transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:03] A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs by Andrew Hickey.

Speaker 2:
[00:09] Song 183, Pinball Wizard by the. Who, Part 2, His Disciples Lead Him In. Before we begin, this episode contains a lot of references to subjects that might upset some people, both in what I say and in the lyrics of the songs excerpted. It contains some discussion of child sexual abuse, both in real life and as a subject of songs, sexual assault, drug use and physical violence. It also discusses songs that have ableist attitudes, and the episode both excerpts them and discusses those attitudes. In particular, the song that gives this two-part episode its title, and others from the same album, use a term for muteness that many non-speaking people find extremely offensive. That term is also used in a working title for the album, and in interviews from the time period, and I will have to mention it as a result, though I will keep uses of the word to a minimum. There are also excerpts from another song from that album that uses the term beginning with G for Romani people, which some Roma consider an offensive slur. My understanding, which may be wrong, is that it's generally considered a slur by Romani people in North America, but that most in Western Europe use the term about themselves. Sadly, that term is used so often in songs from the late 60s and early 70s that it's essentially impossible to avoid it in musical excerpts used in the podcast. Though I won't say it myself. The episode also contains brief mention of domestic abuse, mention of racist violence, alcohol abuse and a longer, though non-graphic, description of a death in a car accident, as well as some descriptions of self-harm and mental illness. If those things may upset you, it might be better to read the transcript or skip this episode rather than listen and it may also be an idea to avoid listening to the music in the accompanying playlist. That said, let's get on with the story. When we left the. Who at the end of the last episode, they had just released the single that Townshend believed was his ultimate single. As we heard, that single did make the top ten in both the UK and the US, This may in part have been because of the lyrics. While they were about jealousy, and Townshend has stated repeatedly that that's all he intended, many listeners heard them as actually being about LSD. And while for most bands, the end of 1967 saw a transition from caring about pop singles, to being about albums, that didn't yet really apply to the. Who. The Who sell out their third album, which had been released at the same time as the single, and which is now often regarded as the group's greatest album, only reached number 13 in the UK, and didn't make the top 40 in the US. However, while the group were making such an impact as a live act, especially in the US where they could make serious money, that didn't matter all that much. As Townshend told the NME, the group has been getting a great feeling of satisfaction from the dates we've played. We'd like to reach the stage where our record success becomes secondary to concerts, and I think we might be getting there. He also got some satisfaction from a message from Sir William Walton, one of Britain's most celebrated composers, who had, among other things, written the coronation marches for both King George VI and Queen Elizabeth II. Walton was Kit Lambert's godfather, and he sent word via Lambert that he had been impressed by I Can See For Miles. Even if the record-buying public weren't as thrilled with his experimentation as he'd hoped, Townshend could take comfort in knowing that someone as renowned as Walton found his work worthwhile. But late 67 and early 68 was a time when Townshend was re-evaluating a lot of his life. He had his first same-sex sexual experience with Danny Fields while on tour in the US, and while the way he describes it in his autobiography makes it sound like a sexual assault rather than a consensual encounter, he also describes enjoying it and it leading him to the realisation of his bisexuality. And, even more importantly, he was becoming interested in the teachings of Meher Barber.

Speaker 3:
[04:42] Meher Barber has come from India with a message to the West. He does not convey this message by speaking but by his mere presence. When he wishes to communicate with people, he uses this board and points to the letters on it. My object in coming to the west is not with the intention of establishing new creeds or spiritual societies and organizations. I see the structure of all the great religions of the world tottering.

Speaker 2:
[05:22] Townshend naturally became a follower of Meher Barber indirectly thanks to the Blues Magoos. As we discussed in the last episode, when the. Who toured on the same bill as the Blues Magoos, two members of the band had introduced Townshend to the works of the New Age guru and supposed UFO contactee, George Adamski. Adamski, you may remember, claimed to have been visited by a Venusian called Orthon, an alien who was truly shocking in appearance. To quote Adamski, There were only two outstanding differences that I noticed as I neared him. One, his trousers were not like mine. Two, they were, in style, much like ski trousers and with a passing thought I wondered why he wore such out here in the desert. Two, his hair was long, reaching to his shoulders, and was blowing in the wind as was mine. But this was not too strange, for I have seen a number of men who wore their hair almost that long. Orthon also apparently communicated only by telepathy or augmented by hand gestures, rather than using words like earth people, at least at first. Though between his first and second visits to Adamski, he learned English. On that second visit, Orthon the Venucian was accompanied by Furcon the Martian and Ramu the Saturnian. They however wore normal business suits, rather than having trousers unlike those of normal men. Orthon, Furcon and Ramu took Adamski to Venus, where they introduced him to someone called the Master, a thousand years old in his current body, who gave Adamski important revelations such as that war is bad and tolerance is good, which he was told to take back to the other people on earth. Townshend was talking to his friend Mike McInnery about this, and McInnery handed him a book which he thought described similar revelations. This was The Godman, a book about Mayor Barber. Mayor Barber is a figure who it's very difficult to sum up in any sensible way. He described himself as a Sufi, but his teachings had little to do with actual Sufism, and seemed to be a blend of Hinduism, Zoroastrianism and Buddhism, with some overlay of Sufi terminology. Those teachings are written in an idiosyncratic jargon, full of terms that are expected to be understood without being explained. And no two sources I consult can fully agree on what those terms mean. One thing that everyone is certain of, though, is that Barber coined the phrase, Don't Worry, Be Happy, which later inspired the hit song by Bobby McFerrin. Babur was born in India to Iranian parents who were members of the Zoroastrian religion. Zoroastrianism is too complex to explain at the moment, though we'll probably get to it in a future episode when talking about Freddie Mercury, but it's an ancient religion based on the teachings of the prophet Zarathustra, which seems to have had a lot of influence on the Abrahamic faiths. But as we've discussed previously, there seems in the late 19th and early 20th century to have been much more fluidity between religions in India than people listening to this would tend to assume. And it was very possible for someone seeking enlightenment to follow a guru of a different religion altogether. So the first master to be followed by Baba was not a Zoroastrian, but Hazrat Babajan, an Afghani Muslim holy woman who had in turn supposedly trained under a Hindu guru. Though almost everything we know about her comes via Baba, whose description of her life contains several miracles which those of us who don't follow either of them must consider sceptically. And it is an interesting point to note, given the themes of gender we have noted in Townshend's writing in the previous episode, that Babajan was a name she chose herself, and the Baba in her name, as in Mayor Baba's similarly self-chosen name, means father, and she would apparently get very angry if anyone referred to her as mother rather than father, claiming that being a woman had connotations of weakness and she was strong. According to Baba, after sitting in silence with Babajan on many occasions, she kissed him on the forehead, thus passing on her barak, a blessing that gives one spiritual powers. He had apparently already had a realisation years earlier, after reading a book on Buddha and coming across talk of the Buddha's future reincarnation as the Maitreya, that he was, in fact, the Maitreya. As he put it, I realised all of a sudden, I am that, actually. Phrasing which will be familiar, if you remember some of the things I've said in earlier episodes about the Vedas. But then he forgot about that until spending time with Babajan. After being kissed by Babajan, by Baba's own description, he spent the next nine months almost catatonic, fasting and living on almost nothing but tea, in a state of divine bliss but with no consciousness of his own body. His parents thought he was mad and took him to doctors who could do nothing. Then one day he went to move his bowels and couldn't, because he hadn't eaten solids in so long and, according to Baba, then I saw with these gross eyes of mine, circles and circles, whole universes. From that moment, instead of the divine bliss that I was in, for nine months I was in such torches that none in the world can understand. I used to bang my head to relieve my pain. I scarred my head on floors and walls. I could not contain myself. It was as if the whole universe was in my head. My sleepless staring vacant eyes will remember the most. This pain, according to Barber, was because he had achieved what he referred to as God-realisation, and was conscious of a greater bliss than anyone knew. But he had to come back to normal levels of consciousness to bring everyone else to that level with him, and he was unwilling to come back to the pain and suffering of normal life. After Barber Jan, Barber went on to follow up Asani Maharaj, a Hindu guru and Ayurvedic doctor who had himself studied with a Muslim guru, Sai Barber, who was regarded by many of his Hindu followers as an incarnation of the god Datta Traya. Maharaj apparently helped Barber to come back to normal consciousness on their first meeting by throwing a stone at the young man's head, which hit him on the forehead in the same place Barber Jan had kissed him, drawing blood. This sort of thing seems to happen a lot in the stories around Barber, though it's usually Barber inflicting the violence rather than having it inflicted on him. All of these stories are filtered through Barber's followers, who say things like, This might sound to ignorant Western ears like abuse, but to those of the mystic East it is apparent that this has a deeper spiritual meaning and is gentle loving kindness. According to Barber, at any time in the world's history there are five perfect masters who are responsible for guiding humanity. Barber John, Maharaj and Maharaj's Guru Sai Barber were three of them. The other two were Tajuddin Barber and Nairan Maharaj. Barber visited all of these, three Muslims and two Hindus, in 1914 and 1915 and learned from all of them over the next few years, while still suffering from the after effects of whatever happened after Barber John kissed him. He would often go off and headbutt rocks until he bruised himself. In 1921, Barber came to the realisation that he was himself the Avatar, a personification of God. According to Barber, every few hundred years the Avatar incarnates in a new human body, and he was the reincarnation of Zarathustra, Rama, Buddha, Krishna, Jesus