The Who: The Making of Tommy

This programme contains some strong language.

Who are The Who? The Who are The Who, that's who they are.

A rock group, veterans of Woodstock,

and now they're authors and performers in a rock opera

Pete knew that he'd got to write something more substantial

and he'd always had this thing about writing a rock opera.

# Ever since I was a young boy I played the silver ball... #

I felt... the band, and myself as a composer,

deserved one big last splurge.

If that album hadn't made it, the band would have disbanded.

# Sure plays a mean pinball... #

Tommy is one of the most important albums ever made, and was

Pete sitting with his guitar, trying to make sense of the universe.

# Tommy, can you hear me?

# Can you feel me near you? #

When we played it live it changed me completely.

I just grabbed it by the scruff of the neck and said,

"Right, let's make this person live."

# I'm free

I'm free... #

I'm fed up with talking about it I'm certainly not fed up with playing it.

We always had an idea that Tommy was going to mean something.

It was a series of great hit singles, it's a great concept album,

it's a rock opera, it's a great concert vehicle for The Who.

# Listening to you... #

I just knew we were good.

I didn't quite know how or why or what, but I knew we were good.

The reviews they got were overwhelming,

and so they'd suddenly arrived and Tommy changed everything.

Tommy was the first time that we really tackled

the idea of doing an album as a piece of art.

It was meant, in a sense, to hold a mirror, you know,

to what we were doing at the time and what was happening to us.

And when you look at sort of what was happening,

it then starts to really take on extra resonance.

By '68, they seemed to be running out of steam.

They were in trouble, really.

We were afraid that we were losing our touch.

We'd had a series of successful hit singles, you know,

from I Can't Explain, Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere,

My Generation, Pictures of Lily, I'm a Boy.

We were a singles band going nowhere,

and occasionally we might come up with a hit single now and again

but on stage we had grown immensely.

# I can see for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles... #

They were the group that took the power of rock'n'roll

most seriously. I love the early Who singles.

I think, you know, to me

maybe the greatest rock'n'roll record of all time is I Can See For Miles.

I Can See For Miles, which should have been number one,

there's no question about it -

it's a masterpiece as a pop song of our genre - and it didn't do that.

I think Pete thought we were running out of steam,

but then I always believed in the chemistry of the band.

There's something about the mathematics of Who music, within it,

that knitted it together, and it had an incredible strength.

# Talking about my generation

# Talking about my generation

# Talking about my generation

# Talking about my ge-ge-ge...

# Talking about my generation

# My generation This is my generation, baby... #

They were just a great live band and that sense of, you know, you just

had this feeling like, you know at any moment they could just levitate.

GUITARS SCREECH

It's an image that remains in my mind about the energy

and danger that he had in his performance.

Pete was playing and was bleeding from his hand

DISTORTED GUITARS

# My generation... #

The Who had this enormous image set for them in stone, really,

by My Generation

and the Mod connection and smashing up equipment,

and so they wanted to destroy that image

and prove that they could do something of real importance and value.

And we were writing more

and more stuff that didn't fit in with the singles market.

The shortcoming was mine. I wasn't coming up with the singles.

And I knew that I couldn't do better than I Can See For Miles,

and I was kind of groping, in a sense, to find

something that would work for the band at this time.

He knew that he'd got to write something more substantial

and he'd always had this thing about writing a rock opera.

Pete obviously wrote the songs

but it was huge, huge input from Kit Lambert.

And, you know, Kit was always pushing Pete to write deeper,

write for a bigger stage.

There is more valid, new creative music being made at the pop end

I don't see any good classical composers emerging at the moment.

I certainly haven't heard a decent new symphony

or a decent new opera in the last 18 months.

And I think opera, as we know now, is absolutely defunct.

One needs a completely fresh approach,

and I think pop's going to provide it.

There were other attempts to do similar kind of things,

although nobody took much notice of them at the time,

it has to be said. There was Mark Wirtz's Teenage Opera, which was

a single, but was actually intended to become a full-blown opera.

And then The Pretty Things had been working on something

called SF Sorrow, which was a concept album,

and they later claimed that this was the first rock opera.

I felt we were first anyway because we'd done, you know,

two operas, we'd done... It's just that they didn't look like that

It's a group of numbers off our LP written by Pete -

it was part of an opera he wrote.

It's a bit shorter than it was supposed to be.

It's one called A Quick One.

It was a piece that ran about 11 minutes long that really

showed the potential of the band.

The Who told stories.

You know, there was a narrative arc in all of those songs,

however short.

Cos what A Quick One While He's Away was, I think,

five or six songs which I was working on, this story about child abuse.

Mainly it was a story about evacuees,

because when these kids came home and they told their parents

about the fact that they'd had a terrible time,

their parents said, "Listen, shut up.

