145. The Who - Tommy (May 1969)

1. Overture

2. It's a Boy

3. 1921

4. Amazing Journey

5. Sparks

6. The Hawker

7. Christmas*

8. Cousin Kevin

9. The Acid Queen

10. Underture*

11. Do You Think It's Alright

12. Fiddle About

13. Pinball Wizard

14. There's a Doctor

15. Go to the Mirror

16. Tommy Can You Hear Me?

17. Smash the Mirror

18. Sensation

19. Miracle Cure

20. Sally Simpson*

21. I'm Free

22. Welcome

23. Tommy's Holiday Camp

24. We're Not Gonna Take It

**

I usually listen to albums at least twice for this, but once again I'm not doing that because I don't want to.

This is not the worst album I've listened to for this project. In fact, there's even some pretty good music here. No, the problem is having to sit down and listen to an hour and fifteen minutes of this crap, uninterrupted. I tried. I got distracted several times and flipped through a coffee table book. Is that doing the Who a disservice? The Who have countless fans and made millions of dollars. I don't care what the Who think. If anything the Who should be apologising to me for expecting me to want to listen to songs like "The Acid Queen" and "Fiddle About".

The plot of this album (or "Rock Opera", if you will) is pretty easy to follow in general, although it gets confusing in the particulars. Basically a boy is traumatised by his parents, becomes psychosomatically deaf, dumb and blind, lives a terrible life, regains his senses after being subjected to a painful shock, and this somehow results in him becoming a sort of messiah figure (I think because the music in his head makes him some kind of pop star, though I'm not sure) - only for him to screw up and be left alone again. Along the way he gets tortured by his cousin, sexually abused by his uncle, given acid (and possibly raped - it's a bit vague) by some random woman, and also turns into a pinball prodigy because Pete Townshend wanted a pinball-loving critic to give the album a good review. There's a certain peverse creativity at work, but I have to wonder why primary songwriter Townsend went with such an incredibly bleak narrative. Supposedly it's all about the spiritual and philosophical beliefs of some guru or what have you that he liked, but not much of that comes out in the lyrics. Instead the listener is subjected to a bleak, horrific story, shown a glimpse of light at the end, and then Tommy fucks it all up with the help of his uncle (I suppose, being deaf, dumb and blind, Tommy may not have realised it was Uncle Eddie who asaaulted him?) and has a sort of mild revelation or something at the end which I didn't pay much attention to because I was really, really bored.

Musically there's some good stuff, like the extended instrumental piece "Underture", and the faintly satirical pop song "Sally Simpson" (tellingly, these songs were written independently of Tommy and shoehorned in). What's annoying is that a man who wrote so many great pop songs before and after Tommy would fumble things so badly here. Maybe someone out there thinks "Pinball Wizard" totally rocks, but I don't. And it's not like opera can't contained short, catchy standalone tunes. But what's really annoying is that the wit and warmth that made an album like The Who Sell Out so great is almost entirely absent here. I guess Townsend wanted to attempt something serious and profound, but that's not really where his strengths lay. After this he'd go on to pen the bloated Who's Next, which a lot of people love but which I don't really care for, either.

On a side note, I hate being called "Tommy". So it's perhaps inevitable that I'd hate an album where someone keens "Tommy can you hear me?" over and over again. 

Anyway, I can see why some people would like this but I do not. It's an important album in that it popularised the rock opera form (even if we've had two much, much better rock operas already from the Pretty Things and the Small Faces), and I guess there are a few good tunes buried deep within its bloat. Like I said, the big problem is the length. Taken individually there are some great moments here, but as an album Tommy is a depressing, nigh-incoherent slog.