and Muhammad. In 1922, he gathered 45 followers, 12 Muslim, 11 Zoroastrian and 22 Hindu, who he said should continue to practise their own religions while following him. Barber's teaching, as far as I can understand it, was that everyone started as the same infinite soul, but that that soul got shocked and shattered into pieces which identified themselves with gross material objects. Each soul, according to Barber, starts out as a stone and keeps getting reincarnated as a stone until it has experienced everything that a stone can possibly experience and realised that all the impressions of its existence as a stone have been illusions caused by its form. It then reincarnates as a metal and the same thing happens over again. Then as a plant and it has every possible experience for a plant to have, then a worm, then a fish, then an animal, then a human. Each time the same cycle repeats. Souls get reborn over and over and learn all they can through their sense impressions as worms, as fish or whatever, until they realise that all those sense impressions are false. Only when they have realised that all human sense impressions are false can they once again ascend and become one with God. That point, that one's senses are always lying and that enlightenment comes with the realisation that you can't trust your sense impressions is the theme that we see come up again and again in Townshend's future work. There is one other thing we need to note here about Mayor Barber, and that is that for the last 44 years of his life, from 1925 on, Barber didn't speak a single word. Instead he communicated at first by pointing at letters on an alphabet board, spelling out the words for his followers, and later, having renounced even the written word, by making hand gestures which were interpreted by a trusted follower. He claimed many times that he would say one final word which would shake the world to its foundations and set things up for the next avatar, who will arrive in 700 years. But that word was never spoken before his death in 1969. Townshend started going to meetings with some of Barber's disciples, and also talking with his friend Ronnie Lane of the Small Faces, who became another follower of Barber. The Small Faces and the. Who were very friendly with each other, and had both initially appealed to the same mod audience, though the Small Faces were actual mods, while the. Who had been moulded to appeal to the mods by Pete Meaden. So it made sense that when the. Who toured Australasia, the Small Faces were also on the bill, along with Paul Jones, the former lead singer of Manfred Mann. That tour did not go very well at all. From the very start, it seemed doomed, as the group found out when they got to the airport that they were having to make the 36-hour multi-stop journey in economy class. And then when they arrived in Australia, they immediately had to do a press conference for hostile journalists. The very first question, according to various band members' later memories, was directed at Ian McLagan of the Small Faces, who had recently been busted for pot use, as so many pop musicians of the period were. He was asked, Mr. McLagan, is it true you are a drug addict? And perhaps understandably, swore at the journalist in response, and from that moment on, there was no salvaging the situation. Townshend was amazed, though, to be introduced to a girl who was also a follower of Mayor Barber, who handed Townshend a badge with Barber's face on it, confirming for him that he was looking in the right place by following Barber. He had a brief affair with the girl, and wrote the song Sensation about her, though the lyrics were later gender swapped. That badge became the source of an anecdote which summed up the attitude that some of the other members of the band had to Townshend's newfound religiosity. When Moon saw Townshend wearing it, he asked who was on his badge. Mayor Barber, Townshend replied, to which Moon responded, Is it? Well, you won't see me walking round with a picture of Vidal Sassoon. For some Americans who are reading the transcript rather than listening to the podcast, that joke might not make sense, so as a brief explanation. Most English accents, including both Mine and Moon's, are non-rhotic, which means they drop or soften the letter R when it comes after a vowel but not before another one, while most American accents are rhotic. This means that in English accents, Barber, as in Mayor Barber, is pronounced the same as Barber, as in someone who cuts hair. But other than meeting that girl, little went right for the group. Both the. Who and the small faces were accused of swearing on stage and investigated by Australian police. And then, on an internal flight, a stewardess refused to serve any of the travelling musicians. They complained about this and were accused, possibly correctly, of being drunk and held for three hours at the next airport before having to charter a private plane as the pilot for their connecting flight refused to have them on his plane. That's not to say that the groups in question were innocent of bad behaviour, of course. For a start, there was an incident at Steve Marriott's birthday party where he threw a TV off his balcony, right in front of a passing police car. But there were serious threats that they would be departed and neither the. Who nor the Small Faces could cope with the cultural conservatism of Australia and New Zealand at the time. They likened it to the American Midwest in the 1930s. By the end of the tour, Townshend in particular was vowing never to return. And he didn't for more than 40 years. The feeling was mutual. New Zealand newspaper The Truth said of both groups on their departure, We really don't want them back again. They are just unwashed, foul-smelling, booze-swelling no-hopers. The stress of the tour traumatised Moon in particular. And a typical story told about him is when on their next trip to the US, three of the. Who were meeting with Frank Barcelona. He knew Townshend very well already but didn't know the other three. Barcelona made a remark about how if the group were making serious money now, they should consider investing in businesses in Australia, which he saw as a growing market. Moon immediately went into a frenzy, screaming and throwing the wine he'd been drinking all over Barcelona's furniture, ranting about how he hated Australia and if Kit Lambert were there he would punch Lambert in the face, becoming a totally different person as if a switch had been flipped, before eventually calming down, apologising and leaving having ruined the night. Entwhistle, who remained behind, said to Barcelona, You know my song Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde? Now you see what my inspiration was. This is the first time you've seen it, but we see it all the time. When the rest of the group got back to their hotel, they found they were being kicked out. Moon had blown up the toilet in his room with cherry bombs, not the first time he had done so, and was now throwing cherry bombs from his hotel balcony at police on the street who were trying to figure out how to arrest him without being blown up themselves. Moon's vandalism and drunken buffoonery were at the time often laughed off, at least by casual acquaintances and friends who only saw him in public. But he was a deeply, deeply disturbed person, and while he would play the fool in public because of his desperate need to be loved, in private that would often turn to violence, both against his bandmates and, inexcusably, against his wife, who left him on multiple occasions after his violence got too much but always returned when he promised to reform. Most of these violent turns and angry outbursts, like the incident with Barcelona, happened when he was drunk. He was by all accounts the nicest man in the world when sober. The problem was, he was getting drunk more and more often and spending less and less time sober. After the Australian tour, of course, there was more music to be made. Plans were made initially for an album to be released during the Wimbledon finals that year to be titled Who's For Tennis, though, as it turned out, the. Who would not release an album in 1968 at all. Townshend was eager to expand his musical vocabulary. He had been teaching himself the piano and learning orchestration, and he was doing exercises in different styles. One of the first things he wrote and demoed after the Australian trip was a song titled Going Fishing, an attempt to copy the style of Brian Wilson's work on the Beach Boys' Smiley Smile album. There was also a new non-album single, Call Me Lightning, which wasn't released as an A-side in the UK, and barely scraped the top 40 in the US. In the UK, that was released as the B-side of another single, Dogs, a song about greyhound racing that shows the strong influence of the small faces. That only made. 25, the lowest that any proper. Who single endorsed by the band themselves had ever reached, other than their version of The Last Time, which had never been promoted. Townshend later said of this period, We went through that very funny period of Happy Jack and Dogs. It was also a very terrifying period for me as the Who's Only Ideas Man. For instance, Though I Can See For Miles was released after Happy Jack, I'd written it in 1966, but had kept it in the can for ages because it was going to be the Who's Ace in the Hole. If you want the truth and nothing but, I really got lost after Happy Jack and then when I Can See For Miles bombed out in Britain, I thought, what the hell am I going to do now? The pressures were really on me and I had to come up with something very quick. Daltrey was similarly dismissive of this period, describing it later as, a real self-indulgent wanking-off period that didn't work. And once again the group seemed on the verge of splitting up. Townshend later said of this rather floundering period. When this happens, a group generally splits up. If a group goes along without accelerating its talents, it is inevitable that you either split up or you go into cabaret. We said, it can't be that simple. Why should we split up? The group were in a quandary. We still worshipped the two and a half minute rock single, but worshipping it and playing it are two different things. Musically, the. Who were totally capable of making records like these, but by now we were doing things that just couldn't be captured on the pop single. We needed a bigger vehicle. Speaking of vehicles, their next single was another sound that Townshend was wheel spinning creatively. It was a remake of Magic Bus, the song he had given to the Pudding the year earlier. That did no better than Dogs in the UK chart, and was equally unloved by the band members, especially Endwhistle, who found it dull playing the simplistic, bowdiddly riff. While there was, in 1968, the start of a move back to more simple, straightforward, blues-influenced rock, that move was more noticeable among album artists than among singles artists like the. Who. The pop charts were still looking for innovation, not for anything retro. It made number 25 on the US charts, and number 10 on the Cashbox charts, one of the bigger discrepancies I've seen between the Cashbox and Billboard tallies. The single was successful enough in the US that when a planned live album of the group shows at the Fillmore East was rejected by the band, their US label put together an odds and sods collection titled Magic Bus, the. Who on Tour, which was meant to give the impression that it was a live album. The actual live album didn't get released until 2018, when it finally got a release to attend the copyright. As well as the live album, Lambert's Who's for Tennis idea was stalled after Lambert supposedly left several of the master tapes the group had recorded in a taxi. Oddly though, while Townshend was unable to come up with a hit for his own band as a songwriter, he produced a bigger hit for someone else than the. Who ever had. Townshend had been a fan for a long time of