"You're alive, you're lucky, you know,

"you weren't blown to bits in the Blitz. Just keep your mouth shut."

So everybody went into, you know, huge denial.

I'm on the stage and we get to the end - "you are forgiven".

This is at the end of A Quick One, I went, "You are forgiven.

"You are forgiven. You are forgiven.

"Forgiven, forgiven, forgiven, forgiven, forgiven, FORGIVEN!"

You know. This incredible...

When, of course, no forgiveness there at all.

And then finally...

# We're all forgiven... #

But we'd also done another one called Rael, which was...

you know, a full-length, two-hour epic opera

squeezed down to seven minutes

# He's crazy if he thinks we're coming back again

# He's crazy if he thinks we're coming back again... #

I felt I was in a climate where everybody was going to be

doing this kind of thing.

Cos it was on an extraordinary period, that psychedelic period

of...

Because people were opening up their minds with psychedelic drugs.

New attitudes and the whole love movement,

and a sort of philosophical kind of revolution took place very quickly.

And people were searching for their own kind of answers.

The Who weren't, you know, immune to all of that.

I mean, in their own way,

like Townshend himself was very interested in philosophy

and all kinds of mysticism, in a sense,

and experimentation with drugs wasn't unknown to The Who.

Pete had had that LSD bad trip he took

when coming back from the States.

It was the most extraordinary drug experience

that I've ever been through.

It was just absolutely bizarre like Alice In Wonderland,

like extreme mental illness.

Nothing good about it at all, but so disturbing that I left my body

and I floated up on the ceiling of the aircraft

looking down at myself, and I'm sitting there and I'm unconscious.

It's extremely disturbing

and I'm very, very frightened I'm going to die.

And when I get home, I kind of think about this and I think,

"I left my body.

"I just left my body, so I know that I am not my fucking body.

And it shook him up, and from then on

he gave up psychedelic drugs and got very anti-psychedelic drugs.

There was that sense that we needed an alternative to this

extraordinary colourful world that we discovered in hallucinogenics.

At that point everybody, it seemed like, you know,

was exploring some or one or another aspect of, you know,

kind of a spiritual development

You're looking for some answers

You're looking for some ways of living.

You're looking for something that's going to bring you

some peace of some kind, and I think Meher Baba offered that.

When Mike McInnerney introduced Meher Baba to Pete,

I think he gave him a book.

It was called The God-Man by an eminent British journalist

called CB Purdom, and I kind of immediately warmed

to the way he looked in the photo,

but what really struck me is as soon as I started

to open the book up, I started to read things, I felt that I'd found

answers to so many of the questions that were rolling round in my head.

And the really, really simple thing is -

and it's really not complicated - was that he asked you to love him.

It was the simple stuff

that I liked. It was "don't worry, be happy.

"Do your best, leave the results to God."

You know what you should do, basically,

that's why I think he didn't speak.

He took a vow of silence in 192 or something,

and I think he didn't speak because he said it had all been said,

do you know what I mean?

There's no point giving more messages, it's all there.

You can't describe the kind of the discovery,

the feeling you get when you feel the presence of someone like

Meher Baba on Earth, on this planet, at this time, in this universe

It changed him completely. He was absolutely fired up by it.

He was absolutely...

I mean, it was the most profound change he'd ever had in his life.

You impede your own spiritual progress by doing things

which are against the grain physically,

by self-indulgence, by indulging in lust, by indulging in greed

And we just had to stop fucking around, you know.

We had to stop taking acid,

stop pretending that we could have sex

with whoever we wanted to have sex with

and just get serious about life

Let your own intuition guide you.

Like, when you're writing a song or something,

just write it with the best intentions - probably to entertain

and to please people -

and via doing that, you might create a spark in them.

When I did discover Meher Baba I think all the pieces of the jigsaw

fit into place and then I was able to start on Tommy in earnest,

and I think I was inspired to write Tommy as a spiritual story.

The idea was that Tommy would be a young boy who would grow up

in adverse circumstances, but those adverse circumstances

would lead him to a spiritual pathway.

He would then be elected,

if you like, by the masses as a spiritual teacher

and then he would, in a sense, misuse his powers and pay the price.

And that was the original story

This is 1918.

Captain Walker is missing, believed to be missing with a number of men.

Then Mrs Walker has a child, a son.

ALL: Absent friends.

# Captain Walker didn't come home

# His unborn child will never know him... #

The war is still on... you know, it's about to end.

A mother has bore a child.

# It's a boy, Mrs Walker

# It's a boy

# It's a boy, Mrs Walker... #

She doesn't know, you know, if it will have a father.

She's taken a lover.

# A son, a son, a son... #

I had to create this viable boy that my audience, Who fans,

could occupy, get inside him, and then they become the hero.

Then Captain Walker comes back

Now, the first song is very vague,

you don't really know what's happened.

