Hear Tommy Live
London 1969

Wednesday, May 13, 7:30 PM
Boulder Theater, 2032 14th Street, Boulder

6:30 PM | Tommy and Rock Music’s Ambitious Turn–
Presented by John Covach, Director of the University
of Rochester’s Institute for Popular Music
Or click here for season ticket options.

Wear your grooviest 60s outfit.

It’s 1969 and veteran composer Franz Josef Haydn is making his first trip to London where he is swept up in the dizzying world of The Who, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Cream, and Hendrix, many of whom had grown up idealizing this early work in Esterhazy in the 1950s, much as they had Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker in America.

All of London’s hippest gather for the premier of Haydn’s London Symphony at the Hammersmith Odeon (aka Boulder Theatre) but Haydn is there for the premiere of the first rock opera, “Tommy,” by Who’s Mahler.

HAYDN | Symphony No. 104 in D major
THE WHO | Tommy

MahlerFest Chamber Orchestra
Kenneth Woods, Conductor

Who’s Mahler
Kenneth Woods, Guitars & Vocals
Tony Escueta, Keyboards & Vocals
Sean Flora, Bass & Vocals
Brad Harner, Drums & Vocals

There are many aspects of Tommy which are mysterious or confounding. Perhaps the most confounding thing about Tommy is that it was a huge success with the public at the time it appeared, and has remained so for over fifty years, during which it has been reimagined again and again as everything from a Broadway musical to a surrealist art film. How is it that Tommy, an opera with a complex and confusing plot, one which deals with genuinely disturbing themes and events, became a beloved cultural touchstone for generations of music lovers? And how is it that a work born, at least in part, out of Townshend’s spiritual awakening triggered by his discovery of the teachings of Meher Baba, ended up offering such a sharp critique of both organised religion and the cults of personality that surround religious leaders?

The Who’s primary songwriter and guitarist, Pete Townshend, is generally credited as the ‘author’ of this, the first major rock opera. While Townshend was, without a doubt, the main creative force behind the project, Tommy received essential creative contributions from Townshend’s bandmates in The Who, particularly John Entwistle, who wrote two of the songs. The Who’s producer, Kit Lambert, was also deeply involved, providing both essential encouragement, and in helping Townshend to refine and focus the narrative (in addition to his role in managing the studio recording process). Finally, artist Mike McInnerney, like Towshend, a recent convert to the teachings of the guru Meher Baba, was instrumental in not only providing the powerful cover imagery, but in helping Townshend clarify the moral and philosophical themes of the work.

The Overture which opens Tommy is more than merely a curtain raiser. It wordlessly depicts the events which occur prior to the start of the opera proper. The story begins in the latter part of World War I (Ken Russel’s film and the Broadway show would later shift the timeline to WW II), when Tommy’s parents, Captain Walker and his wife Nora, fall in love, marry and conceive Tommy. Captain Walker is summoned to the front before Tommy Walker is born, and disappears in combat, presumed dead.

The sung opera opens with the text of the telegram informing Mrs. Walker that her husband is missing and not expected to return, followed by the birth of Tommy. The War ends and Mrs. Walker falls in love with a new man, but Captain Walker returns unexpectedly, having spent some years recovering from his injuries in France, and, enraged, kills his wife’s lover. Young Tommy, by now about four or five, sees the murder take place via the reflection in the mirror of his parents’ bedroom. Horrified, Captain and Mrs. Walker tell Tommy “You didn’t hear it, you didn’t see it…. You won’t say nothing to no one, never in your life!” The trauma causes Tommy to withdraw into a state of severe catatonic shock, becoming, in effect, “deaf, dumb and blind.”

Who frontman, Roger Daltry, called the next number, “Amazing Journey” the ‘pivotal’ song on the album. Its lyrics were taken from an epic poem Townshend had written about his inner quest for enlightenment. Having withdrawn from the outside world, Tommy finds beauty and insight in an inner world of “musical dreams,” which are depicted in the following instrumental, “Sparks.”

The next portion of the opera deals with Tommy’s abusive childhood. Disengaged from family and society, he is subjected to all manner of neglect, bullying, sexual trauma and medical quackery. His increasingly desperate parents take him to pimps and prostitutes, faith healers and doctors, while also leaving him vulnerable to torture at the hands of disturbed relatives. Townshend, himself a survivor of sexual abuse by his grandmother as a very young child, leaves unanswered the question of what effect this all has, if any, on Tommy. Of his own experience, Townshend has said he remembers very, very little in any detail, but when it came time to write “Cousin Kevin” (in which Tommy is left alone with a psychopathic relative who tortures and abuses him) and “Fiddle About” (in which Tommy is sexually abused by his uncle), he found himself unable to write. “When I tried to work on those songs,” he said, “I either became engulfed in blind rage or withdrew into a kind of white-screened fugue state.” Townshend turned to his bandmate, John Entwistle, who ended up writing both songs.

However, Townshend not only wrote but sang the similarly dark “Acid Queen,” in which Tommy is drugged a raped by a deranged prostitute in hopes she will snap him out of his catatonia (“If your child ain’t all he should be now, This girl will put him right.) Tommy’s acid trip is depicted in the following number, “Underture.” Throughout these dark chapters, Tommy’s parents’ motivation veers between religious zealotry (“He doesn’t know who Jesus was or what praying is.How can he be saved from the eternal grave?”) and frustration.

As Tommy enters young adulthood, he begins to show an incredible aptitude for pinball. Townshend had originally intended that Tommy’s ‘gift’ would be musical, in line with the musical dreams of Amazing Journey. Having previewed the work in progress to his friend, Guardian music critic Nick Cohn, Townshend was alarmed by Cohn’s tempered enthusiasm. Cohn thought it was all a bit too serious and, in Townshend’s words, “po faced.” Townshend, who played pinball with Cohn socially, suggested the change of tack, and Cohn responded with enthusiasm (his review hailed Tommy as ‘a masterpiece.”)

Increasingly desperate, his parents take Tommy to a specialist. He explains to them that Tommy is medically fit, and that his catatonic state is psychological in nature:

“His eyes can see, his ears can hear, his lips speak
All the time the needles flick and rock
No machine can give the kind of stimulation
Needed to remove his inner block”

The doctor’s assessment unleashes the pent-up rage simmering inside Tommy’s mother after two decades of blank-faced passivity.

“You don’t answer my call
With even a nod or a wink
But you gaze at your own reflection! Alright!

You don’t seem to see me
But I think you can see yourself
How can the mirror affect you?

Can you hear me or do I surmise?
That you fear me,
can you feel my temper Rise…”

She smashes the mirror, and Tommy awakens from his catatonic state.

Reconnected to the physical world, Tommy becomes a spiritual teacher and leader. His existing fame as the deaf, dumb and blind pinball wizard means his ‘miracle cure’ creates a sensation, and eager followers flock to him seeking guidance.

“I leave a trail of rooted people
Mesmerized by just the sight
The few I touched now are disciples
Love as One, I Am the Light”

Tommy becomes part messiah, part rock star, and the song “Sally Simpson” is a cautionary tale about trying to get too close to your heroes

“Outside the house Mr. Simpson announced
That Sally couldn’t go to the meeting
He went on cleaning his blue Rolls Royce
And she ran inside weeping

She got to her room and tears splashed the picture
Of the new Messiah
She picked up a book of her father’s life
And threw it on the fire!”

While Tommy quickly finds legions of followers, his teachings seem vague and contradictory

“If I told you what it takes
To reach the highest high
You’d laugh and say nothing’s that simple

But you’ve been told many times before
Messiahs pointed to the door
And no one had the guts to leave the temple.”

In later years, Townshend explained that one of the key insights he had learned from Meher Baba’s writings was that the search for god was an individual and internal one. The character of Tommy seems bent on confounding his followers. On the one hand, he calls on ‘everyone’ to follow him and his teachings, but he seems unwilling or incapable of doing much more than spouting platitudes.

“Ask along that man who’s wearing a carnation
Bring every single person from Victoria Station
Go into that hospital and bring the nurses and patients
Everyone go home and fetch their relations!

Come to this house, be one of the comfortable people
Lovely bright home, drinking all night, never sleeping”

Tommy and his family, including his abuser Uncle Ernie, build a new kind of religious retreat to accommodate his ever-growing flock. It is a quintessential mid-century British holiday camp, full of all the most loathsome trappings of commercialism and organised religion:

“I’m your Uncle Ernie
And I’ll welcome you to Tommy’s Holiday Camp
The camp with the difference, never mind the weather
When you come to Tommy’s, the holiday’s forever”

When Tommy addresses the campers, he seems to have taken on the worst aspects of fire and brimstone preachers. He’s aggressive, intimidating and judgemental.

“Hey you getting drunk, so sorry, I’ve got you sussed
Hey you smoking mother nature, this is a bust
Hey hung up old Mr. Normal, don’t try to gain my trust”

He demands they relive his experiences:

“If you want to follow me, you’ve got to play pinball
And put in your ear plugs, put on your eye shades
You know where to put the cork”

Has Tommy become drunk with power? Is he deluded? Corrupted? Are we witnessing the end of the arc of a tragic character? How far we have come from “Messiahs pointed to the door, and no one had the guts to leave the temple.” Tommy’s followers become enraged and reject him en masse:

“We’re not gonna take it, never did and never will
Don’t want no religion and as far as we can tell

We ain’t gonna take you, never did and never will
We’re not gonna take you, we forsake you, gonna rape you
Let’s forget you better still”

Many readings of Tommy have taken this rather pessimistic view, including Ken Russel’s, in which Tommy’s family are murdered by an enraged mob before Tommy flees. But, having threatened horrific violence, the crowd instead decides to “forget you, better still.”

Perhaps Tommy did finally find a way to get his flock to “leave the temple,” after all?

A number of early reviews of Tommy criticized the end of the work, some of the most powerful music and words ever to emerge from rock n roll, as vague. Couldn’t and shouldn’t Townshend have clarified who the ‘you’ is in the music Townshend always described as ‘the prayer’?

“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”

Is ‘you’ Tommy? Is it Meher Baba? God? Nature? For all of Ken Russel’s fantastical imagery in the movie version, his film ends in a rather pedestrian way, with Tommy climbing an actual mountain. Is that all there is to it? Perhaps, before we decide who is ‘you’, we should first ask whose words these are. Is this Tommy singing to god? Is it Tommy’s followers singing to him? It is in answering these questions that the work’s origins as a rock opera are most illuminating. Townshend understood that rock is unique among musical forms in being both immersive and participatory. Audiences don’t merely listen, they dance, they cheer, they sing along. Who is singing the prayer? By now, millions have sung it for 50-plus years. And who have they been singing it to?

They’ve been singing it to each other.

Hear Tommy Live London 1969