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Full text of "The Story of Tommy (The Who)
"
See other formats
Introduction by Pete Townshend
About once every two weeks I receive a letter from an amateur
dramatic society, a school or a college, and occasionally from
theatrical impresarios, for permission to put on a _ performance
of the rock opera TOMMY. They ask for a script, perhaps the
‘““musical score’ (in fact one doesn’t exist), and sometimes even
my guidance as a director or producer. |
TOMMY has become Rock’s “Pirates of Penzance”’ in only ten
years of exposure to the public, through the Who’s performances
on Stage, their original album, Lou Reizner’s album with the London
Symphony Orchestra, Ken Russell’s film, the ballet of the Royal
Canadian Ballet, and dozens of minor exploitations such as “Electric
Tommy’, the music played on synthesiser, and *‘Marching Tommy’’,
the music scored for college brass bands.
The above, in a simple way, illustrates how as a Rock composer
and performer I was dragged into the world of light entertainment,
and into the world of high finance. The Who’s original TOMM Y
album sold very well indeed in comparison to their early record
sales and as a result the band was baled out of terrific debt and given
a new lease of life in many ways. As for the reference to light enter-
tainment; TOMMY was never ever really meant to be as “‘heavy”’
as say, My Generation. We joked as a group about TOMMY
being true opera, which it isn’t, but the Who’s audience, and many
of the Rock press took it very seriously indeed. It was this seriousness
that turned TOMM YY into light entertainment.
For a Rock group to receive a critical review in the music
section of the TIMES or the GUARDIAN used to be considered
quite hilarious in 1967. By the group themselves that is; the managers
and the record companies realised immediately that although this
recognition by the establishment was not going to help the “‘street
image’ of their artistes, it would certainly help record sales. These
always depend on the popularity of a performer with as wide a range
of people as is possible.
Before TOMMY, the Who were a ‘*Mod” group. We thought
of ourselves a little like the Punk Rock/New Wave bands of today do,
though less politically inclined I think. We complained about society,
education, unemployment, diffident parents, capitalist exploitation
of the young (Note: not the workers). Suddenly, as a result of
TOMMY, we were able to pay our equipment bills overnight,
employ a couple of extra road crew, get some stage lights, buy a
home. The need to complain fled with our frustrations. We have
never attempted anything as orthodox as TOMMY since; it is
significant that TOMMY was the crest of a breaking wave for the
band, it liberated us financially, but it also smashed us down in some
senses. It challenged our legitimacy as true Rock chroniclers, and
refused to age gracefully!
(Continued on inside back cover)
£3.95 net in UK only $6.95 in US
Published by Eel Pie Publishing Ltd.
The Boathouse, Ranelagh Drive, Twickenham
Middlesex TW1 1QZ
England
ISBN 0 906008 02 6 (Hardback edition)
ISBN 0 906008 01 8 (Paperback edition)
ne
OF f : fa
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saints m : i ee acioe” sat z 3
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H
ant
Compiled & Edited by Richard Barnes
Part One Written by Pete Townshend
Designer... : Richard Barnes
Assistant Designer . seceeseesss, Jan McVeigh
Art Assistant ...... Keith Reynolds
Photography Graham Attwood & Richard Barnes
Paintings on pages 4 & 8 Bob Harvey
Postcard rack (p. 12) . Bill Fallover
Illustrated postcards (p. 12) Malcolm Harrisson
‘Acid Queen’ collage (p. 46)...... Bill Fallover
‘Pinball Wizard’ artwork (p. 72).........Jan McVeigh
‘Champagne’ artwork (p.74) Bill Fallover
‘Uncle Ernie’ collage (p. 116) . .. Jan McVeigh
‘Listening To You’ artwork (p. 126) Bill Fallover
Additional photographs
Photographs on pages 114 & 122. . Johnny Dew-Mathews
Parts Two and Three written by Steve Peacock and
eT Richard Barnes from material supplied by Ken Russell, | 7. ae :
re ce | Pete Townshend, Brian Doyle (Tommy film publicist), 7 WM § oS =
("Fee roe an Keith Altham, John Clarke (Tommy film art director), ay. - Ne Daa) ror FUN anes
RECREATION J] slams and Nobby Clark (Film explosives and effects man). =e RECREATION
= Ken Russell interview by David Litchfield. First pub-
lished by The Baroque Press in IMAGE magazine.