the band The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, and had got Brown and his band signed to track records. Townshend is credited as associate producer of The Crazy World of Arthur Brown's Eponymous first album, with Lambert the credited producer. That was recorded in June 1968, shortly after the recording of Dogs, and shortly after Townshend's marriage, and on its release in September, became one of the biggest hit records track ever had, reaching number one in the UK and number two in the US, and selling well over a million copies. At the end of June, the. Who had to fly off to the US again for yet another US tour, their second of 1968. While the group loved them American success, they were starting to see it as a double-edged sword, with Moon saying around this time, We are in an interim sort of position at the moment, both over here and in America, because although we have established a name for ourselves in both countries, we are not really an established group. What the. Who really need is a million seller, and I think we ought to stay in England and just flood the US market with records until we achieve that. I think that at the moment we are losing out both in America and England, because we are not spending enough concentrated time in each country. On one of the US tours of 1968, the group met up with their old friends the Yardbirds, themselves going through the motions on the way to splitting up for good. And Moon and Entwistle both once again talked with Jimmy Page about possibly quitting the. Who to join his new supergroup. Both Moon and Entwistle were pushing for the name that had been thrown about the previous year, Led Zeppelin, though at this point only Entwistle was really interested in joining Page's band. He was getting stressed that his songs were only being put on B-sides, and he wasn't getting any A-sides or many album tracks, and was looking for another outlet for his writing. Townshend was also annoyed that at that point he couldn't have a concentrated period of time thinking about his plans for his music. He and Lambert had been talking with each other about the possibility of the. Who doing something that might be considered a Rock Opera, a long-form musical narrative that would take up an entire album, a longer version of what Townshend had already done with A Quick One While He's Away, or the group's friends the Small Faces had done that spring, with Side Two of Ogden's Not Gone Flake. That idea was definitely in the air at the time, and before Townshend had a chance to complete his Rock Opera, several other bands released narrative albums. The first, but largely ignored, had been a psychedelic duo called Nirvana, who we heard about briefly in the Jimmy Cliff episode, and whose album The Story of Simon Simopath had come out in December 1967. A better known example came out while Townshend was working on his own opera, though. The Pretty Things released SF Sorrow in December 1968. Ray Davis was also working on his own narrative album, Arthur, or The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, though the Kinks wouldn't release that until after the. Who released theirs. And as far back as 1967, Mark Wirtz had planned a piece called A Teenage Opera, which had never been completed, but the single, excerpt from A Teenage Opera, sung by Keith West of the band Tomorrow, had been a huge hit, and Townshend liked the record. There was clearly something in the air. Townshend's initial plan for a rock opera had been to expand Rael from the. Who sellout into a full-length work and have Arthur Brown, who had an operatic baritone voice, sing it, rather than have it be a. Who album. He was eventually persuaded to concentrate on the. Who as a vehicle for his operatic ambitions, but you can still hear musical elements of Rael in parts of the album, partly because Townshend found himself having to reuse material because of distractions like having to tour the US. The tour did, though, give him a piece of inspiration, though in rather a sad way. When the group was supporting the doors, Townshend saw a girl injure her face by trying to get on stage to get to Jim Morrison. That unpleasant experience inspired the song Sally Simpson, though by the time the. Who recorded it, the protagonist was no longer trying to get to a rock star, but to someone else on the stage. Also on that tour, Townshend gave a long interview to Yann Wenner of Rolling Stone magazine. An interview in which at one point he wondered if he had been spanked because he was thinking differently than normal. In a later interview he would admit that while by that point he had given up on psychedelic drugs after reading that Mayor Barr were disapproved of them, he had compensated for that by increasing his consumption of both cannabis and cocaine, and was on a lot of cocaine when he gave the interview. In that interview he gave a long explanation of the idea that he and Kit Lambert had been working on for the album. That explanation was more or less off the top of his head, including quite a few details that he hadn't yet firmed up. But when Wenner printed it, Townshend felt that he had now been locked in, and that that story would have to be the one he told. The idea was a story called, and here I have to use that offensive term for non-speaking people, and so I apologize in advance, The Deaf Dumb and Blind Boy. The idea was to have the narrative be based around a child. Townshend refers to him as Tommy in the interview, but also makes it clear that at that point this was just a placeholder name, though it later became the name both of the protagonist and of the album, who can't see or hear and who therefore also can't talk, but who can still feel music as vibrations in his body, and these feelings would be the only impressions he would have of the world around him. The name Tommy was chosen because the album was to be in part about trauma, and in particular the generational trauma of those growing up, as Townshend had, in the aftermath of the Second World War, though Townshend later decided to change it to after the First World War. Tommy was both a fairly common forename and also the nickname of British soldiers in both world wars, so the name worked well as a generic name for a British boy of that era. Townshend also liked it because it contained the syllable om, which is the most sacred symbol in Hinduism, and Hinduism in turn was one of the major streams of thought that fed into Mayer Barber's beliefs. Tommy would be physically abused by his father and sexually abused by an uncle, but would not experience these things as good or bad, just as pure sensation, just like the sense impressions that Mayer Barber wrote about, and he interprets those sensations as music. At some point he would gain the ability to see and hear, and this would give him a new level of enlightenment, which in Townshend's telling would have paralleled the awakening of Mayer Barber and other enlightened individuals into understanding of God. In order to have that awakening, Tommy had to be physically capable of seeing and hearing, so his inability would have to be a psychosomatic one. Several interviews and reviews describe him as autistic, but this is very much a 1960s pop culture understanding of autism, which has less than nothing to do with the actual condition. I am told by someone who has it that Tommy matches a condition called functional neurological disorder rather better. I don't know enough about that condition to say that's the case, but I mention it here in case that's a lead anyone else wants to follow. Townshend's explanation of all this was actually slightly more coherent than the eventual album's narrative ended up being, but he still had the problem of how he could turn that into an album. At the start, despite having used the term Rock Opera, the plan was to have the album be a series of songs with no particular musical connection. Indeed, the initial plan had them including cover versions along with originals, incorporating the covers into the narrative. One cover version would survive into the album proper, but one that didn't was the first song they recorded for the album. Moe's Allison's Young Man's Blues had always been a favourite of the groups to cover live.

Speaker 3:
[38:43] Young man, ain't nothing in this world these days.

Speaker 4:
[39:10] In the old days...

Speaker 2:
[39:15] Daltrey in particular always liked that song, and early on the intention was to incorporate the song into the narrative. Possibly this was partly because the song was not originally titled Young Man's Blues, but was called Backcountry Suite Blues, and was part of a suite of ten short songs on Alison's first album. Maybe the group thought that it would be appropriate to nod to someone else who had combined pop songs with more ambitious classical forms. Either way, the group recorded their version in a heavy rock style, and when they later decided that it didn't fit the album, it was first thought of as a potential stopgap single, but eventually sneaked out just on a cheap compilation of track records artists' work. The album took six months for the group to record. They had the recording studio block-booked from Mondays through Fridays and spent the weekends playing one-off gigs. One of those one-off shows was for the Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, a show we looked at in the episodes on Sympathy for the Devil, and which was apparently inspired initially by a plan the. Who and Small Faces had cooked up together for a joint tour in a circus big top, which never worked out. For that show, the. Who only performed one song, though that one song was A Quick Run While He's Away, which ran to seven and a half minutes, nearly the length of three normal songs of the time period. The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus wouldn't get a release for nearly 30 years, and one of the reasons often given is that the Stones felt that they had been upstaged by the. Who, who gave the best performance of the day. There was even a suggestion a year or two later that the special could be re-edited without the Stones' performance and turned into the Who's Rock and Roll Circus, though that never went anywhere. But while the group continued playing live shows, they were spending most of their time in the studio working on a project that was infinitely more ambitious than anything they had done before. Tommy, the album, was conceived as a single piece, but at the same time it was partly made up of pre-existing pieces that Townshend had already written, and as we heard last time, in some cases that the. Who had already recorded and even released in other forms. As Townshend said later, I didn't write Tommy in any kind of chronological order. I already had some of the material, Sensation, Welcome, Sparks and Undercure. We're not going to take it was a kind of anti-fascist statement. The first rundown of the idea I put on a graph. It was intended to show Tommy from the outside and the impressions going on inside him. To help navigate the complex storyline, which initially only existed in random notes and in Townshend's head, Kit Lambert wrote a film script titled Tommy 1914-1984. That script was used to structure the group's work, but it was also intended at the time that Lambert would actually try to make a film based on the album. Lambert and Stamp had started working with the. Who five years earlier, after all, as a way to become filmmakers, and they both still wanted to do that. And so Lambert's script was possibly going to be used for the actual film, which Lambert would of course direct. Lambert's script just pulled together the things that Townshend had been talking about in interviews and in discussions with the other band members, but by doing so it helped turn vague ideas into something at least semi-coherent. As Townshend explained in an interview just after the album's release, the writing of Kit's film script made a lot of difference too. He wrote a film script for the opera and