# I had a feeling '21 is gonna be a good year

# Especially if you and me sit in together... #

All around me, when I was a kid

there were these intrigues going on, you know, marital intrigues.

My mum, she fell in love with this guy

and she wanted to run away with him, and what she wanted was romance

and that was the thing that my dad couldn't give her.

# I had no reason to be over-optimistic

# But somehow when you smile I can brave bad weather... #

A smile, a loving touch, this is what life was about.

# About the boy, about the boy

# About the boy, he saw it all

# You didn't hear it You didn't see it

# You won't say nothing to no-one Never in your life

# You never heard it

# Oh, how absurd it all seems Without any proof... #

It turns out - although you wouldn't know it from the record -

that the father came back and found the mother with her lover

and he killed the lover, and the boy witnessed it.

As a child he sees this murder

as a child he sees a reflection of the murder.

He doesn't actually see the murder, he doesn't see the blood,

he doesn't hear the cries, he just sees this happening in this mirror.

And as a result of them saying "You didn't see it.

"You never saw it. You won't tell a word about it," he has a trauma

and he withdraws himself and becomes deaf, dumb and blind.

# That dumb and blind boy He's in a quiet vibration land

# Strange as it seems

# His music dreams ain't quite so bad... #

The amazing journey was the nucleus of Tommy,

as far as I was concerned, and it sticks in my brain

and has been the song that kind of said it all.

It's about going through life in this strange other world.

With the deaf, dumb and blind boy, I was looking

for an analogy to the fact that it seemed to me that we are deaf, dumb

and blind, if you like, with respect to our spiritual genome.

Whatever it is in us that drives us spiritually

is effectively deaf, dumb and blind.

I think Townshend totally got how, underneath

all of your aggression and all of your violence

and all of your anger is a real sensitivity,

a desire to somehow be accepted

# Sickness will surely take the mind where minds can't usually go

# Come on the amazing journey and learn all you should know... #

I'd written this epic poem,

it was about somebody who gets very, very, very close to God-realisation

and then makes a disastrous mistake.

"As time passes boredom forces me to amuse myself.

"I marry and justify a lifetime of obsessed

"money-making in order to keep my family.

"I justify an eternity of oblivious dreaming to counter

"the strain of all my money-making."

The music business itself would appear to be very shallow

and very kind of one-dimensional in a way, you know,

leading a lifestyle that is not always satisfactory

I don't know how he coped, you know?

This was a guy in two worlds, you know?

He's in a rock'n'roll world.

He's coping with stardom and, at the same time,

he's trying to be a boy, trying to understand himself,

and he's trying to be a man and be a good husband.

It is a warning that if you don t use the experience that you have,

if you don't use the qualities that you develop wisely

and kindly and in a good way, you know, you end up in shit.

MUSIC: "Eyesight To The Blind" by Sonny Boy Williamson

There's that brilliant use of Sonny Boy Williamson, one of the, you know,

original great blues figures, and a song called Eyesight To The Blind,

you know, a nod to both where this music came from,

where The Who came from and a perfect use of an old song in a new context.

I was attracted to it because it was about...

He refers to a deaf, dumb and blind guy in his song.

I like singing this...

probably most out of all the things we've ever done.

It's challenging, it's incredibly challenging

but, at the end of it, it's incredibly rewarding.

And it fit in beautifully, I think.

It created a reference back to our lineage, our heritage,

our influences... and it's a fucking great song, too.

# You talk about your woman

# I wish you could see mine

# Yeah, you talk about your woman

# I wish you could see mine... #

I don't know why Kit...

It's always puzzled me why he double-tracked everything.

It's not like I haven't got quite a fat voice to start with

but it did give it that kind of other worldly quality.

# She's got the power to heal you

# Never fear

# She's got the power to heal you

# Never fear... #

It solved a problem in a narrative.

I wanted there to be a pimp.

I wanted the Acid Queen to have a pimp.

I didn't want the Acid Queen to be entirely responsible

for corrupting the boy, sexually speaking.

Pete just has a darker turn of mind

and, you know, addressed these things, and powerfully so

Nothing at all could ever be too strong for an album

and nothing was off-limits.

It was amazing that the band supported him

and were not anti-critical of him, Meher Baba and all the rest of it.

Cos the thing was that they could probably sense that he was

definitely inspired from his confidence

that he got from Meher Baba.

We were always supportive,

that had been going on for years, but there was something

in Kit's belief in us that I always knew that it would be OK,

and that Pete would kind of go on to write this kind of work.

# Did you ever see the faces of the children?

# They get so excited

# Waking up on Christmas morning

# Hours before the winter sun's ignited... #

On Christmas Eve, I would be left on my own,

and with a fire and all the presents round the tree. Magic.

Just waiting, waiting while my mum and dad went to the pub,

got smashed, came back at one o'clock in the morning,

put me to bed. Then I'd wake up and open my presents and, yeah

that was good times.