Chart (p. 28) painted by Rano Gayley, under the super-
vision of Meher Baba, is a pictorial version of the book
GOD SPEAKS, published by Dodd Mead & Co. Here
reproduced by permission of Sufism Reoriented Inc.
Newspaper (p.70) courtesy of THE NEWS, Portsmouth.
All lyrics © 1975 by Fabulous Music Ltd. and New Ikon
Music Ltd., except for ‘Eyesight To The Blind’ © 1951
by Robert Mellin Music Publishing Corp. (BMI). All
songs written by Pete Townshend except ‘Cousin Kevin’
and ‘Fiddle About’ by John Entwistle, ‘Eyesight To The
Blind’ by Sonny Boy Williamson and ‘Tommy’s Holiday
Camp’ by Keith Moon.
Film Produced by The Robert Stigwood Organisation.
Printed in England by Waterlow (Dunstable) Ltd.
Colour Separation by E. Moffat & Co. High Wycombe.
© 1977 Eel Pie Publishing Ltd. Middlesex, England.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
Photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the
prior permission of the copyright owner.
ONVENTS
Part One/Writing Tommy............................ 4
Part Two/Filming Tommy..........................34
Part Three/Tommy People........................86
Ken Russell
Roger Daltrey
Ann-Margret
Oliver Reed
Part Four/Tommy Lyrics..............................8
(Part Four consists of pages of illustrated lyrics made up from,
or inspired by, images from the TOMMY movie and placed in
sequence throughout the book)
aa =a aa Gears
RECREATION |] sium eee — \__ RECREATION x
: mi Bernie's Holiday Camp Vid Big e: oom ca
IOS A WRELA DOUIGTIIC BOY ene tte xc sae 15, 16, 17
AN OZING SOUl OVER 2.2 ee, ES pretence RR toa caw oal pees LUs 21
Christmas
Eyesight To The Blind
Acid Queen
Do You Think It’s Alright/Cousin Kevin
Do You Think It’s Alright/Fiddle A bout
Pinball Wizard
CRAM POSNE Doras 6 ect Re eR Oe Ae ee
Petes A: DOCIO, Fe ee dese Pie ee She gel eee 84
Go To The Mirror
LOVES GAN NOU TAT VLCl Ban tite, So ip hs See Ae, ea 90
SHTASH PREM ON 0k, eae eek WG Retin 5H AGENTS. Bee 9]
I'm Free
Mother And Son
Sensation
Sally Simpson
Welcome
Tommy's Holiday Camp 116, LI7 Mr ny _cuioned. 1 S065
WEE NOUGONTGI ARGU a. :3 cae se des Ale oe ia. Dee Ses 120, 121 pe
See Me, Feel Me 124, 125 seecees mene
Listening To You 126, 127
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- coma. I've known cases of this when patients remain
for years." Mother looked at father, and father looked at mother,
x
"The boy is incredibly withdrawn. said the doctor,"As far as
o make out, his long life as a bedridden child has affected a total
| in this’ deep sleep
they
both would resign themselves to this new sadness quickly it. was clear,
they had faced twelve long years of tension up till now, waiting for
their son to recover from his semi trance kike state which had kept him
from them, amd another two or fifty years would not make any difference
now. "I suggest you allow a nurse to instruct you how to feed the lad
and so on," the doctor wen t on, "The better health he is in, the more
chance there is that he will stay outof his coma permanantly when he does
awaken." | | ee one |
I could hear it all. It was faint and even slightly reverb-
erant in my head, I heard my father talk to me, he would talk to me of-
ten, obviously not believin gthat any of his words were getting through
but talking to me none-the-less. He always talked rubbish, nothing I
could have understood even if I'd have known him. In fact I knew nothing.
I was always too deep in withdrawl to take education, and the onl¥words
ever spoken to me were the cupses of the nurses who had to take me to the
lavatory. But I could hear them. All of them, all the time, yet it was
impossible for me to know what they meant when thay said,"He can¥ hear
@ word we are saying!", for I couldnt even distinguish betwwen the spo-
ken word and odd noises in the room, they all sounded so natural, all
arrived as simple vibrations of the air. I hadnt left that room since I
was brought home from hospital at seventeen months, Aware of everything
I could not translate or understand anything I heard or saw or felt. I
couldnt co-ordinate the muscles of my body to move, or even move them to
. GO-ordinate them, I was just aware of being aware so to speak, solid, and
non active. But this recent developement shocked me, even in my delerium.