that changed my ideas towards the plot a lot because he put forward some very groovy ideas with a groovy kind of scenario which I liked and which added to the atmosphere of some of the songs which had already written. I wanted to let that atmosphere leak in more. Townshend has pushed back against this interpretation in later years, saying in his autobiography, Another myth is that Kit completed and guided the story around Tommy. He typed out what we settled on together, but only several days after the album was completed and the track sequenced. He did this in part to protect the dramatic copyright. He also did it to create a film treatment, something I wasn't aware of at first. That's clearly not what he was saying in 1969 and I suspect is an example of Townshend's memory being coloured by his later disagreements with Lambert. At this point Lambert was at least as important to collaborate with Townshend as the other band members were. He and Townshend would bounce ideas off each other and Lambert would encourage Townshend to go even wilder with his ambitious ideas. At a point where the other members of the group didn't fully understand what Townshend was trying to do, having someone who not only got it but pushed him further was essential. It was Lambert for example who made the important suggestion that the album, which eventually became a double album as the narrative expanded, should open with an overture like a proper opera. That was not only a statement of intent, something saying that the album was intended as a serious work, a rock opera and not just a concept album, but it also gave the piece as a whole more coherence than it otherwise would have had. The overture includes statements of several musical themes that turn up in later songs on the album, so when they return later it gives the piece more of an internal structure. It contains sections prefiguring 1921. We're not going to take it. See me, feel me. Listening to you. Pinball Wizard. And underneath them all, the bass part from Go to the Mirror. That said, not all of Lambert's ideas were taken on board by the group. Lambert wanted to bring in an orchestra and have the album fully orchestrated. That wasn't necessarily a bad idea. And as we'll see in a future episode, when we get to the 1970s, the album got reinterpreted several times, including orchestral versions. But the group wanted to have something that they could perform live. And for that reason, the entire album was performed only by the four members of the. Who, apart from some additional backing vocals by Townshend's brothers. Townshend played all the keyboard parts as well as the guitars, while Entwistle added French horn. The album was not recorded in anything like chronological order. And indeed a lot of the album was recorded multiple times over, as decisions made about later songs required rewrites of earlier ones. But because it's a narrative, it's probably best if we go through the tracks and talk about that narrative as it appears in the original album. The tracks segue in to one another as would happen in an opera and as had also happened on a few albums in the previous couple of years. Most notably of course, Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, but also Frank Zappa's Absolutely Free, an album which with its recurring musical motifs and two extended movements is a bigger influence on many of the concept albums that came after it than many people realise. This segueing means that some tracks made up of multiple movements are labelled differently on the vinyl and CD releases of the album. And so sometimes I might say that something is part of one track when your copy has it as another. I'm going to go with whichever version makes the most sense to me at any given time. For example, on the original release, The Overture is a purely instrumental track, three minutes and fifty seconds long. The follow is a vocal section which is now included in The Overture but was originally part of the next track. In that brief section, the narrator, who otherwise only turns up in Sally Simpson and Amazing Journey, outlines the disappearance in combat of Captain Walker in the last weeks of the First World War, leaving his pregnant wife at home alone. Oddly, Overture was covered and released as a single by a band of studio musicians called Assembled Multitude, who recorded an album of instrumental cover versions of then-current hits like MacArthur Park and Ohio. That single made number 16 on the US charts. Tom Sellers, the arranger behind the Assembled Multitude record, went on to arrange records like Glen Campbell's Rhinestone Cowboy. But the other musicians on that record are people we'll be hearing from again. Under the name MSFB, those session players were the house band at Sigma Sounds, and played on every classic Philly soul record by artists like Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, the OJs, the Stylistics, and the Spinners. After the Overture, there's a track titled It's A Boy. On the vinyl release, this included the excerpt about Captain Walker, but on the CD, the track name is given just to a short fragment sung by Townshend as a nurse, one of several vocals on the album in which he takes on a female persona. Interestingly, in Townshend's autobiography, when he talks about this, he says, and the wording is important here. To confuse things, I also took the role of narrator, and was supposed to sing Captain Walker Didn't Come Home from the Overture, as well as the role of the nurse who delivers baby Tommy and sings the entirety of Amazing Journey and Acid Queen. I don't know if Townshend may be phrased this clunkily, but that suggests to me that at least at some point, the character of the nurse was also meant to be the Amazing Journey narrator and the Acid Queen. If so, that certainly doesn't come across in the record, and there are definitely different characters in any of the later reworkings of the material, which we will talk about when we do our next episodes on the. Who, when we get to 1971. The next song moves forward two years and is titled 1921. This is, lyrically if not musically, I throw back to A Quick One While He's Away, but with a much darker outcome. Mrs Walker's husband has been missing, presumed dead for two years, and she has, understandably enough, moved on with her life and taken a lover. But then it turns out that her husband isn't dead at all, and he turns up. This, like much of the narrative of the album, is not actually clear. For most of the record, there's no narrator, and the story is told by either the character's dialogue or their internal monologue, but they only rarely explain their actions in any sensible way. And with only the members of the. Who to play all the different characters, it's sometimes not even entirely clear who's meant to be singing. But what is clear is that unlike in A Quick One While He's Away, when Captain Walker arrives home and finds his wife in flagrante delicto with another man, he is not as inclined to be forgiving. A murder takes place. This is only implied in the lyrics, and it's not even clear who is murdered. The implication is apparently that the lover is murdered by Captain Walker. But in the film adaptation, it's Captain Walker himself who gets murdered by the lover. And both interpretations are possible from the actual lyrics. But there's a problem. Little Tommy saw everything reflected in a mirror. So his mother and either his father or stepfather keep emphasising to him, You didn't see it. You didn't hear it. You won't say nothing. Little Tommy is so traumatised by this that he takes those instructions literally, and develops a psychosomatic condition which makes him deafblind and unable to talk. This is something that is completely implausible if you know anything at all about the way trauma or the brain works, but makes sense with the kind of popfroidian psychology that Townshend was aware of at the time. This popfroidianism in fact lays very deeply at the heart not only of Tommy, but of a lot of the. Who's work, and this is where I have to speak very carefully, and where I also ask people please not to interpret anything I am saying here as meaning anything other than the very specific words I am saying. Any influence you make or implications you read into what follows are absolutely not intended, and I will be very upset at anyone who accuses me here of saying something that I didn't say. I am trying here to be respectful of something very delicate. Townshend has talked, often, about how he has recovered memories of some kind of trauma, related to sexual abuse at the hands of his grandmother and or her lovers, which he had at least partially repressed as a child, and which has come out in much of his work. Now Townshend also acknowledges, correctly, that that kind of repression is not actually how trauma works. We now know that most of Freudianism is dangerously wrong, that people who have undergone trauma don't repress the memories at all, and that most so-called recovered memories are confabulations which people believe to be true memories but are no such thing. As we talked about at the beginning of last episode, memories change every time we recall them and talk about them, and so it is entirely possible for people to have strong, vivid memories of something happening to them when that thing absolutely did not happen. People with such recovered memories are not liars, in the sense we understand that term. They absolutely believe they're false memories, and for exactly the same reason that I believe I had a sip of sparkling water five minutes before writing this sentence. But Townshend, while acknowledging that his recovered memories probably aren't, also still believes that he was actually abused, and I have no reason to disbelieve him. Child abuse is far more common than we would like to think, and there is no reason not to believe that Townshend was actually abused, even if some of the memories he now has are confabulations. And, no matter which of his memories are real and which aren't, there is no doubt at all that those memories are very traumatic, painful ones for him, and Tommy, more than much of his work, deals with those experiences to an extent that he has been known to break down in tears when performing parts of it live. Musically, 1921 has a lot of characteristics that come up again and again in the album. The intro is inspired by baroque music and has a C chord, without the third, but with a descending bass line going down chromatically from C to G. Well, the So You Think 21 is gonna be a good year section alternates between a G and a Gsus4 chord. The kind of shuffling of suspended chords we saw Townshend doing a lot in the previous episode, and we'll see in much of the rest of the material on Tommy. Amazing Journey, which follows, sets out much of the story and is the core of the whole album. Amazing Journey was one of the first things Townshend wrote specifically for the album. He also wrote it on piano, which was unusual for him, as he had only relatively recently started learning the instrument. The song was so important to the conception of the album that the full lyrics were included on the back cover of the album, along with credits. Including, along with the credits for the band members, one for Mayor Barber as Avatar, though as Townshend would say later, that was partly a joke. The idea of Avatar being like a function, which in fact it is, very much a function. Just like being the Messiah, it's a job of work which somebody has to do. The song was originally a much longer poem about Townshend's own feelings, which he cut down to the present lyric and set to music, and talks about how while Tommy is cut off from the world of the senses, unable to see, hear or speak, he nonetheless grows in his dreams. Those dreams mostly take the form of music, a hangover from the original concept of the album, which had Tommy feeling everything as vibrations. But he also gets visions of a stranger in long robes, who appears to be intended to be a vision of Tommy's own future self. Though, apart from the character having a beard, he sounds again as if he's based on Barber, whose followers often talked about how he could communicate more with a simple expression or gesture than anyone else could with words. Amazing Journey is followed by Sparks, an instrumental track named after a book of Mayor Barber's sayings, and based around a musical theme that Townshend had already used in Rael on the previous album. The next track is the only cover version to appear on the album. While it's titled The Hawker on the album, the song in question was originally titled Eyesight to the Blind and recorded by its composer, Sonny Boy Williamson II. However, the group had originally encountered the song, not through Williamson's blues track, but through a cover version by Moe's Allison, who we heard earlier singing Young Man's Blues, and who was a big influence on the group, especially Townshend at this point. Indeed, Townshend actually wanted to include another song he'd learned from Rose Allison, One Room Country Shack, originally recorded by Mercy D. Walton, a song which, like Eyesight of the Blind, includes reference to deafness, blindness, and being unable to speak. Indeed, there may have been even more than those three. In an interview shortly after the album's release, Townshend says, Originally, there were a lot of old blues songs I wanted to run in it, because there were a lot of blues songs about things like triples and blindness and all this sort of thing, like, I'm gonna get me some kind of companion, even if she's dumb, devil-crippled and blind, I'm so lonely, all this sort of thing. And I wanted to get all those in because I thought there were great blues comments, which fitted in really well to the structure of the opera as I saw it then. It wasn't half as pop and cosmic cartoony as it is now. The lyrics to I Sight to the Blind, about a woman so amazing she can make blind people see, make devil people hear and make mute people talk, obviously resonated perfectly with the concept of Tommy, and so the. Who recorded the song unchanged. In the Rock Opera, as the altered title suggests, it's sung by someone trying to sell Tommy's parents on a cure which can be provided by his girlfriend, who we'll encounter later. Christmas, which follows, is another song like Amazing Journey, which is both tightly linked to the narrative and also sets up a lot of the musical themes that will recur throughout the rest of the album. The song is about how children enjoy Christmas, but Tommy can't understand it, and asks how he can find salvation if he doesn't know Christ. But it also includes the first appearances of two motifs that will appear throughout the rest of the album. Townshend singing Tommy Can You Hear Me. Paltry and characterist Tommy, whose voice as internal marlog we finally hear for the first time. Apart from the countervocal singing I Saw It, I Heard It when being told otherwise by his parents. Singing See Me, Feel Me. Initially, the plan had been for Townshend, rather than Daltrey, to sing the See Me Feel Me theme, which recurs several times in the course of the album, and have Daltrey only play the adult Tommy, but this would have meant that Daltrey was barely heard on the first disc of the double album, as so much of it is sung by characters played by Townshend and Antwhistle. Thankfully for him, he demonstrated that he was able to sing that section in a far more sensitive manner than his normal vocals, and so he became a larger part of the early sections of the album. The See Me Feel Me motif, which recurs throughout the album, is another example of Townshend's fascination with suspended chords. The cycle on the See Me Feel Me Touch Me Heal Me lyrics goes E flat major 7th, F suspended 4th, F, F suspended 4th, F, G, over and over. We then have one of two songs written for the album by Entwistle, though both come from concepts from Townshend. Townshend wanted to have Tommy experience abuse, but felt unable to write songs about the subject himself, finding it too close to his own trauma, so he asked Entwistle, who was known for having a dark sense of humour, to write both. Cousin Kevin, sung as well as written by Entwistle, is sung from the perspective of a cousin of Tommy's who has left to babysit him, and who delights in torturing him. This is one of several songs which are written from the perspective of different characters. Townshend said at the time that one of the aims of the album was that because it was impossible for people to see themselves in Tommy's experiences, he wanted to create many characters who people could identify with, but to make them want to be able to identify with Tommy. However, these characters, he named Cousin Kevin, Uncle Ernie, The Acid Queen and Sally Simpson, are, with the exception of Sally Simpson, all grotesques, and also in one way or another abusive, and one would hope that most people wouldn't identify that closely with any of them, though perhaps that hope suggests a rather more optimistic view of humanity than is warranted. After Cousin Kevin, we have a song that's oddly placed. The Acid Queen is actually, narratively, a follow up to The Hawker, and is sung from the perspective of The Hawker's girlfriend, a sex worker who in an attempt to cure Tommy introduces him to the pleasures of both sex and hallucinogenic drugs. Townshend admitted in interviews shortly after the album's release that this was an odd bit of sequencing, and in later revisions, like Ken Russell's film version, the Acid Queen comes right after The Hawker. The song is also notable for once again seeming in some ways to refer back to Townshend's own trauma. This is the song which uses the word for Romany people I mentioned at the top of the episode, and Townshend's abusive grandmother was apparently of Romany descent. He said of the song later, When I sing the acid queen, there's a bit of my mother's voice comes in there. I'm kind of angry with my mother, and I'm angry with all women who are mothers. It's a misogynist song in a way. I can sing it as a woman. While Townshend wanted to make the character of Tommy an exceptional person who nobody could relate to. The idea is that by the end he becomes, to use the terminology of the Mayer Barber movement, God realized. He also wanted Tommy to be in some way the perfect embodiment of the typical post-war British male. As he said later, the song's not just about acid. It's the whole drug thing, the drink thing, the sex thing wrapped into one big ball. The acid queen was meant, as well as being a specific abuser, to be a representative of societal pressure on adolescents to drink, to have sex, to take drugs and to be told they are lesser or freaks or not normal if they don't do those things. This is followed by the album's third and final instrumental track, this time meant to represent the hallucinations that Tommy experiences while on acid supplied by the acid queen. Titled Underchore, it once again reprises the theme from Royale that was also used in Sparks, helping to give the album a much needed musical coherence. Underture was titled as a joke, a play on overture. Townshend was, several years later, astonished to discover that a favorite album of his at the time, Blood Sweat and Tears' Childish Father of the Man, also had a track titled Underture. Townshend had only had a taped copy of the album, so he didn't know any of the track titles, and didn't find out the coincidence until an interviewer asked him in 1972 if it was a reference. There's then a short track titled, Do You Think It's All Right?, in which Tommy's parents question whether his uncle Ernie would be a suitable babysitter, coming to the conclusion that he would, before the next song makes it very clear that he is absolutely not. Fiddler Bout is the second of the songs written and performed by Antwistle, this time in character as uncle Ernie, a child molester who sexually abuses the helpless Tommy. As is the case with Antwistle's other work, the song is played for laughs, but if it's funny at all it's a bleak kind of humour and many people will question whether it's a fit subject to joke about at all, though given that Townshend was the one who asked Antwistle to write it and was himself a survivor, it reads to me like the kind of bleak you have to laugh or else you'll cry joke that many people make about their own worst experiences. I won't, however, excerpt it here in case it's upsetting to people who've had similar experiences themselves. Townshend himself seems to be ambivalent about the song even from sentence to sentence, saying in his autobiography, I liked it very much, it was disturbing, relentless and powerful, although I was sad that it also seemed to turn into a dark joke something I myself had found so disturbing as a child. Still it did the job nicely and I was relieved not to have to battle with the subject myself. But after that comes the song which gave this episode its title, and about which there is of course quite a lot to say. When planning the story of Tommy, Townshend had always had in mind that Tommy himself should gain a following of teenagers, much like the one that a rock star would have, and that these followers should be admirers of his, even before he has his mystical experience. He's made different statements about what would have caused Tommy to get those followers at different times, but it seems quite likely, given that so much of the initial plan of the album was about Tommy feeling the vibrations of music even though he couldn't hear it, that Tommy was originally intended to be a musician of some sort. In his autobiography, he describes the early plan for Tommy both as him being a guru and a kind of divine musician, who felt vibrations as music and made music in the hearts of his followers. But then Townshend played some of the tracks from the album to the journalist Nick Cohn, someone who had generally been quite supportive of the group's music, and who was at that point the Guardian's pop music critic. Cohn thought the idea of Tommy being a guru was, in Townshend's words, old hat. The Beatles' infatuation with the Maharishi had been at the beginning of 1968, and it was now 1969, after all. Townshend tried to explain about Tommy not only being a guru, but also a divine musician. But this didn't impress Cohn any more. Cohn said that he probably would not give the album a five-star review. But then Townshend had an idea. Cohn was a huge enthusiast for Pinball, an enthusiasm he shared with Townshend, and was then writing a novel titled Arthur, Teenage Pinball Queen. What if Tommy got his teenage followers by being great at Pinball? Well, Cohn said, obviously that would be a five-star album. So Townshend went off and wrote the song that would become the single off the album, and the group's first UK Top 5 single in two years. Cohn was. He was as good as his word, and gave the album a rave review, saying in part, Tommy is just possibly the most important work that anyone has yet done in rock, and this just might be the first pop masterpiece. The start of the track is another one influenced by Baroque music. The very start of the intro this time has a pedal bass, a bass keeping the same note, an F sharp, as one might in Baroque organ music, with the chords changing by one note each time, going from B minor to B minor suspended fourth to F sharp 7 to F sharp 7 suspended fourth to F sharp minor 7, each one with one note going down a tone or semitone while keeping the rest of the chord the same. You can play it with quite a Baroque feel. But the intro also has another inspiration from a different type of classical music. Townshend said of the song shortly after Tommy was released, It's a very recent influence from that Strauss music in 2001. I just built up a similar rock structure on it, the same sort of thing, and it works in exactly the same way. I suddenly realised the other day that that's what I'd done. The music in question also struck Zarathustra, coincidentally named after