# And Tommy doesn't know what day it is

# He doesn't know who Jesus was or what praying is

# How can he be saved from the eternal grave?

# See me

# Feel me

# Touch me

# Heal me... #

There is that extraordinary moment in the recording of Tommy

where I arrive late, looking forward to doing my bit, you know,

which is singing the emotional bits, "See me, feel me..."

You know, because, you know, I had such a tough childhood,

so I would be able to really sing it.

And I knew that, you know,

Roger had had a couple of goes and Kit had kind of gone,

"I don't think you'd better do this, Rog.

"I think I might better leave this to Pete."

And I come in and I hear this.

# See me

# Feel me

# Touch me

# Heal me... #

And I realised that Roger has occupied Tommy,

in such a way, though, that other people were unable to occupy him.

# Heal me... #

I was just inhabiting the music

I think everybody has a longing in them...

..to be understood, to be loved and that's what I tried to do.

I was very, very well aware that

it was going to do something a little bit deeper,

and in that Kit Lambert was an absolute dynamo of support.

But then, it wasn't just Kit, we did have Chris Stamp in there

who's, again, very, very influential on the input of Tommy.

Their partnership and their work together

was extraordinary and magical.

Tommy was everything.

You know, we were going to... we were going to sort of

put everything into Tommy. It was going to be the, sort of

the great big last-ditch effort you know,

of all this sort of creative juice that we'd had for all these years.

If ever I had any doubts, you know... If ever I said, you know,

"Oh, God, you know, it all feels a bit pretentious,

he would just say, "Oh, fuck them."

You know. "Just fuck them all, you know?

"What does anybody know about opera?"

But the person that was most helpful to me in constructing

the story was actually the guy doing the artwork - Michael McInnerney.

As a creative in the band, you know,

Pete needed somebody to be able to talk his ideas out to.

We were still in the studio developing the music,

so I would go and I would talk to him about it,

I would play him my demos.

He often got to hear my songs before the band.

The cover carried a kind of symbolic idea

of what I felt the overarching idea of the album was.

I was trying to carry this idea of what it would be like,

in a sense, to be this character,

trying to imagine what it's like

if you can't see, you can't hear, you can't speak, what kind of world

you're in, you know, how infinite and how large that might be.

I had to try and find a kind of visual method to sort of do that.

I don't think Mike has ever surpassed it.

He's done some fantastic work,

but I do think that it's up there with Magritte.

# Extra, extra, read all about it

# Extra... #

My first major interview about Tommy was with Jann Wenner

of Rolling Stone magazine before the fucking album was made,

in which I pitched the album and he printed it in its entirety.

I didn't know at the time that was the first time he'd, apparently

had ever articulated that,

and I think that he might have been making it up

as he was going along, you know it was kind of occurring to him

But he'd laid it out in very rational form.

And he said that, really, that interview cleared it -

clarified it in his head.

What's interesting, reading that interview

is the conviction that I had that we, as a band,

could kind of create this journey for this boy.

We could sort of make this music

that evoked all of these different aspects of life

and very, very ambitious, you know,

but I was convinced that we could do it.

# We're on our own, cousin

# All alone, cousin... #

Pete Townshend is one of the most sensitive souls who's ever

found their way into rock'n'roll.

And I think that's the secret of Tommy, is he was sensitive

to his own issues and to the fact that there were probably

other people out there dealing with some of the same psychosexual

childhood abuse, bullying, all these themes that are so of the moment.

Young Tommy went through, you know, sexual molestation, bullying,

drugs and whatever, that Pete had gone through.

Pete was an unhappy kid, you know, full of, you know, doubt

and shame and feelings of inadequacy and the inability to get a girl

And he's really...pretty painfully frank in his music..

..at a time when you're not supposed to be

# You won't be much fun being blind, deaf and dumb

# But I've no-one to play with today... #

Bullying at that time, it was just, you know, it was just...

It was par for the course. It was the way that society operated.

Policemen didn't pull you aside and, you know...

They would just smack you round the head, you know?

It was just this kind of, you know, teachers would batter you

with lumps of wood, you know, and that's what life was like.

# I'm the school bully

# The classroom cheat

# The nastiest play friend you ever could meet... #

He asked John to write those difficult songs

those dark songs, because when Pete was younger

he had some bad...

sexual experiences and bullying experiences.

I didn't want to have to write those songs,

but I knew that they had to be in the story.

I knew that we had to deal with the reality

of what a boy like Tommy would go through.

As I tried to deal with it,

I would either go into kind of white-flash anxiety or rage...

And I tried a few times...

..but in the end I just kind of gave John a brief.

I just said, "Do you think you could crack this?" And he said, "Yep.