One night, as I lay allowing the barrage of information being fed to me
by my sensss to wash over me in a kind of sleep, I found myself suddenly
able to do something. What I could do wasnt a lot, but it was an incred-
ible sensatio for me, as I had never regarded my senses as mine to regard
or my body mine to contro}, i found I had the ability to stem my senses
flow to my brain. Of course, already in an amzingly complete neutrality
Il would have prefewred some kind of active event, but this was huge any-
way.l had the power, the power, the power, to stop the barrage, the un-
ending, incessant bombardment of my soul by these relentless stimulii.
So I did, slowly at first, but then faster and faster as I grew used to
my new talent. Each tiny change in conciousness was a wevelation to me,
so green to any kind of change at all during my childhood years. And now
IT had finally reached complete peace, complete quiet, complete freedom
from the ignorance tha could not allow me to see order an the chaos my
body presented me.At. least nearly. Iitseemed that the further I got nto
non thought, the more effort was required to take me further, and so
each time the moment came for me to completely pass away from all the.
cloudy, distant, but obvious stimulii, I became suddenly aware of some
difficulty. It was like trying to commit suicide without a weapon, I
had no weapon, only the powers of withdrawl, each time I came near the
blissful peace of non existence some crude and compelling life force
hurled me back. |
“Tommy” has passed through many stages in its lifetime:
A mere idea, an uncomplicated dream, an unsuccessful
study of orchestration, a Hesse-like novel... hundreds of
variations.
What is enclosed here is where we are at today. I daren’t
say this is the definitive version of Tommy. Many people
more attached to the Who’s album than Ken Russell’s
film would no doubt object. Even people who loved the
film might feel that Tommy could easily be improved on
or even edited down to a simpler basis.
1 think it would be very interesting to look at all the
stages of Tommy’s history from my point of view, as the
main writer and composer. To look at the whole thing
now might be indulgent, at a time when things are by no
means over for the film. But there is a new interest in
Tommy now, and many people think of it purely as an
idea or gimmick; the brainchild of some rock musician
with pretensions of grandeur.
Strangely enough, writing Tommy was something that
simultaneously brought me as a composer, tremendous
praise and criticism. Many fans of The Who and of rock
in general have never been able to see where an ‘opera’
fits alongside songs like ‘““My Generation’’, or “‘Substi-
tute’. In a sense, Tommy really does form a tremendous
part of my retrospective writing output. Such a lot of time
and energy went into it, so many ideas, and more speci-
fically so many actual songs were used in Tommy. Some-
times they were used up, changed about from original
songs intended for other purposes, or written specially
for the opera, then ditched.
Writing rock songs was something I ended up doing.
When I was young I thought of myself as a Rock Star
rather than a rock writer. I would dress in front of a
mirror, standing with a guitar, legs apart, trying to look
like one of ‘““The Shadows’. I wrote a couple of songs for
The Who when they were called “The Detours” back
around 1960. My first song to be published was called
“It Was You” and was recorded by a Beatle-ish group
called ‘‘The Naturals” in 1963. Needless to say 1t was a
flop. It could even have been a B-side, I can’t really
remember. I just remember showing up at art college
having visited the publisher, full of talk of ‘advances’ and
‘really big money’.
When later, The Who took their first serious record
company audition, we were turned down because we
didn’t, at that time, play any original material. It seemed
obvious that I should try to write, having had some
experience, and I began a song called ‘‘Can’t Explain’’,
which was in the charts about six weeks after I'd written
it. Things moved fast in those days. I didn’t really feel
serious about songwriting, although I did admire serious
non ‘pop’ writers like Dylan and Nina Simone. What
made me become serious was the fact that I discovered
that I really could communicate far more honestly and
effectively through music than through conversation or
relationships.
What I learned was, that I could write a song about
anything, absolutely anything, and something quite
surprising and candid would emerge between the lines of
an ostensibly simple song. Even I didn’t really under-
stand how this happened, but to the public of course this
‘was ‘talent’ — later ‘genius’. I would love to be able to say
it was just ‘hard work’. Often the harder I worked at
something, the less real and connected with its audience
(and my own life), it seemed to be. So I knew that Tommy
would have to be on an unconscious basis. I would have
to form a hard core on which to build songs that I hadn’t
written specifically for an opera. So I looked through my
notes, my sheets and sheets of unused words, and dis-
covered several songs; the songs that served as the hard
core of Tommy.
