glittering acoustic textures which could shift into strident marches or fanfares. It also added greatly to both the back-to-basics approach and added a more transparent layer, enhancing access for the listener. When he rocks out it feels like it, roaring or crunching electric tone that can settle into a gentle jangle. The sheer breadth of his guitar playing, while it might at first seem on a short spectrum, delivers worlds.
Entwistle and Moon are both solid in partnership and brassy in bravado throughout. Moon takes many opportunities to lighten his famous lead pipe style to provide some real subtlety but then creates thunderstorms when needed. The instrumental performances on this album manage to keep the freshness in. When extra voices are brought in like Entwistle's brass, piano or orchestral percussion it feels taxed by the phrase. As the band provide all their vocals, solos, duets, choruses etc, what might have really sounded overblown ends up far more candid. Kit Lambert's wish to set the piece to a full orchestra was well vetoed by the band. As it is they could play it on stage and they avoided it sounding as dated as the Moody Blues do now.
TOMMY AND ME
Tommy was the first album I bought with my own money. Well, not really. I was newly teenaged and hard to buy presents for so it was Mum's Christmas present that I chose. Oh, and it wasn't this album, it was the movie soundtrack. I wasn't to see the movie for a few years but the inner sleeves and gatefold art with its quilted stills from the film engorged my imagination. But one thing that did come across was a pretty clear sense of the story.
Each character had a particular voice and there were female as well as male voices. Townshend's arrangements leaned heavily on the kind of synthetic orchestration he had been exploring with the Who albums and it was solidly expressive. The experience felt like overhearing a movie and when I finally got to see it at the Twin Cinemas in Townsville with a bunch o' school friends it was actually much better than I had imagined. I knew the name Ken Russell from my sister's accounts of movies like The Music Lovers and I'd seen a local radio station's advance screening of Lisztomania at the same cinema at the end of the year I bought the record. Those experiences seemed to bring a world of creativity and art flashing into my brain.
So, when, after I found I did actually like the Who after getting a dub of Sell Out from a school friend and buying a copy of the Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy compilation, and after many visits to Ken Hurford's Records ended in my leaving the big blue double sleeved opus where it was and exiting the shop confused as to why I should threaten my relationship with the opera by listening to what I could only imagine was a feeble first go.
But one morning in the cooler part of the Townsville year I went into Ken Hurfords and picked it up. Once home, I put it on and was immediately confused that the Overture was not like the big brassy Wagnerian thing from the movie but a rock band playing through what sounded like bits of songs. From there all I heard was weedy vocals and a lot of acoustic guitar. The only Tommy track on Meaty Beaty was Pinball Wizard but that had a full throated Daltrey vocal and some great power chording from Townshend. I liked the weird wobbly choir and guitar crunch in Christmas and Go To the Mirror but I'm Free sounded like The Seekers. As for the Underture ....
You should understand that this was 1978. My most played album was Never Mind the Bollocks. I had a strong sense that The Who's legacy fed straight into the Pistols (they even covered Substitute on the Swindle soundtrack) and this thing ... I made a cassette of the tracks I liked and left it at home when I moved to Brisbane.
But here's the thing (and this is a way of incorporating my listening notes in the main article) the original LP master is muddy and lifeless (and this on the deep dish import vinyl that Ken Hurford sold). It would have taken gentle understanding well beyond my capability to read through that. The record sounded dark in the other sense, also, like the complicated cover art with its strange storybook illustrations and the main triptych of a latticed planet in a starless black sky surrounded by white birds and a fist breaking through the void. I could easily relate all that to the concept but I felt nauseated by it.
Some time in the 2000s I happened on a re-release on CD at a discount and bought it for the sake of it. The remaster opened windows. The shine of the acoustic guitar and growl of the electric, the brightness of the vocal harmonies and meatiness of the bass and drums just popped. It was an extraordinary difference. I started listening to the whole thing regularly. Then when the DVD-Audio appeared with a surround mix overseen by Townshend I snapped it up. And then all the way up to the recent Blu-Ray Audio version (which has the offputting feature of putting the drums to the rear left speaker of the 5.1). I settled on the legit download from and online shop which is how I listen now. The current mastering is "a sensation".
LISTENING TO YOU
It still works. It doesn't invite you in the way that Who's Next or Sell Out do. Bolder in concept but more modest in execution than either of those, this album flaunts the expectations by not sounding like a musical progression. It is the idea that, when you grasp it, does that job. A group that seemed destined to roar and thunder in the stadiums to come stepped back from the foldback speakers to craft a testament to its imagination and maturity. Fans will sooner put I Can See For Miles or Won't Get Fooled Again on eleven while this understated marvel seems to plink underneath them. But, I swear, if you should step from that light into the big dark universe of Tommy and follow its peaks and valleys through to its upsetting inner-cosmos you will feel richer for it, strained, perhaps, but richer.