# I'm your wicked Uncle Ernie

# I'm glad you won't see or hear me as I fiddle about

# Fiddle about Fiddle about

# Your mother left me here to mind you

# Now I'm doing what I want to

# Fiddling about Fiddling about

Fiddle about

# Down with the bedclothes Up with your nightshirt

# Fiddle about... #

What's so extraordinary about those two songs

is that they're so powerful and they're so deeply felt

and they're so accurate that I wonder whether, like me

John had lots of friends who had stories to tell.

Child molestation is not discussed,

it's not generally a pop music theme, you know,

but it's one of the big, you know, successful themes of Tommy.

Pete was selling us and sharing with us his pain.

I mean, he had this part of when he was young,

of his mother and father not getting on,

and his mother was a singer and stuff,

and they left him for a time with his grandmother, this Denny,

who was a little bit strange.

My experience of abuse as a child is something which

I don't fully recall.

I get the sense that there's something that has happened

to me as a child, something that is erotic or sexual,

or disturbing or dark, or something in nature

because of dreams that I've had and memories that I have.

But I was very, very young, you know,

I was between the ages of 4 and 5? when I was

with my grandmother, and I just know that some weird shit went down

# Fiddle... #

# Your child ain't all he should be now

# This girl could put him right

# I'll show him what he could be now

# Just give me one night

# I'm the gypsy The Acid Queen

# Pay before we start... #

I go to a very strange place when I sing it.

It's like, "Can you give me permission to sing this song?

"I'm going to sing it like a woman who's going to rape a child in order

"to make it better."

I'm 68 years old, there's not much analysis for me.

I've got a pretty picture of what kind of person my mum was.

I love her, I love the memory of her, but I also know

that she was a complete halfwit in many respects, you know.

And she abnegated a lot of her duty to me as a young mum,

and when I sing the Acid Queen

there's a bit of my mother's voice comes in there.

I'm kind of... I'm kind of angry with my mother.

I'm angry with all women who are mothers.

It's a misogynist song in a way you know,

and I can sing it as a woman and...

"If your boy ain't all he should be now, this girl can put him right."

There's a sense of "oh, how arrogant you are."

# Give us a room Close the door

# Leave us for a while

# Your boy won't be a boy no more

# Young but not a child... #

What The Acid Queen represents to me is that female force.

It's a fairytale figure, you know?

It's the wicked queen, it's the wicked witch,

and yet, in Grimm's Fairy Tale language, it's a very erotic figure.

It's erotic, powerful, manipulative, fixing figure.

"I can fix you. Come in, young man, I'll show you the future."

And what a great power for a woman to have over a young man...

..the power to give him his first real orgasm.

# My work is done now Look at him

# He's never been more alive

# His hand, it shakes His fingers clutch

# Watch his body writhe

# I'm the gypsy The Acid Queen

# Pay before we start

# The gypsy

# I'm guaranteed to break your little heart... #

Kit Lambert had got me tape-machines

very, very early in my writing career in 1964, so I'd been

working on tape, and by the time I started to work on Tommy

I had a fully-fledged recording studio in my house at home.

I loved it.

And he would come in with a new demo and we'd write,

and then we'd build up from a very simple demo...

And slowly, but surely, the story pieced itself together

in some kind of sense.

# Ever since I was a young boy I played the silver ball

# From Soho down to Brighton I must have played them all

# But I ain't seen nothing like him in any amusement hall

# That deaf, dumb and blind kid sure plays a mean pinball... #

Before Pinball Wizard, Tommy was a kind of rock star.

I saw him as, I suppose, a guitar-playing rock star,

cos Tommy was about music.

It was about a young man who is deaf, dumb and blind,

but can hear music through vibrations,

so he can feel stuff, so he can feel music.

They wanted some feedback on how it was going

and the album they were making and Kit Lambert knew Nik Cohn,

who was the writer on the Guardian, and he was a rock critic, and

they brought him in and he listened to their...what they'd got so far.

I said, "What do you think?"

"And he said, "It's... It's wonderful. It's really wonderful.

"Wonderful music. I love it.

"But...it's a pity it's about a guru."

And I said, "Well, it's not really about a guru.

"No, it's not a guru. He's not a guru.

"He's somebody who can feel vibrations and music and through,

"you know... And it turns into a kind of a spiritual language

"that he understands and that other people around him can see."

And he kind of goes, "I think that's even worse than a guru.

He used a wonderful expression he said, "It's a bit po-faced.

"And it's a bit heavy, religious and... But I'll give it four stars.

"It's GOOD, you know, but it's not..." And that wasn't good enough.

I knew him and we used to play pinball together quite a bit,

and he'd written a book called Arfur - with an F - Pinball Queen,

and I'd met this kid who he'd based the story on,

played pinball with her,

and we used to go out and play pinball in Soho together.

And Pete said she beat him every single time.