I thought about the American tour in 1967 when the Who
used to do two-hour long performances of old-time hit
material when we toured with Herman’s Hermits. At that
time after each show performing numbers like the “Mini
Opera’, ‘“Substitute’’, “Happy Jack’, ‘Pictures of Lily’’,
‘Little Billy’’, and songs of this type. I used to rush back
to the hotel room to work, writing songs or collating
lyrics, or scribbling out ideas for the opera that I was
working on at the time called “Amazing Journey’’. More
about that later.
On another occasion in America, I remember a perform-
ance at the Fillmore West in San Francisco, where after
playing and playing and playing, deep into the night,
again probably a two or three hour show, Jann Wenner,
who is the editor of Rolling Stone Magazine, invited me
back for a long interview at his home. I described to him
in some depth, the ‘vision’, if you like (although it does
make it sound pompous, but at the time it was just a
vision, nothing had exactly been done), of the story of
Tommy, and of the idea, the concept.
(The following is an extract from this interview, orig-
inally printed in Rolling Stone magazine dated Septem-
ber 14th. 1968 and carried over to the following issue).
What other ideas in this field do you have?
Well, the album concept in general is complex. I don’t
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Pete finalized his ideas for Tommy during this interview.
know if I can explain it in my condition, at the moment.
But it’s derived as a result of quite a few things. We’ve
been talking about doing an opera; we’ve been talking
about doing like albums, we’ve been talking about a whole
lot of things, and what has basically happened is that
we've condensed all of these ideas, all this energy and all
these gimmicks, and whatever we’ve decided on for future
albums, into one juicy package. The package I hope is
going to be called “Deaf, Dumb and Blind Boy.”’ It’s a
story about a kid that’s born deaf, dumb and blind and
what happens to him throughout his life. The deaf, dumb
and blind boy is played by The Who, the musical entity.
He’s represented musically, represented by a theme which
we play, which starts off the opera itself and then there’s
a song describing the deaf, dumb and blind boy. But what
it’s really all about is the fact that because the boy is “‘D,
D & B,” he’s seeing things basically as vibrations which
we translate to music. That’s really what we want to do:
create this feeling that when you listen to the music you
can actually become aware of the boy, and aware of what
he is all about, because we are creating him as we play.
Yes, it’s a pretty far out thing actually. But it’s very,
very endearing to me because the thing is .. . inside, the
boy sees things musically and in dreams and nothing has
got any weight at all. He is touched from the outside and
he feels his mother’s touch, he feels his father’s touch, but
he just interprets them as music. His father gets pretty
upset that his kid is deaf, dumb and blind. He wants a kid
that will play football and God knows what.
One night he comes in and he’s drunk and he sits over
the kid’s bed and looks at him and he starts to talk to him,
and the kid just smiles up, and his father is trying to get
through to him, telling him about how the other dads
have a kid that they can take to football and they can
teach them to play football and all this kind of crap and
he starts to say, ‘Can you hear me?” The kid,-of course,
can't hear him. He’s groovin’ in this musical thing, this
incredible musical thing, he'll be out of his mind. Then
there’s his father outside, outside of his body, and this
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« We're Not Gonne Take It.
* Reprise.
List showing sequence of songs, prior to recording Tommy.
song is going to be written by John. I hope John will write
this song about the father who is really uptight now.
The kid won’t respond, he just smiles. The father starts
to hit him and at this moment the whole thing becomes
incredibly realistic. On one side you have the dreamy
music of the boy wasting through his nothing life. And
on the other you have the reality of the father outside,
uptight, but now you’ve got blows, you’ve got communica-
tion. The father is hitting the kid; musically then I want
the thing to break out, hand it over to Keith—“'this is your
scene, man, take it from here.”’
And the kid doesn’t catch the violence. He just knows
that some sensation is happening. He doesn’t feel the pain,
he doesn't associate it with anything. He just accepts it.
A similar situation happens later on in the opera, where
the father starts to get the mother to take the kid away
from home to an uncle. The uncle is a bit of a perv, you
know. He plays with the kid’s body while the kid is out.
