There’s a story that has been told a thousand times, eventually becoming a self-parodying idiom: a kid goes to see a rock concert, gets inspired, buys a guitar, learns to play, becomes a rock star, and inspires the next generation. It certainly is plausible; the fruits of early rock music were fairly low-hanging, the glamor obvious, and the path to success short enough that a good concert could conceivably give a teenager with nascent musical abilities enough of a push to start a career. It doesn’t take much imagination to imagine how a repetitious rhythm, a few chords and simple lyrics might inspire a group or maybe two, which might in turn spawn variations, deconstructions, loving homages, and composites that reference several earlier generations.
There’s another story, however, which is much rarer. It’s the story of a person who goes to see a rock concert, gets inspired, walks out of the theater with a new and better understanding of themselves and their place in the world, and this feeling has enough inertia to sustain him or her through major life events over the next few decades. That’s the sort of story that people tell about seeing The Who perform Tommy live.
Tommy, which has been called the first true “rock opera” (although in its original form it didn’t really satisfy many of the canonical criteria for opera, the later film and Broadway incarnations of the music and story arguably may), is an intricate and rich tapestry of great complexity, knit together into a musically cohesive structure of nearly flawless majesty. You could think of its components as a sort of musical Noah’s Ark: everything needed to repopulate the rock world in the case of some sort of musical catastrophe is included, but there’s also nothing extraneous or gratuitous. The nuance and subtlety of the music was lost on some reviewers, who were distracted by the reputation of The Who as the loudest performers in a cohort known for a profound lack of restraint.
The plot of Tommy doesn’t make a great deal of sense, but that’s not really a problem because it’s just a delivery vehicle for the points that The Who wish to convey. Many of the listeners of the individual songs or medleys from the album don’t even know that there’s a story, or would be hard-pressed to explain what it might be. Fixing the story so that it seems plausible or realistic would simply add a bunch of unnecessary baggage that would take time away from the real points; nobody ever criticizes the parables in the Bible because they lack context, character development or even names for most of the major characters, just as nobody cares that Batman, Iron Man, and The Green Hornet are all essentially the same story. The story is just a scaffolding.
When the eponymous Tommy was a young boy, he witnessed something awful and fraught with lasting and dire implications, but was told by his parents to pretend that he didn’t see or hear anything, and that he mustn’t ever tell anyone. Tommy acts on this command far too literally and without proper qualification, thereby becoming deaf, dumb and blind. While the Beat generation was trying to batter down the doors of perception and explore what lay further, Tommy was caulking his shut. Alone with his thoughts, Tommy was given much time to think, and much to think about, and he eventually attains a state of limited enlightenment.
In the meanwhile, back in the real world, people are beginning to suspect that Tommy is not physically crippled, but that his isolation is self-imposed. This is particularly obvious when Tommy demonstrates a nearly prescient aptitude for the game of pinball, a game which usually requires a keen eye and hearing, but which, in Tommy’s case, he is able to play entirely by touch, and perhaps, as his vanquished opponents conjecture, by sense of smell.
The song Pinball Wizard, which illustrates this part of the story, which was allegedly added to Tommy as a quickly-written afterthought (to lighten the mood of the overall piece, which was seen as too dark and serious), and which the Pete Townsend, its composer, called “the most clumsy piece of writing [he’d] ever done”, became an enormous pop hit and radio hit as a single, even though the lyrics make absolutely no sense without context. One must wonder whether Townsend is being self-deprecating, or perhaps is simply so facile at his craft that his worst is better than most composers best–after all, if you asked Beethoven to choose his least favorite symphony, he’d have to pick a number from one to nine. In any case, the chord progression over a droning, pulsing tone at the beginning of the song, and the vivace strumming that follows is immediately recognizable, more than forty years later. In fact, I would wager that most listeners could recognize this song from the first three notes, played by any performer, on any instrument, at any reasonable tempo, simply because so few other composers use this structure. Certainly by the time the intro is played–a sequence of consisting of sixteen unique chords–anyone who isn’t tone-deaf and amnesiac and has been in the vicinity of a radio during the past forty years is likely to be able to recognize the song.
Most concert footage of The Who focuses on Roger Daltry, the singer, or on Pete Townsend jumping around and windmilling his guitar, or on Keith Moon doing things that defy analysis–although it’s great fun and rewarding to try–so it’s hard to figure out what Pete Townsend is doing to produce those sounds. In particular, there’s one moment important phrase change in Pinball Wizard when the guitar chords seem to transition impossibly far in an impossibly short period of time–through a suspended chord, but not to its resolution, but instead another suspended chord in a different, much higher position. It seems impossible to play, and watching someone with great technical proficiency play it at full speed, with the camera focused on his fingering, is even more impressive–at least at first glance (the change is around the thirty-second mark).