And so I said, "What about if, instead of him being, like,

"a, you know, a phenomena, musically-speaking,

"he's a pinball champion?"

thinking I was kind of like, lowering the, you know, the...

And you know, "He plays pinball He can play pinball.

"He's deaf, dumb and blind,

"but through vibrations he can play pinball."

I said, "Would you give it a good review if he was a pinball star "

And Nik Cohn said something like,

"Ah, yes, I think I would give that a five-star review...

"with an extra ball."

So I rushed home that night and wrote Pinball Wizard.

# Ever since I was a young boy I played the silver ball

# From Soho down to Brighton I must have played them all

# But I've never seen anything like him in any amusement hall

# That deaf, dumb and blind kid sure plays a mean pinball... #

Pinball Wizard is a crucial song.

It's actually the whole thing in a nutshell,

and it's incredibly powerful.

The first time I heard it, I was literally blown backwards

it was so powerful.

And I felt it was too sweet and, you know,

so if this is someone singing about Tommy,

it should have a bit more meat and potatoes...

..which is what I gave it.

# He stands like a statue Becomes part of the machine

# Feeling all the bumpers Always playing clean

# He plays by intuition The digit counters fall

# That deaf, dumb and blind kid sure plays a mean pinball

# He's a pinball wizard

# Had to be a twist

# A pinball wizard's Got such a supple wrist... #

I think that it was such a clever device, a perfect vehicle.

Nothing to do with words, just to do with feeling the flippers

and feeling the...

And feeling the ball and scoring a great score.

You don't need words for that.

What it did was inject this incredible silly, colourful,

daft notion into the whole thing which, in actual fact,

totally redeemed but also created a much better focus for my notion

that somebody who was deaf, dumb and blind could do something miraculous.

# He ain't got no distraction Can't hear no buzzing bells

# Don't see no lights a-flashin

# Plays by sense of smell

# Always gets a replay Never tilts at all

# That deaf, dumb and blind kid sure plays a mean pinball... #

Listening to the production on Pinball Wizard,

and it's absolutely genius, but it's a masterpiece.

# I thought I was the Bally table king

# But I just handed my pinball crown to him... #

Next day he brought it in, played it to everyone.

He thought, "Oh, God, I'm embarrassed by this."

I came in and I played it,

and the great thing about it was that it was obviously the hit.

And Damon Lyon-Shaw, the engineer, said,

"That'll be a number-one hit, you know."

And they all went, "This is great." And he went, "Oh, really?"

I think it got to number four.

HE LAUGHS

# That deaf, dumb and blind kid. . #

Nik, true to his word, gave the album a fantastic review.

With Tommy, it was the first time we used eight-track

and we didn't know what to do with them.

I've seen the multi-tracks from Tommy

and there's three tracks empty

Cos they'd insisted all the way that they wanted to be able

to play it on stage, cos there was all sorts of great ideas came up.

Kit Lambert had asked me to dance around the room

like a ballet dancer holding a microphone for an effect.

He was wonderful because he would just try everything.

He'd try the kitchen sink, he'd throw it all in.

He'd make terrible mistakes.

The next thing we knew, we'd be marching around the studio

playing trombones, you know?

Would I have changed him for someone more polished?

No, we wouldn't have been what we are today

without his early production.

It was quirky, it was cranky, and it wasn't like anybody else

In Damon Lyon-Shaw,

he did pick an absolutely excellent engineer who got fantastic sound

so, you know, he just left that kind of stuff to the engineer.

He interfered a bit, you know?

Damon Lyon-Shaw talks about the fact that Kit always wanted

the needles in the red,

and all they did was they turned down the bit behind the needles

so that the needles were always in the red,

but they were actually recording clean.

So, everybody got what they wanted.

The making of the record

and that period of our career was the most joyous time -

it was wonderful. And going to work a lot, working in the studio all day,

going out to do gigs at night what more could anybody have wanted?

Kit made recording fun, there's no question about it, it was great fun.

# There's a man I found who can bring us all joy

# There's a doctor I've found could cure the boy

# A doctor I've found... #

What's probably more important in the context...

and that these songs I DID manage to tackle, you know,

in the shape of the doctor's song "Go To The Mirror!"

was the complicity of parents and social workers,

and doctors and do-gooders,

in a sense, to try to get round the problems that this child might have.

# He seems to be completely unreceptive

# The tests I gave him show no sense at all

# His eyes react to light The dials detected

# He hears but cannot answer to your call... #

The reason why none of the other cures,

the quacky cures or even the, you know, the credible medical cure,

the reason why none of them work is that because...

What's actually happened, of course,

is that Tommy is not deaf, dumb and blind,

he's not even really autistic, you know?

What's actually happened is that he's been traumatised

and is in a kind of shutdown state.

# Tommy, can you hear me?

# Can you feel me near you?

# Tommy, can you see me?

# Can I help to cheer you? #

What cures him is that the mother smashes the mirror

that he's looking at himself in and breaks the spell.