And at this particular time the child has heard his own
name, his mother called him. And he managed to hear
these words: “Tommy”. He’s really got this big thing
about his name, whatever his name is going to be, you
know “Tommy”. And he gets really hung-up on his own
name. He decides that this is the king and this is the goal.
Tommy its the thing, man.
He’s going through this and the uncle comes in and
starts to go through a scene with the kid’s body, you
know, and the boy experiences sexual vibrations, you
know, sexual experience, and again it’s just basic music,
it's interpreted as music and it is nothing more than music.
It’s got no association with sleeziness or with undercover
or with any of the things normally associated with sex.
None of the romance, none of the visual stimulus, none of
the sound stimulus. Just basic touch. It’s meaningless.
Or not meaningless, you just don’t react, you know. Slowly
but surely the kid starts to get it together, out of this
simplicity, this incredible simplicity in his mind. He
starts to realize that he can see and he can hear, and he
can speak; they are there and they are happening all the
time. And that all the time he has been able to hear and
see. All the time it’s been there in front of him, for him to
see.
This is the difficult jump. It’s going to be. extremely
difficult, but we want to try to do it musically. At this
point, the theme, which has been the boy, starts to change.
You start to realize that he is coming to the point where he
is going to get over the top, he’s going to get over his hang-
ups. You’re gonna stop monkeying around with songs
about people being tinkered with, and with father’s getting
uptight, with mother’s getting precious and things, and
you're gonna get down to the fact of what is going to
‘happen to the kid.
The music has got to explain what happens, that the
boy elevates, and finds something which is incredible. To
us, it’s nothing to be able to see and hear and speak, but to
him, it’s absolutely incredible and overwhelming; this is
what we want to do musically. Lyrically, it’s quite easy to
do it, in fact I’ve written it out several times. It makes
great poetry, but so much depends on the music, so much.
I’m hoping that we can do it. The lyrics are going to be
okay, but every pitfall of what we’re trying to say lies in
the music, lies in the way we play the music, the way we
interpret, the way things are going during the opera.
The main characters are going to be the boy, and his
musical things, he’s got a mother and father and an uncle.
There is a doctor involved who tries to do some psychiatric
treatment on the kid which is only partly successful. The
first two big events are when he hears his mother calling
him and hears the word, ““Tommy” and he devotes a whole
part of his life to this one word. The second important
event is when he sees himself in a mirror, suddenly seeing
himself for the first time: he takes an immediate back step,
bases his whole life around his own image. The whole
thing then becomes incredibly introverted. The music and
the lyrics become introverted and he starts to talk about
himself, starts to talk about his beauty. Not knowing, of
course, that what he saw was him, but still regarding it as
something which belonged to him, and of course it did all
of the time anyway.
It’s a very complex thing and I don’t know if I’m getting
it across.
You are.
Because I don't feel at all together.
I know you don’t look it, but you’re
coming on very together.
Good.
In my first notes I talked of an opera that would tell a
spiritual story in a parallel way, from the inside and from
the outside, (see notes) but the solid undercurrent riding
through all the material was the fact that I was in a
‘newfound spiritual mood’. When looking through my
past notes for material for this article I found prayers to
Meher Baba. I don’t remember praying much before that
date, but I do believe in the power of prayer. I’m not
going to qualify that statement, there are too many
diverse ways to God, people are too delicate about the
rightness of their own chosen path. (Don’t want to feel
they could be wasting their time you know).
Some of the prayers I wrote to Meher Baba became
lyrics of songs.
For example, Baba — When my fist clenches.... crack it
open.
I had lost my temper with a groupie, who on my arrival at
Denver presented me with a bottle of C.C. and maybe
even herself (I should be so lucky). But I threw her out. I
got a little worried that that wasn’t the way to do thing
and wrote the above prayer which I later used in the
bridge of “Behind Blue Eyes’’. Incidentally, later that
night in the same hotel, I was awakened by a small
group of White Panthers who had come to violently
avenge Abbie Hoffman, whom I threw offstage at
Woodstock. I came very, very close to getting my head
cracked open when I lost my temper with them, (they
were quite small people), then a giant emerged from the
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What about the boy?
What about the boy?
What about the boy?