the prophet who inspired Zoroastrianism, Meher Baba's religion, had become very popular after Kubrick's film 2001. And you can hear a faint family resemblance between Strauss's piece. And Pinball Wizard, even though none of the actual notes are the same. The song is sung by Daltrey, giving him a rare lead vocal in the first part of the album. As well as writing that song, Townshend rewrote the lyrics to a couple of other songs to include references to Pinball. And depending on how one looks at it, the change either adds a pleasant level of absurdity and surrealism to a story that was otherwise in danger of getting far too pompous, or makes the story ridiculous and unbelievable. I have taken both attitudes at different times as my artistic views have shifted, and I'm sure I'll go back and forth on it over future decades. Townshend has always acknowledged the ridiculousness of Pinball being such a crucial part of the story, saying what we have to accept is that what he's got a following for is pretty bloody stupid. Again, it's metaphorical. If he's a Pinball champion, it's just about as credible and valid as somebody having a huge following for writing songs about boys that wank over pictures and smashing guitars. Townshend even found a way to convince himself that the introduction of Pinball into the story resonates with the larger themes. Mayor Barber had said on multiple occasions that God plays marbles with the universe, and indeed Barber himself had been a keen marbles player. And there's one famous story about Barber telling his disciples to bring him their best marbles because he wanted to play a game with them. He went first and took his shot with such force that several of their marbles, all made of glass, smashed. He then said in a serious tone that that was the end of the game. His serious mood and the smashing of the glass was later taken as a premonition. Right after the game he got into a car and was in a car accident that left him with mobility problems for the rest of his life and which killed his companion, Neelu. According to another of Barber's companions, named Vishnu, even though Barber was seriously injured in the crash, in the immediate aftermath, never in my life have I seen such utter radiance and lust as was on Barber's face then. He was like a king, a victorious king who had won a great battle. Lord Krishna must have looked like that in his chariot on the victorious battlefield. The radiance was blinding. I could see nothing else. Not the car nor the surroundings. Only Barber's face in glorious triumph. One thing the inclusion of Pinball does do, though, is completely wreck the chronology of the story. And again, everything about the story becomes much more sensible if you have Captain Walker fighting in the Second World War rather than the first. Because the lyrics of Pinball Wizard describe Pinball as it was played in the 50s and 60s. But that particular type of Pinball table wasn't invented until after the Second World War. So, Tommy, the deaf dumb and blind kid, is in his late 30s or early 40s when he starts playing Pinball. For more, a lot more, on the history of Pinball and why the song doesn't make chronological sense, see Season 2 of the great country music podcast Cocaine and Rhinestones, which I think anyone who enjoys this podcast will find worth their time. But again, that is a relatively minor point for nitpickers. If you're expecting Tommy to make any kind of coherent sense as a narrative, you're really looking for the wrong things in it. And Pinball Wizard is undeniably one of the greatest pop singles the. Who ever released. Arguably their last great pop single, before they completely transitioned from being a pop single band into an album rock one. Townshend said of it in his autobiography, I had no doubt whatsoever that if I had failed to deliver the. Who an operatic masterpiece that would change people's lives, with Pinball Wizard, I was giving them something almost as good. A hit. And he had. It returned the group to the top ten in the UK, reaching number four and getting them a gold record, and made the top twenty in the US. Though in both countries it also got a certain amount of criticism for what was considered its sick lyrics about disability. We then, after the preceding few coherent independent songs, which mostly stand apart from the narrative, have a long stretch of pieces that only makes sense within the context of the album. We start with a twenty second snippet titled. There's a Doctor, which just says that there's a doctor who might help Tommy. The song that follows, Go to the Mirror, is not really a song as much as a patchwork of different ideas, for the first time on the album it introduces a light motif that will come back again, the Listening to. You section. But the song is mostly narrative, explaining that Tommy's disability is psychosomatic rather than physical, and also saying that Tommy can see himself in a mirror, even though he can't see anything else. Once again, the decision to have the band members play all the characters on the album makes for a certain amount of confusion as to which character is who. In this case, Daltrey sings the lead vocal as the doctor. But this in turn means that when it gets to the see me feel me section of the song, even though that's normally sung by Daltrey as Tommy, this time, in a relic of the original conception, Townshend sings that part. We then have two songs, Tommy Can You Hear Me and Smash The Mirror, which are again more narrative rather than song, showing Tommy's mother trying to communicate with him, and getting frustrated and smashing the mirror he looks at all the time, which shows his reflection and is the only thing he can see. This is followed by a return to self-contained songs, as we get to Sensation. This is the song we talked about earlier, originally written about a woman with whom Townshend had an affair in Australia, and titled. She's a Sensation. The lyrics were rewritten to be from the perspective of Tommy, though Townshend sings them on the album. Daltrey sang them in subsequent re-workings of the material. The mirror being smashed has freed Tommy from his psychosomatic disability, and not only that, it has elevated him to a higher spiritual level than normal people. In the terms Townshend used, which he took from Mayor Barber, Tommy has attained God-consciousness, and he now thinks of himself as a Messiah. After Sensation, there are more self-contained songs. We first go into Sally Simpson, like Sensation, another song that was not originally part of the narrative, and based on that incident with the doors fan who got hurt. It's a song about fandom, and female fandom in particular, and has Townshend conceptualising Tommy's religious disciples as essentially being the same kind of people as rock fans. After that comes another self-contained song, indeed one that was released as a single in many countries, I'm Free. I'm Free was inspired by the Rolling Stones' Street Fighting Man, and you can hear some similarities. Compare the Stones. And the. Who. There's no direct one-to-one copying going on. Nobody could mistake one song for the other, but there's definitely a family resemblance there. I think you'll agree. Again showing the way in which Townshend tried to construct the album as a coherent work with repeated themes, the riff from Pinball Wizard makes a return about two minutes into the song. We then go back to pure narrative material as we learn that Tommy's followers are showing up in droves. Welcome, the song that follows, is about welcoming those followers to what we first assume is Tommy's home, but we soon discover from the song after, Tommy's holiday camp, is actually, well, a holiday camp. For those who don't know, holiday camps are a uniquely British institution. In the middle of the last century, any medium-sized town near a beach would have a resort, operated by a company like Butlins or Pontins or several smaller competitors, consisting of a few hundred or thousand prefabricated chalets and caravans, large ones similar to American trailer park trailers, where people would go for a week at the seaside, with entertainment included. As we heard in the first Beatles episode, Ringo Starr was playing a residency at a Butlins camp when he got the call to join the Beatles, for example. Much of the entertainment would be of the cheap and tacky variety, bathing beauty competitions, contest to see who had the noblest knees and so on, and there was a low rent cheesiness to the whole affair. Moon had suggested that Tommy's religious retreat should be at a holiday camp rather than anywhere more traditionally religious, and Townshend had liked the idea enough that he had written the song and given Moon the songwriting credit. While Townshend, not Moon, had written it, he felt that he had written it the way Moon would have, so Moon deserved the credit anyway. In another confusion of characters, while Uncle Ernie was played by Entwistle and Fiddler Bout, here the character is sung by Townshend. According to Townshend's autobiography, that's because Kit Lambert just used Townshend's demo for the track rather than having the band re-record it. And the final song, We're Not Gonna Take It, was another piece that had its origins before Tommy. It started out as, in Townshend's words, a kind of anti-fascist statement. And presumably in its original incarnation, it was somewhat similar in mood to the group's later One Get Fooled Again. But in its finished version, the song has several parts. The song starts with Tommy giving his disciples instructions on how to gain enlightenment like him. At first they have to play pinball while deliberately cutting off their own senses, just like him. He then tells them that they also have to give up on the drinking, smoking dope and also on being normal. Their reaction to this is, as one might expect, to be angry at the restrictions Tummy was putting on them. A note for those who might find such things distressing. If you listen to the full version of the song, the crowd go on to threaten to rape Tummy. The album ends with Tummy, alone, no longer being followed by Disciples, first reprising the see me feel me material again, and then ending with a final section, sometimes labelled as a different track. A reprise of the listening to you material as a finale in which Tummy experiences a spiritual ecstasy. Some of the most powerful music on the album and a fitting climax to the record that took the. Who from being a singles band to an album act. While Kit Lambert was the credited producer on Tommy, he didn't supervise the mixing as a producer normally would. Instead, he went on holiday and left engineer Damon Lyon sure to do the mix down, although he left detailed instructions as to how it should sound. The group, on initially hearing the mixes, were horrified, to the extent the tent whistle found the album unlistable. The instrumental tracks were mixed far lower than they expected, and the vocals much higher. The group eventually came round to the decision, which made sense, as the album was a narrative, and so the words needed to be audible. But Townshend always suspected there was an element of sabotage involved, even though he was the first one to decide that the mix was OK. Townshend and Lambert had clashed from the beginning about whether or not there should be an orchestra on the record. Lambert, influenced by his father and wanting to impress people from the serious music world, wanted to have one, but Townshend was insistent that the whole thing should be performed by the members of the group. As much as anything else, he wanted to make Tommy into a piece that could be performed in full on stage. He was also worried that he might be considered too pretentious. At the time, Townshend was listening a lot to Frank Zappa, and particularly to the album Uncle Meat, which had just been released, including a performance where Don Preston, the mother's keyboardist, had climbed the Albert Hall organ and played Louie Louie on it.

Speaker 1:
[96:51] They like it too, they like it loud too, you know. Let's hear it again for the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

Speaker 2:
[97:27] In a contemporaneous interview with Barry Miles, Townshend said of Zappa, who he said he listened to at the time more than anyone else, if it's freaky and way out, he wouldn't let that stop him. For example, he wouldn't not use the Albert Hall organ because someone would say, well, that's just Flashpiece of Moody. He'd get right up and use it, you know. And has done. He also wouldn't not use, and he did this as well, use the London Symphony Orchestra. He'd use it for the right reason, not the wrong reason. The Bee Gees would use it for the wrong reason. Zappa would use it for the right reason. I'm always afraid of using things like that for the wrong reason. So in a way, although I'm influenced by both those parties, I'm not half as influenced by them as I am by straightforward groups like the Stones and straightforward musicians like Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry and people like that, who affect me far more, and straightforward lyricists like Brian Wilson. And I find these people affect me far more as a composer. And he had yet another reason for not wanting the album to have orchestration on, which was simply that it would be the first time the. Who had used an orchestra, and he was worried that if they did that, then people would think that the only reason the album worked was because of the orchestra on it, not because of the. Who themselves or his writing. Lambert had reluctantly agreed to what Townshend wanted, but then when recording started they hit a problem. There were several songs where Townshend wanted to play acoustic rhythm guitar, but IBC, the studio in which they were recording, didn't have very good shielding, and so Townshend couldn't play acoustic along with Enquistal and Moon. Lambert persuaded him to play the acoustic parts on those songs on an electric guitar while cutting the basic tracks, and Townshend planned to replace those electric rhythm parts with a much thicker sounding acoustic, doubled with a stronger electric guitar than he'd played during the tracking sessions. But according to his autobiography, Townshend discovered that Lambert hadn't left enough three tracks on the multi-track tape to record the multiple guitar overdubs he wanted. But there was enough left over that they could overdub an orchestra to thicken the sound. John Entwistle, on the other hand, said in interviews later that when he'd examined the multi-tracks, he discovered that they'd only used five of the eight tracks on the tape because they were used to recording in four-track and didn't know how to use so much space. In the end, neither set of overdubs happened and the album went out with a much thinner guitar sound than Townshend wanted and he would never be completely happy with how the album sounded. Tommy wasn't the only thing that Townshend was working on during those sessions. At the end of February 1969, Townshend recorded some tracks with Ian McLagan, Ronnie Lane and Kenny Jones of The Small Faces. The three had been blindsided by Steve Marriott's departure from the band, and asked Townshend to sit in with them on lead guitar to see if it was possible for them to carry on without him. Townshend said of those sessions, They don't quite know what's happening. They were making the discs to see how things would work out without Steve. Although Ronnie's voice lacks Steve's projection, they still sound very like the Small Faces. I think that if Ronnie, Kenny and Mack don't find another guitarist they really like, they will break up completely. Thankfully, they did find another guitarist they really liked, and also a singer with more projection than Ronnie Lane had. But that's a story for a future episode. Tommy was premiered live at Ronnie Scott's, the famous jazz club, in a much louder and more rock sounding version than the rather thin sound of the album itself, to an appreciative audience of critics and people from the industry. Townshend in particular was relieved that the songs were coming alive in the live shows, becoming more like the. Who. He was increasingly seeing recording and live performance as two entirely unrelated art forms, and it was important to him that the band be able to be a breathtaking live act. The group almost immediately started touring the US again, playing the same circuited venues like the Grandie Ballroom and the Fillmore East, with support acts as varied as Joe Cocker, Led Zeppelin and Buddy Rich. The group also made arrangements while on that US tour for their appearance at Woodstock, for which they were meant to receive a fee of $12,500. On their return to the UK, they played a pop prom with Chuck Berry. Disputes over the billing meant that for the two shows, Berry headlined one and the. Who headlined the other. In a repeat of the Mods V Rockers fights of years earlier, angry Chuck Berry fans who didn't approve of this more modern music tried to force the. Who off the stage, and in the first set they threw sharpened coins, one of which cut Daltrey on the forehead. For the second show, the group started the show with two of the older rock covers they included in their regular set, Summertime Blues and Shakin All Over, which placated the Teddy Boy contingent in the audience somewhat. For much of the next couple of months, most of the group worked on outside projects in between. Who gigs. Keith Moon went on tour with his friends in the Bonzo Dog band, a band who would take a long time to explain here I did a Patreon bonus on them a couple of years ago, but for whom the best one sentence description is the link between the Beatles and Monty Python. Indeed, Paul McCartney had co-produced their big hit I'm The Urban Spaceman, written and sung by Neil Innis, who later went on to provide music for many Python projects and the Beatles. They had also appeared in the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour, performing their song Death Cab for Cutie. And it jammed at the Apple Christmas Party in 1967, with members of the Beatles and with Mike and Bruce of the Beach Boys. Much of their music was eccentric-sounding and less commercially successful, but hugely popular among both musicians and comedy connoisseurs.

Speaker 4:
[104:06] My darling, in my cardboard colored dreams, once again I hear your laugh, and I kiss, yes I kiss, your perfumed hair, the sweet essence of giraffe.

Speaker 2:
[104:33] Moon would increasingly spend time with the Bonzos in the late 60s and early 70s, particularly with their frontman Vivian Stanchel, whose mannerisms he would often adopt, including addressing people as Dear Boy in an affected aristocratic accent, though the accent was also very similar to that of Kit Lambert, and drummer Legs Larry Smith, both of whom were, as Moon was, alcoholic eccentrics with bizarre and sometimes tasteless senses of humour, which paradoxically allowed him to be, with them, a much less boisterous person than otherwise. Moon's wife Kim would later say, with those two he could be quiet. Usually he wanted to be on display and on show and everyone could see that side of him, but I think Legs Larry and Viv were the only ones who saw him in all his different guises. On the Bonzo tour, Moon, under the stage name The Loner Ranger, would cover for Smith on drums while Smith went up front and performed as a second front man with Stanshal. Daltrey produced a track for a band called Bent Frame, which at the time featured the. Who's roadie Tony Haslam on drums. That track was never released, but oddly a later line up of Bent Frame would briefly feature the guitarist Jimmy McCulloch, who at this time was in the band that Townshend was doing his side project with. And the song that Daltrey produced for Bent Frame, Accidents, was a cover of a track by that band, Thunderclap Newman. Thunderclap Newman were a trio of musicians and songwriters that Townshend had brought together as a studio project, consisting of McCulloch, a 16-year-old prodigy who had met the. Who when a band he was in had been their support act on guitar, jazz piano player Andrew Thunderclap Newman, who Townshend had known from art school, and drummer Speedy Keene, who had been a friend of Townshend for a while and had actually written the opening song on the. Who sell out, Armenia City in the Sky. Townshend had initially wanted to produce separate projects for all three men, but decided to put them together. As he said later about the group, a lot of them would say if asked now that we were a figment of Pete Townshend's imagination but they weren't, it's not true. Independently all three of them came to me or I got involved with them with a view to helping them and then suddenly I realised, or rather again it was Kit Lambert who said to me, you haven't got time for all of them, why not try them together? I thought, impossible, three more unlikely people you couldn't get. But they got in a room together, they played together on some film music for a friend of mine and they were really great and I played them back the tapes and they said, yeah, seems to work and they liked it and they were all enthusiastic about it as a concept as it were. Townshend thought all three members of the band were geniuses, but especially Keane, who ended up writing ten of the twelve songs on the only album that Thunderclap Newman made, which Townshend produced and on which he played bass and pedal steel under the pseudonym Bijou Draines. The two songs that Keane didn't write were an instrumental written by McCulloch and his brother, and a cover of Dylan's then unreleased basement tape song, Open the Door Homer. Townshend's main creative contribution to the album, as he would later tell it, was that he would encourage Keane to actually record his material. He said of that album, Speedy very much needs me to tell him that he's written a song. He doesn't know until I've told him. That doesn't mean that I've written it. I mean, he will stand in front of me and I'll say, well what have you got? And he'll say, well nothing. So I say, we can't record then, can we? You must have something, what's on that bit of paper there? Oh, that's just a few lines I wrote down the other day. Well has it got a tune I ask? Yeah, a bit of a tune but it's not very good. Well play us that. And it's a great song like Something in the Air. In the case of Something in the Air, in fact, Keane initially didn't want to play the song for Townshend at all, because it was called Revolution, and the Beatles had already released a song called Revolution. Townshend suggested renaming the song Something in the Air, and the track went to number one in the UK for three weeks. Thunder Clap Newman didn't stay together very long after their one album. Newman later said that he liked Keen's music but disliked Keen as a person, while he liked McCulloch as a person but disliked his music. Keen went on to record a couple of solo albums before moving into production, producing records like Motorhead's first album. Newman played with former Bonzo Dog Band member Roger Ruskin Spear, and McCulloch had the most successful career, playing with bands like Stone the Crows, John Mayall's Blues Breakers, and, most notably, a stint with Paul McCartney in Wings, as well as playing on solo albums by both Daltria and Endwhistle, and briefly joining a reunited Small Faces, before dying tragically young of an overdose in 1979, aged only 26. But something in the air had been a massive hit, and this led to a certain amount of resentment from Townshend about the way he was treated by track records. He complains in his autobiography about the fact that the. Who had been under the impression they would get shares in track records but never did, and that this was particularly unfair on him, as he had brought the label to number one artists in the crazy world of Arthur Brown and Thunderclap Newman. After playing a few more UK gigs, the. Who flew to the US to play a couple of festivals, including Woodstock. Having been burned before by promoters of big US festivals, they were one of the few acts to play Woodstock and actually get paid. John Wiggy Wolf, the group's tour manager, later said, I told them, Look, we're not waiting anymore, where's the money? They said, We'll give you a check. I said, I'm not interested in a check. So they avoided me for several hours. By now it was getting closer and closer to the band going on. They then tried the, You'll have to go on routine, like, You won't be able to not play in front of all these people. I said, I don't care, not interested, they're not going on. Anyway, they kept stalling until in the end they had to get a helicopter to get the bank manager up, because the safe was on a time lock and he was the only person that could open it. They got the cash, paid me, and suddenly I was surrounded by all these other band managers who hadn't been paid. Sly and the Family Stone had been on for three hours and the band before that had overplayed. The Who were supposed to have been on at about ten o'clock at night and ended up on stage at four in the morning. It was just a joke. They performed almost the whole of Tommy. The group's stage performance of the album missed out a handful of the more standalone songs like Sally Simpson and Sensation, as well as Undercore, presumably in that case thinking that the audience would be unlikely to sit still for a ten-minute-long instrumental. The performance of Woodstock was a typical 40-minute-length performance of this cut-down Tommy. Well, it was a typical performance except for, as we heard in the MC5 episode, Abbie Hoffman invading the stage to try and raise awareness of the imprisonment of John Sinclair.