# Do you hear or fear or Do I smash the mirror? #

GLASS SMASHES

And when she smashes the mirror he not only sees himself

for the first time in the trauma of that moment,

but he realises the power

of his mother's loving rage and frustration.

And that's kind of, in a sense what brings him to his senses.

And so then, "Da-dah! I'm free.

# I'm free

# I am free

# And freedom tastes of reality. . #

The whole thing is metaphorical of course.

It's about a coming of age, you know?

About the fact that each of us as young men,

that that happens to us at some point.

We break away from stuff that we've clung onto in our childhood

and we...

..assume our power as men, and that's what happens to Tommy.

It's a pivotal song. It's the pivotal song.

It's from hereon in that all the problems need to be solved. .

because you're back in the real world.

# I'm free

# I'm free... #

I think we probably discovered something about our sound in Tommy

when we played at the Ronnie Scott's Club.

And they decided to have a proper full-blown press launch.

They booked Ronnie Scott's Club

which, in itself, was a unique experiment,

to have a rock band playing at the famous London jazz venue

And it was very hostile. They said, "Well, I know people there

"and they said the press were drunk, and sort of shouting at them

"and leering at them."

And as we started to play, somebody shouted out

"Smash your guitar, you sick BLEEP!"

So, I think that's kind of where we were, you know,

and whoever said that was drunk on our free booze,

so we didn't really have many friends.

And so Pete said, "Right, let them have it."

I turned it up. I turned everything up.

We played with tremendous vigour and passion and vengeance,

and fear that it wouldn't work

And we played to absolute silence...

incredibly loudly,

but the ovation at the end kind of took us by surprise, I must admit.

That was... That was stunning.

The real change in The Who happened when they played it live,

not from the album.

That's when The Who sound really started to bed in.

# I'm free

# I'm free

# And I'm waiting for you to follow me... #

Several things happened to me at that time.

I was a Mod with curly hair, which was worse than having the pox.

And my wife said to me,

"Why are you straightening your hair? It's beautiful."

She said, "Just let it hang out "

And she, again, gave me the confidence to do it

So, I kind of gained a different physical persona.

# I'm free

# I'm free

# And I'm waiting for you to follow me... #

He was your archetypical rock star of the '70s,

with his fringed jacket and his long hair and his bare chest.

Roger was definitive in the role and no-one will ever sing Tommy

the way Roger, you know, Daltrey did and does.

The fact of suddenly realising "Oh, my God, we've got

"a rock god as a singer and not just an annoying fucker

"who disagrees with everything we say," you know?

It all added up to turning me into the kind of rock star

that I became. Previous to that I was just another pop singer.

Daltrey sort of became the kind of visual expression of Tommy.

The audience was watching Roger singing Tommy as Tommy -

it was totally different.

# And I'm waiting for you to follow me... #

Roger just became this figure who was at the centre of things. .

and it changed everything.

# How can we follow? How can we follow? #

What we have to accept is that what he's got a following for

is pretty bloody stupid.

You know, he's got a following again, it's metaphorical.

If he's a pinball champion, it's just about as credible

and valid as somebody, you know having a huge following

for writing songs about boys that wank over pictures

and smashing guitars.

So, you know, it was quite close to home.

This is about pop culture,

and the people around him, his pinball fans, see this

and they kind of go, "Wow, you know, you were deaf, dumb and blind and

"now you're OK and you can see, and you have this incredible freedom."

That's what his fans respond to

and they kind of go, "We want what you've got."

He has all these followers and they're basically in a holiday camp.

# Good morning, campers

# I'm your uncle Ernie and I welcome you to Tommy's holiday camp

# The camp with a difference Never mind the weather

# When you come to Tommy's The holiday's forever... #

The wonderful thing about The Who, of course,

was that what was a fairly po-faced idea to begin with

and probably far too...

..far too serious, really, to have worked for a rock band

was that, as we worked through it,

it got lighter and lighter and lighter.

Keith Moon came up with the idea that, instead of Tommy opening up

his home for hundreds and hundreds of people,

that it would be a holiday camp

# The camp with a difference Never mind the weather

# When you come to Tommy's The holiday's forever... #

So it was lighter and funnier and more delightful.

Tommy finally turns to the people around him

and says, "Listen, this is really simple.

# Welcome... #

You know, "If you really want what I've got,

"if you want what you THINK I've got, then maybe you should just live

"the kind of experience that I lived.

"Pretend to be deaf, dumb and blind, you know,

"witness a few murders, you know, do what I did.

"Do as I do and you will end up where I am.

# Welcome to the camp I guess you all know why we're here

# My name is Tommy and I became aware this year

# If you want to follow me You've got to play pinball

# And put in your earplugs

# Put on your eye shades

# You know where to put the cork .. #

Woodstock was the thing that changed The Who.