He saw it all
He didn’t hear it
He didn’t see it
He won’t say nothing to no one
ever in your life :
Heneverhncard4. 2
How absurd it all seems
without any proof
You didn’t hear it
You didn’t see it
You won't say nothing to no one
ever in your life
You never heardit .
How absurd it all seems
without any proof
You didn’t hear it
You didn’t see it I
-You never heard it, not a word of if
You won’t say nothing to no one
Never tell a soul
What you know is the Truth
Chinese (The Redchins) as world leaders. The only
spiritual note was that the Redchins were regarded as
being fairly evil because they were crushing the old
established religions as they conquered. Again, looking
back, I think maybe that isn’t such a bad thing.
“Rael” resembled the later “Quadrophenia” in some
ways, in fact both “Rael” and Tommy and the later abort-
ed Life House contained various similarities of theme and
purpose. They all started as vehicles for the group, so the
individual characters in the group all influenced the
characters I’d invented, very deeply.
In 1966, at my studio in Wardour Street I wrote this (one
of the first idea-sheets for “‘Rael’’) :—
‘‘Opening is set at sea. In order to create a wide linear
feeling in the opening of the opera. The sound of the sea in
deep echo is heard. It must be fairly artificial so as not to
start too heavily.
NARRATOR SINGING. Someone, a man, is leaving
home, (thoughts of home). He is wealthy. He has broken
many ties. It is a time of indecision. He is on a boat that
recently left harbour and is heading out to sea. He wonders
if he is doing right.”
The temptation toward self-analysis is enormous here,
but Pll leave all that to you. Basically the story was
running into about twenty scenes when Kit Lambert
reminded me that while I was pretending to be Wagner,
The Who needed a new single. What did I have? I had
“Rael”. Thus Rael was edited down to four minutes (too
long for a single in those days ironically) and recorded in
New York for that purpose. It later appeared on an
album. No-one will ever know what it means, it has been
squeezed up too tightly to make sense. Musically it is
interesting because it contains a theme which I later
used in Tommy for “Sparks’”’ and the ‘‘Underture’’. That
music was written in 1966.
An interesting point on the side was that the hero, named
- Damon after our then recording engineer (I thought his
name was romantic) had a lisp. I admitted in one of the
sheets that it had no bearing on the plot, but it does throw
some light on why Tommy turned out to be deaf, dumb
and blind. I always loved circus and freaks, and the only
grouplever produced, Thunderclap Newman, was another
expression of this love of freaks who make it. The fallen
raised up. I also nearly produced Tiny Tim.
In 1967 I moved to my wife’s flat in Victoria and later to
Lower Belgravia (Ebury Street) where Tommy began
to take shape. LSD had come and gone by then. During
the year I was taking acid I wrote hardly anything,
probably the most revealing testimony to its uselessness
I ever experienced, although the images I saw still
influence my music. I had a studio at Ebury Street on the
top floor. I had nice big playback speakers at the time,
and as usual when writing I would prepare demos (test
recordings of the songs) before I even played them to the
group or even suggested to the group that there might be
the possibility of a song. One of the reasons I still find to
this day the need to make a recording of a song myself, is
that songwriting to me (and probably to everyone) is a
very impulsive process and a very revealing process.
One has to be very careful that one doesn’t say anything
that one is going to regret at a later date. Making tapes,
complete tapes in fact, you don’t just have an idea
whether a song is good, you also know whether it is
going to be possible to complete it. You get some glimpse
as to how best it will be arranged. Perhaps in the process
of sorting it out at home, adding instruments — adding
organ, drums or bass to a simple guitar part — you’d get
the feeling. Maybe you even make a mistake, and so at
least one of the many infinite possibilities would be dealt
with. The most fascinating thing about this recording
studio in particular, was that it was the room in which
Tommy —the first few songs from Tommy were born.