The truth, as explained by the talented and articulate Peter Autschbach in this clip, is that what appears to be resolving into the next chord is not a conventional chord at all. It’s the sound of the pick being strummed across all of the strings open, as revealed clearly at the 3:15 mark. It’s not something that one would ordinarily expect to find in a piece of music, but it fits here. Perhaps Townsend never got around to finishing this part, and just wanted to keep the cadence going while his hands shifted for the next chord, or maybe there’s another message: simplicity suffices. There’s certainly a message here from Tommy, who, though apparently blind, can play pinball with nearly supernatural skill–just as many of us are able to accomplish amazing feats of skill and cognition, whether ingenious engineering marvels or scintillating blog entries, while still being utterly oblivious and ignorant of so much that is going on around us.
Tommy eventually breaks free of his self-imposed exile from his senses, and reveals his enlightenment to his pinball followers, becoming a somewhat messianic figure in their eyes. Tommy is a gracious, although very skeptical and somewhat cynical, spiritual leader; his growing number of disciples beg for spiritual guidance, but he offers little. In stark contrast to the other self-proclaimed messiahs roaming the landscape of the mid-sixties, Tommy is a reluctant messiah, and makes few promises. After all, as he points out, he doesn’t have anything to say that hadn’t been said, and said well, by the messiahs who came before–and if Jesus et alia hadn’t been able to teach them, then why should they expect him to do any better?
The song I’m Free details this transition (if “details” is the proper word, since the lyrics are shorter than my description of them), and contains another item of musical inspiration. When the music begins, it seems to fit the triumphant moment–a strident, simple melody, in march tempo, played by the guitar. All goes according to expectations for the first four seconds or so, until the rest of the instruments and the singer join in, and it becomes apparent, after several seconds of readjusting where the listener believes that the beat falls, that the melody the guitar is playing is syncopated and ahead of the beat. By the time the phrase repeats, we’ve completely forgotten we were ever confused, but I defy anyone, no matter how many times they’ve heard this song, to get the count right for the first eight bars without careful concentration. Tommy is an eighth-note ahead of us, but that’s it. It’s enough to confuse us at first, but it soon becomes delightful.
The Who weren’t playing hard-to-get messiahs. Unlike some other groups, who claimed some spiritual insight, or at least to be well-intentioned, the message from The Who is always grounded in a gritty, cynical view of society and the world we live in. One need look no further than their overshadowed, underappreciated later masterpiece, Quadrophenia, in which gangs of teenagers, unified by race, religion, geography, income, social status and other beliefs, ostracize and murder each other over differences of opinion regarding haircuts, jacket styles, and musical preferences. If it’s not one thing, it’s another; people will always be able to find a way to make themselves miserable, unless they all devote all of their energy to fight against this most basic of human tendencies. But even good intentions are not always enough; when the live performance at Woodstock of excerpts of Tommy was interrupted by Abbie Hoffman, who attempted to grab a moment of stage time to speak about a social issue he thought should be of wide interest, Townsend explained, in unambiguous terms, that he didn’t wish to concede the floor, and underscored the point by clubbing Hoffman off of the stage with his guitar. While there is some question about whether this event was accurately reported by the media, the fact that it is widely believed and reported as fact is as important as the truth. Assuming that it is true, Hoffman probably was fortunate that Townsend got to him before Moon or Entwhistle–especially if Hoffman made the mistake of reminding them of plumbing fixtures. The Who might have been spiritual gadflies, but they certainly never claimed to be spiritual leaders and nobody ever mistook them for saints.
Tommy’s disciples and followers soon leave him, abandoning his path to spiritual enlightenment after realizing that self-sacrifice and hardship are required. Tommy is alone again; he can see, hear, and speak, but there is a question about whether anything has actually been gained. In the final song, Tommy pleads with the world to “See me, feel me, touch me, heal me” and he explains that although the inspiration he provided to his followers might have been ephemeral, the inspiration that he gained from them is eternal:
Listening to you, I get the music
Gazing at you, I get the heat
Following you, I climb the mountain
I get excitement at your feet
Right behind you, I see the millions
On you, I see the glory
From you, I get opinion
From you, I get the story
The lyrics repeat as the song builds in volume, passion, and tempo, più mosso alla doppio movimento. By 3:20, Townsend is windmilling; at 4:10, I start to really worry whether Daltry will survive another verse, but the song ends after five minutes simply because there’s nowhere left to go. The song is over, the instruments are silent, but the performance is not complete without the final footnote. As Townsend, almost shyly, thanks the audience for their applause, we realize that these aren’t only the words that Tommy wants to tell his former followers–they’re the words that The Who wants to say to us, and the words that we could be saying to each other.
