Music Alive! Music Education for Today's Generation

The Original Rock Opera

Tommy was written in the ‘70s by the Who’s Pete Townshend to express how he felt after being taught by his spiritual guru Meher Baba. Townshend actually considered the work "a metaphorical story of different states of consciousness." That’s how radical it seemed to tell a story with a mixture of opera and rock!

The story of Tommy is a very somber one: A young man (named Tommy) witnesses a murder, but his parents insist that he did not see or hear the incident and must never speak of it. Terribly upset, Tommy subsequently becomes blind, deaf and mute. He becomes lost in endless games of pinball. Then the boy’s subconscious manifests as a figure dressed in silvery robes who guides him on a journey of enlightenment. Years pass, and Tommy becomes a young man capable of interpreting physical sensations as music.

When Tommy was released, critics were split between those who thought the album was a masterpiece and those who felt it was exploitative because of its dark themes. The recording of the work was banned by the BBC and certain U.S. radio stations. Ultimately, though, the album became a huge commercial success, as did The Who's frequent live performances of the rock opera in subsequent years. In fact, Tommy took The Who to a new level of international stardom—and the work was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998.

Although Tommy is typically described as a “rock opera,” author and Who historian Richard Barnes has written that this definition is not accurate because Tommy does not incorporate the classic operatic elements of staging, scenery, acting and recitative. According to Barnes, Tommy could be more accurately described as a "rock cantata" or a "rock song cycle.” This is actually something it shares with Handel’s Messiah Rocks. Tommy most closely resembles an oratorio in form, as it includes instrumental, choral and solo sections, with no dialogue between characters, and no sets, costumes or choreography. And can you guess the name of the most famous oratorio? Yep, it’s Handel’s Messiah!

Musically, the original album is a complex set of pop-rock arrangements, generally based upon Townshend's acoustic guitar and built up with many overdubs by the four members of the band using bass, electric and acoustic guitars, piano, organ, drum kit, gong, timpani, trumpet, French horn, three-part vocal harmonies and occasional doubling on vocal solos. Townshend mixes fingerpicking in with his trademark power chords and fat riffs.

Some interesting facts about this first rockin’ classical work:

*The climax of Tommy was said by many to be the highlight of the 1969 Woodstock festival. As The Who's Roger Daltrey began to sing "See Me, Feel Me", the sun began to rise, as if on cue. John Entwistle, the bass player, later joked that "God was our lighting man."

*In 1971, the Seattle Opera under director Richard Pearlman produced the first ever fully staged professional production of Tommy. The production included Bette Midler playing the role of The Acid Queen.

*The work was the source material for the 1990 Blue Devils Drum and Bugle Corps program (4th place)

*The original album was dedicated to Townshend's guru Meher Baba. (He is listed as "Avatar" in the album credits.)