Speaker 5:
[112:36] I think this is a parlor sh**, while John Sinclair rocks in prison.

Speaker 4:
[112:57] I could dig it.

Speaker 2:
[113:04] Townshend attacked Hoffman and got him off the stage quickly. For all that Woodstock had a reputation as being a peace and love kind of festival, that reputation didn't extend to the. Who's performance. Indeed, Townshend also kicked the director of the Woodstock film off the stage at one point. Actually kicked him, not metaphorically. Because Townshend saw his stage as sacrosanct, and the director was getting far too close to him. Townshend later said that he probably wouldn't have done that had he not been in such a terrible mood at the time. Because Townshend's experience of Woodstock was not the idyllic one that everyone later talked about. He disliked crowds anyway. He was appalled at the basic lack of professionalism of the organisers, saying later no one was supplying water, no one was cleaning the lavatories, no one was supplying food, but the groups played. I know that's what people were there for, but it's a whole trip. He had also been spanked backstage. His first acid trip since deciding to give up on psychedelic drugs. And he had had a bad trip which had put him in an even worse mood. Though their set was so much later than expected that the whole trip was over with a few hours to spare before they went on stage. The group's performance was, however, mostly a triumph, helped by the unplanned effect of the sun rising as the group finished their set, making Daltrey look almost like a god silhouetted in its rays. Most of the books on the. Who say that this happened exactly when Daltrey started singing See Me Feel Me. But watching the footage, which is now much more easily available than it was when most of these books were written, that seems not to be the case, though some footage of some songs is missing. It looks like the sun actually rose right as the group were finishing My Generation, the last song of their set, though without having access to the actual raw footage I wouldn't like to say that for certain, as edited film can be deceptive. Either way, though, Daltrey was now totally transformed from the performer he had been a couple of years earlier. With his curly blonde shoulder-length hair, and wearing a buckskin shirt open to show his bare chest, he was no longer the rather ordinary looking man he had been perceived as being in the group's early years. He was now a magnetic, charismatic figure, inhabiting Townshend's lyrics, and while factually it might be the case that the sun rose during My Generation, it just seems more appropriate that it rose when Daltrey sang See Me Feel Me. And so that's the way everyone now remembers it. Tommy, in this cut-down 40-minute version, became the centerpiece of the group's live performances. And while Townshend had been annoyed at the filming at Woodstock, a lot of their UK gigs over the next few months were filmed, because Lambert still wanted to make a film with Tommy. The plan at this point was to do something combining live footage of the. Who performing songs from the album with an animated version of the story, possibly made by the same people who had made Yellow Submarine. At the end of 1969, and the end of the 60s in general, Keith made two further guest live appearances with other acts. He performed with a one-off line-up of John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Plastic Ono Band, also featuring George Harrison, Eric Clapton and the Delany and Bonny Band, playing on the same drum kit as Alan White for their two-song set. And he was also, along with Ainsley Dunbar of the Jeff Beck Group, one of the guest drummers who appeared with the Bonzo Dog Band on what was surprisingly announced from the stage as their final show, though they got back together briefly a couple of years later for a contractual obligation album, and partial lineups of the band toured in the mid-2000s and again the 2010s. Moon was also guest drummer on a solo single by Lex Larry Smith, Witchy Tide Toe. But Smith would also be involved in the darkest moment in Moon's life, and the start of the downward spiral that would eventually kill him. On the 4th of January 1970, Moon had been invited to be the special star guest at the opening of a discotheque. It was going to be a party, and Keith Moon could never turn down a party, especially one where he was going to be the centre of attention. A few of his celebrity friends came along, but only celebrities who are less famous than Keith. In one car came Jimmy McCulloch of Thunderclap Newman and his brother Jack, who had now joined that band on drums to let Speedy Keene go up front. In the car with Keith came Keith's wife, Lex Larry Smith and Smith's girlfriend. And the car was driven by Neil Boland, Moon's chauffeur, bodyguard and general right hand man and close friend. But there was a problem at the disco. Everyone in Moon's entourage was a long haired hippie, and the disco, as it turned out, was a skinhead disco. We've not talked much about the skinheads before, but they were and are a working class subculture that descended from the mods of a few years earlier but were a much more exaggerated version of them. While the mods had had relatively short hair, the skinheads had it cropped so they looked bald, for example. They shared a lot of the tastes of the mods, including a love of soul music and especially ska and reggae, but they hated most of the people who made that music. While it's not true that every skinhead was a virulent racist, it's true that a much larger proportion of skinheads than of the general population were likely to abuse people of non-white ethnicities. And given that this is January 1970, when Britain was a much more racist country even than it is today, that's saying quite a bit. But they didn't just hate black and Asian people. They also hated gays and middle class people and intellectuals and basically anyone who wasn't a skinhead, including of course hippies, who were everything that they despised. Moon, at first, was given a certain amount of leeway because he was a pop star. But as the crowd got drunker, that changed into resentment at that same status. He was clearly someone who thinks he's better than us, the ultimate crime in the skinhead's eyes. Eventually Moon and his friends left, but people surrounded the front car, the one Keith was in, throwing first coins and then stones, trying to break their windscreen and windows. Neil Boland couldn't get the car through the crowd, so he opened the door to try to argue with them and get them to clear the way. The crowd pulled Boland out of the car altogether. Moon couldn't actually drive. Not only was he very drunk at the time, he didn't actually have a driver's license, but he was terrified for his life, so he slid over into the driver's seat and started the car up. Legs Larry tried to direct him from the back seat, left a bit, right a bit and so on, until they got off the side street that the venue was on and onto the main road, pulling over away from the crowd, leaving Boland, who they thought could fend for himself, behind, or so they thought. They hadn't noticed that in the confusion they had hit and killed Boland. Boland had been knocked to the ground by the crowd, who were, to use the term later used by one of the teenage skinheads in the trial, putting the boot in. When the car moved forward, the crowd had moved on, but the occupants of the car hadn't seen that Boland was still on the ground. Nobody blamed Keith, except Keith himself, who said to a journalist later, I'll always have his death on my conscience. Now everyone has what they want. Keith Moon down. Really down. They're welcome to him. Moon had always been someone with more bad points than good. He was abusive towards his wife, unreliable, and, like all of the. Who, at times violent. He was also, though, up until this point, someone who did have good points. He was a loyal friend. For example, Vivian Stanchel of the Bonzo Dog Band was spending time in a psychiatric hospital, one of the reasons the group broke up, and Moon paid for him to be moved to better private treatment facilities. People, even his wife, found him charming and lovable to the extent that they could forgive horrendous behaviour that would be unforgivable from other people. But after the crash, that was no longer the case. Miss Pamela of the GTOs, who had an off and on affair with Moon throughout the early 70s, says in her great memoir and with the band, At night he would wake up ten times, bathed in medicine-smelling sweat, jabbering about running over his roadie and burning for eternity. He couldn't wait to pay for that horrible mistake. From this point on, Keith Moon seemed to only have one mission in life. To destroy Keith Moon. A History of Rock Music in five hundred Songs is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. With every episode, and sometimes between episodes, Patreon backers will get a short bonus podcast. This episode is on Time of the Season by the Zombies. Visit patreon.com/andrewhickey to sign up for as little as a dollar a month. Two books based on the first hundred episodes of the podcast are now available, with the third coming soon. Search Andrew Hickey 500 Songs in your favourite online bookstore. This podcast is written and narrated by me, Andrew Hickey, and produced by me and Tilt Araiza. No generative AI has been or ever will be used in the writing, research or recording of this podcast. Visit 500songs.com, that's 500, the numbers not the letters, songs.com, to read transcripts and liner notes, and get links to hear the full versions of songs excerpted here. If you've enjoyed the show and feel it's worth reviewing, please do leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. But more importantly, tell just one person that you like this podcast. Word of mouth, more than any other form of promotion, is how creative works get noticed and sustain themselves. Thank you very much for listening.