There was something about the gathering of Woodstock

and the message of Tommy.

They all put it into this marvellous kind of birth, really,

of The Who and Tommy in America

and it made them legends, really, that performance.

It broke The Who definitely in America.

I mean, that's when they really became an iconic band.

If you look at our gig book, we're at 2,000- or 3,000-seaters,

but it went from that to 120,00O overnight. It was ridiculous.

It was crazy.

# We're not gonna take it

# We're not gonna take it... #

Suddenly there was money and everything, you know, fame

and it elevated them completely

And then that period of my life

that was a bit difficult to deal with.

One of the things that I probably knew was that

if it was as successful as I felt it might be,

it would challenge the life that my wife and I hoped for.

It would challenge the life that we were trying to create around us,

which was a very loving, normal English life.

And it was very difficult to do that in a band like The Who.

Nothing became real.

No-one was... People started treating you...

It's not you that changes,

it's the people around you - everybody, you know,

everyone treats you differently So you go, "What's going on?

"Cos I haven't changed, I'm still me."

# We're not gonna take it

# We're not gonna take it

# We're not gonna take it

# We're not gonna take it

# Never did and never will... #

I think it's a human thing.

It's something that people do,

building our celebrities up and then knocking them down.

What society does is it takes what the charismatic

figure in society can give us, and then runs with it and takes it away.

And this takes the form of a kind of a rebellion,

and this is what happens to Tommy.

# See me

# Feel me... #

I started my journey as a fan, my journey as somebody who was

looking to music and celebrity and glamour...

..for something.

Where DO you find the answers and how DO you grapple with them?

And what do you want from artists or gurus or spiritual leaders?

You know, how much do you need to do yourself?

Pretty much every great spiritual leader in the history of humankind

has said, "You know, at the end of the day look within your own heart."

"The master gravely shook his head

"and I knew that despite his infinite wisdom, infinite power

"infinite awareness, that he WOULD not, COULD not tell me where

"to look or even what to look for. I had to find the answer myself "

# Listening to you

# I get the music

# Gazing at you

# I get the heat-heat

# Following you

# I climb the mountain

# I get excitement at your feet. . #

Everybody!

The prayer at the end is two-fold -

one, we hear Tommy remembering

"See me, feel me, touch me, heal me,"

and then going back on his flight,

"Listening to you, I get the music,"

turning towards the universe and praising her.

But, also, I get the sense, too ..

..that this is the audience, as well.

They're also singing "See me, feel me, touch me, heal me."

They're also connecting with what it is

that is the real fact of the matter.

They are a collection of individuals,

and each individual has to live his own life.

And each individual has a relationship with the universe.

And so the end of Tommy is about that, you know?

And I think, without having read what Meher Baba said -

you know, you have to lose yourself in order to find God,

and you have to lose yourself in order to find your true self -

I don't think I could have hit on it.

You could never wish for a better ending to an album

And it's about you -

and you, as a listener,

feel engaged and touched and moved.

And I think that's what Tommy did for The Who more than anything

It picked our audience up from being...

...a pop band-loving audience,

and moved them into being,

"wow, this is more than that, there's something else going on here."

# Listening to you

# I get the music

# Gazing at you

# I get the heat-heat

# Following you... #

We always had an idea that Tommy was going to mean something.

You know, we liked the album

and we knew it was going to be...kind of important.

People can find more and more meanings in it,

and more and more levels of stuff

as they hear it again and again and again.

You listen to Tommy now and it moves you,

and it moves you because the things he's writing about

are absolutely eternal.

He was, without question, a pioneer,

and I would say this is a quintessentially important creation.

There was a feeling that it was actually something that would last.

It's true, I think we had shifted.

At that point, the centre of gravity had moved from popular culture

from something that was just throw-away

to something that really started to mean something and had purpose.

The pre-Tommy Who, the '60s Who

were a great gimmicky, clever, intelligent pop band.

Post-Tommy, The Who were heavy, serious rock,

up there amongst the top three

Afterwards, for a period, probably the top rock band in the world

Pete's music will be performed as the new classical music,

cos it's, in some ways, classically structured,

and, lyric-wise and emotional-wise,

they're timeless, and they always will be.

It does appear to be the only topic of conversation

that we've had for the past three years, erm..

so I'm fed up with talking about it,

I'm certainly not fed up with playing it.

As Bob Dylan so eloquently said when he came to see Tommy

for the first time at the Filmore,

"I've got another appointment.

But Leonard Bernstein got me by the shoulders

and said, "Do you realise what you've done?!"

So, somewhere along the line, I don't know.

# You feel me coming

# A new vibration

# From afar you'll see me

# I'm a sensation, I'm a sensation

# They worship me and all I touch

# Hazy-eyed, they catch my glance... #

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd