The biggest album of a very big year in rock music was by a band too broke to break up. Despite great competition from the Beatles (Abby Road), the Rolling Stones (Let It Bleed), Crosby Stills & Nash, and even the debut of King Crimson, the Who's 'Tommy' was the even of the year. The package alone shouted 'important!', with a triple gatefold, lavishly illustrated, along with the book of lyrics (libretto for a rock opera), all done by the same artist, all telling the improbable story of a deaf, dumb and blind boy. How the band could afford it is a mystery.
After four years of literally bashing around the various circuits, expanding their touring area and fan base, 1968 was not a good year for the Who. The hits stopped coming, the excellent single 'I Can See For Miles' didn't top the charts as they felt it should. Their last album, 'Sell Out', despite being excellent, paled in comparison to other monstrous 1967 platters, especially by newcomers the Doors and Jimi Hendrix. Worse, Tracks Records, the label specially created for them by their insane management duo of Chris Stamp and Kit Lambert, actually signed the Experience, putting the band in the unenviable position of having to often play toe to toe against Hendrix, as they did at Monterey.
The Who were not a band that could join forces in the studio, rally together quickly and release something to save the day. They relied heavily on one self-tortured genius, Pete Townshend, with a little assistance from John Entwistle. But Pete didn't run the band, instead having to create more and more complex demos to sell his ideas to the other members of the group. Anyone could veto an idea, and they all frequently did.
Add to that the actual maniac Keith Moon, capable of destroying anything at anytime with alarming frequency, and a debt of over $250,000 in 1968 money, probably well over a million with inflation today, and you were looking at an inventive and exciting group that seemed to be self-destructing. Moon and Entwistle literally tried to leave the band a couple of times, once with Jeff beck, the second time a very serious offer from Jimmy Page. They even came up with the name 'Led Zeppelin'! If it weren't for the financial stupidity of Lambert and Stamp, the next album wouldn't have happened at all.
Add to that the mind set of their main song writer, who was typically going through a crisis, this time a spiritual one, rejecting the drug-laced rock world for Indian mysticism. This was probably influenced by his marriage that year, an attempt at settling down. His parents had been in show business, his father a big band leader and saxophonist, his mother a singer. Their marriage was not a good one, with young Pete being sent away to live with a creepy grandmother whenever his mother had one of her many public affairs.
Some how, Townshend managed to put all these elements together to create something new in the rock world. The idea of a rock opera had actually been floating around for a while, including during interviews by Pete himself as early as 1966. "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band' seemed to be a concept album, although it was not, using clever musical ploys such as blending songs and using reprises. A British folk duo called Nirvana, to forever be confused with the group form Seattle, released a true concept album in 1967 called 'The Story of Simon Simopath'. It hardly ever sold, a mere footnote in history, but they were the first.
More importantly, another couple of London groups were playing with the same idea in 1967, both with more juice in the rock world. Tomorrow were a psych band playing on the same circuit as the Pink Floyd and Soft Machine, most notable today for having a young Steve Howe as their excellent guitarist. They had a couple of hit singles, 'My White Bicycle' and 'Revolution' (not the Beatles song) and were a favorite on the BBC rock programs. If they hadn't taken such a long time finishing their first album, they might have been substantially bigger.
During the long sessions for that album, the lead singer, Keith West, started publicizing the idea of a teenage opera to be called, imaginatively, 'Teenage Opera'. I would guess that he stole the idea from Brian Wilson and Phil Spector, duking it out in Los Angeles' studios in 1965 and 1966, who were said to be writing 'teenage symphonies' by such authors as Tom Wolfe. West managed around four half-assed singles over the course of a year, with Tomorrow backing him up mainly, but the effort seemed only to demoralize the group and hasten their demise. Not much more was ever heard of Mr. West again.
Curiously, the drummer of that band, a rather strange creature prone to mime and other crimes against nature, going by the name Twink (which has an entirely different meaning today!!!) left too join a more establish group, the Pretty Things. The Pretties were in a bit of a tailspin, more creative than ever but not selling like they did in their earliest incarnation as a tough R & B group. I can't help but think that Mr. Twink may have brought with him the ambition to do something more sophisticated.
As broke as the Who, the one thing that the Pretty Things had was access to a world-class studio, using Abbey Road at the same time as the Beatles and the Pink Floyd, also the same engineers and same producer, Norman Smith. The album that emerged, 'S.F. Sorrow', didn't sell that well, but it is of the highest quality, a complete concept album, telling the story of someone's life from birth to death. It ranks in the top five psych albums ever.
Townshend has admitted that 'S.F. Sorrow' was a big influence, then denied it, then admitted it again, then denied it again. It is known that the Pretty Things were a big influence on the Who, especially original drummer Viv Prince, the template for certified crazy person Keith Moon. In the end, it really doesn't matter. Through record company indifference, 'S.F. Sorrow' sunk without a trace. The Who's management and record company were able to generate a mountain of publicity for the Who, turning their opus into a certified winner.
But the sound is a little threadbare. They couldn't afford a good studio, recording mostly in four track, using only a single microphone for much of Moon's outstanding drum and percussion work. The sound is sparse but clean, in preparation for orchestral overdubs that didn't happen when they ran out of money. The band and managers left after a long six month off-and-on recording process, leaving the final mix to the engineer.
Fortunately, he did a pretty good job. Without overdubs, it was relatively easy for the band to reproduce the opera, or large portions of it anyway, live on stage. That they did for the next two years, reviving small excerpts of the entire thing periodically over the next fifty years. During those two years, eventually playing opera houses in Europe and America, the Who developed into the best and most dynamic in the world at the time, maybe for all time.
Yet go back and listen to the band running through 'Tommy' live, and they largely reproduce the clean studio sound, just rocking things up a little bit more. The really heavy stuff came before and especially after, on things like 'Young Man Blues' and 'Shaking All Over'. "My Generation' turned into a pulverizing workout that could stretch, on the right night, to over thirty minutes long. The entire performance was a carefully calculated series of events guaranteed to get very specific reactions from rock audiences
This whole thing couldn't be possible without Townshend's amazingly detailed demos. He laid out the entire album out song by song, showing the group not only the parts to play but how they could contribute and make everything sound bigger and better. With a few key contributions from Entwistle and one supposedly from Moon (actually ghost written by Townshend), a bona fide classic was born.
From Woodstock to the Isle of Wight, both in 1969 and 1970, the Who played the opera as the main part of their set, just as they did hundreds of other times. Like all those other performances, it was a monstrous success, eliciting standing ovations at exactly the same spots every time. The Who were inventing arena rock, playing to larger and larger audiences, their performances becoming broader and more physical, particularly Pete, who virtually invented every move that guitarists have been copying ever since.
'Tommy' was successful enough to spawn an all-star symphonic version in 1972, the first time that had been done, and a very successful movie in 1975. Townshend went back and redid the entire piece, adding endless synth overdubs and sound effects in quadrophonic sound, making up for the sparse sound of the original. He earned an Oscar nomination for that one, even though it took an entire year and caused a nervous breakdown. Then there was a Broadway play that ran for years as well as various al-star revivals and charity events.
Of course, the story in 'Tommy' is pure 1960s bullshit at its most pure, part mysticism, part smoke and mirrors. The basic plot has had to be modified for every new medium since it really doesn't make complete sense, jumping around from one improbable event to another. That's part of the charm, the sheer oversized ambition of the thing. Plus, at heart, 'Tommy' is really about dynamics, about balancing loud and soft, hard and tender, fast and slow.
Townshend came down with concept fever after the album, never being satisfied with doing 'just' another album. Everything had to be a major event, a grander step, a more audacious attempt at making serious art. He failed miserably with the Lifehouse project in 1971, only spawning one of the best single albums in rock history. 'Quadrophenia' in 1973 was more sustained, better plotted, a kitchen drama about personal angst and uncertainly instead of anything with cosmic significance. It remains the band's favorite piece and was also turned into an excellent movie in 1979.
The public still loves 'Tommy' more. Bombast always wins out, at least to the general public. The double album provided a template that other bands could follow, threading a story over a couple of discs. The packaging and marketing were a huge influence on the scores of progressive rock groups emerging just as the double album was being released. 'Tommy' has a unique place in rock history, a defining moment of hippie glory combined with mod flash, a brilliant piece of stage craft that gave each member of the band a moment to shine in the sun.
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