Do you think it's alright to leave the boy with Uncle Ernie....

Confession: I don’t remember the movie very much. I know I’ve seen it sometime, probably when I was way too young to understand it, but apart from a couple flashes of memory, I draw a blank. Which is probably good going in to listen to the Who’s Tommy for the first time intact. Without the Ann Margaret & Tina Turner distractions, I could listen with a clearer ear. Re-released in remastered form in 1996, the twenty-four-track album conpacts itself onto just one CD. Mind, only twelve of them could really be true “songs”, and two more are “overtures”, like in a Broadway musical or opera. Hence the “rock opera”. But for the “rock-opera” tag, Tommy is really a loose string of music, tied to a vague narrative of the title character, and fleshed out with additions that would surprise you.

The disc starts (after a preliminary “Overture”) with the birth of “Tommy”, whose dad is gone (military death?, boat accident?) and mother seemingly taken up with another man (in “1921”). There’s an allusion of seeing something he shouldn’t, but doesn’t say what. Apparently the notion of the mother and lover yelling at the boy (or maybe they did something worse?) renders the child deaf, dumb, and blind in “Amazing Journey”, a convincing and eerie journey into psychosis that’s a highlight of the first part of the album. In “Eyesight To The Blind (The Hawker)”, the titular character seemingly is pimping the “Acid Queen” that appears after a bit to the stepdad/lover. But before that comes the first well-known hint of the theme, with “Christmas” containing the “see me, feel me” refrain as well as the introduction of pinball to the kid. Now according to the liner notes, the whole “pinball” thing was surprisingly an afterthought, done to appease an important music scribe after getting bad comments when they played him the original version (he supposedly liked pinball). From the desperate tones of the Father, Tommy is subjected to more abuse in the hands of “Cousin Kevin” (“I’ll stick pins in your fingers, and tread on your feet”) and the “Acid Queen” (“I’m the Gypsy, guaranteed to break your little heart”). The album is split with a longer “Underture” to the third, and most bleak, cycle of abuse, in the hands of “Uncle Ernie” in “Fiddle About”, the most scarily jovial ode to pedophilia on a major hit record that I’ve seen. Which is why on a full listen, it’s more visible that “Pinball Wizard” was an add-on, not quite totally fitting in with the line of the narrative, but hey, it’s the damn best song on here, the glimmer of the Who’s pop sensabilities whittled down to a three minute dose. But after that, things are looking up, with the appearance of hope “There’s A Doctor”, who somehow makes it so looking at himself in a mirror will clear “Tommy” of the Helen-Keller syndrome he has. Even though it’s split up in 3 sections, “Go To The Mirror”, “Tommy Can You Hear Me?”, and “Smash The Mirror”, this by far is the climax and most satisfying part of the work, with the familiar “Listening to you, I get the music, Gazing at you, I get the heat” refrain. Although vague, somehow his “rehabilitation” has given him and the doc fame and a platform, with some messianistic thing going (in “Sensation”), where Tommy becomes just an evil a harm onto a young girl (“Sally Simpson”) as was done to himself. Somehow Tommy separates himself the the doctor and follows his own calling (“I’m Free”, “Welcome”) to set up some sort of retreat on the coast, where Tommy makes his protégés go through the whole “deaf dumb and blind” thing again.

There’s no doubt Tommy is full is great rock and roll. Pete Townshend pulls out all the guitar-riff stops, while Roger Daltrey easily melds his voice to the different characters in the narrative. As long as you don’t linger on the triter-than-thought progression of the piece, or the scattered short cuts, you’ll be much satisfied. Just don’t go looking for Aida.

Grade: B+
Best Cuts: “Pinball Wizard”, “Go To The Mirror”, “I’m Free”, “We’re Not Gonna Take It

Listen: Go To The Mirror! (link)

Buy: You can pick of the Who's Tommy at websites like here and here...

And to compare to the music, here's a god-awful version of "Go To The Mirror" by Jack Nicholson...