I worked pretty much when I liked, and the sound didn’t
seem to disturb any neighbours. In the same house, down
18
Chart for “The A
in the basement, lived an elderly but quiet couple, who
didn’t ever complain. In my studio I had a drum kit, an
organ, an electric piano, two old Revox stereo tape
recorders, a rather ancient but well made microphone
mixer, and some odd effects that I used to use to enhance
my recordings — limiters, and some echo and so on and so
forth.
mazing Journey” attempting to show the two aspe
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After LSD and flying saucers I became more deeply im-
mersed in Meher Baba through contact with other people
who were following Him, mainly, Mike McInnerney and
his wife Katie. The contact with Mike was the most im-
portant really, although others I loved strengthened me
at the time (like Ronnie Lane for example). Mike’s
appreciation and reaction to the Tommy ideas kept me
of living. The aspect of Reality and the aspect of Illusion. Townshend later adopted a more fluid framework and dropped this complex structure.
moving when the thing was under way. I was playing him
tapes so that he could get the feel of the thing to do the
album-cover artwork. I remember making a tape of the
basic chords for ““Welcome’’, a song I wrote, much to the
alarm of Richard Stanley, a friend of mine who was then
living with us. I was really writing the song about what I
felt was an emotion that was actually in my life at the
19
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aoe but sick SAG “does apply.
One line goes *‘ Sickness will surely |
‘take the mind.’ It does. RG. ;
Tracks: Overture, Its A Boy, 1921, |
| Amazing Journey. Sparks, The }
Hawker, Christmas, Cousin Kevin, |
The Acid Queen, Underture Do
You Think It’s Alright, Fiddle
About, Pinball Wizard, There's A
| Poctor. Go To The noe Tommy |
— You Hear Me Smash The
Mirro: sensation, “Miracle _ Cure, |
time; a feeling that I was becoming a part of some state ne
mind, some state of reference that I had never ex-
perienced before, and it was something I simply wanted
to share. I put this to words, ina very sort of trite way in
a sense, in the shape of ' ‘Welcome’. One evening I asked
Richard Stanley up to my studio to play in the song. He
was deeply embarrassed, because he misconstrued the
words where I say, “Come to this house, and be one of the
comfortable people, come to this house and be one of us”
as an open invitation to him from my wife and I to engage
in some, I suppose, co-habitation. I don’t really know,
anyway he was very embarrassed at the time and said so.
Richard was another of the bouncing boards for many of
my ideas regarding the early Tommy. I was full of
mystical feelings, but Richard, though a great friend, was
less interested in Meher Baba than in the music I was
coming up with. When I showed him a piece of paper with
two lines that embodied the original Tommy theme (an
event he still talks about today) he seemed pretty con-
fused. When I look at it today, I feel the same way. The
two lines were meant to represent the two aspects of the
way we live our lives — the two. viewpoints: One the
aspect of illusion and the other the aspect of reality. The
fact that we grope our way through our lives believing
everything we see to be real, but in fact it is an illusion.
and that the reality is a mystical thing, a hidden thing,
and something the essence of which only comes to us
teal ae painful cinouoht experience, ae experience |
is a timeless and everlasting thing — or so I thought at
the time.
My idea was, that I would write a series of songs that
flashed between the point of view of reality and the point
of view of illusion, seen through the eyes of someone on
the spiritual path, a young boy, and I called the basic
idea “Amazing Journey’’. It was sometime later when the
idea struck me that having a two-pronged concept was
very cumbersome. Having to have one song about what
was really happening to a person, and another song about
what appeared to be happening, was too much of an
oscillatory way of going about.things. I had to find some
way of making the illusion of life organic and graspable
by someone listening to the story.
The hero, still unnamed in 1968, was to begin his operatic
career by dying in a car crash. I could go on for hours
about what led up to the hero’s immortalisation as
Tommy, but perhaps a look at those early notes would
tell all. i already had written songs which were to
become, ‘““Welcome’’,, ““Not Gonna Take It’, ‘Sensation’,
and “Sparks” and “The Underture”’. But, when the songs
that I wrote before Tommy were brought together as an
idea, they didn’t really have any meaning out of context,
and it was only later, when I brought them together as
part of Tommy, that I saw their meaning. This might
sound a bit peculiar, but obviously a Sauer is Just
knows
his score
about the standard lamp that I see in front of me, I might
write about the kids I hear shouting in the street.
Whatever I write about will come from me (obviously), my
mind and the way that I am, it will come from a point in
my evolution, upwards or downwards. At a later date,
looking back, it will fall neatly into place. This is what
happened to so many of the songs from Tommy. ‘‘Sensa-
tion”, for example, was another song I wrote before
Tommy, and I wrote it about a girl that I felt had a
tremendous spiritual presence. At that time the lyric
was “She’s a Sensation’, rather than the later ‘‘He’s a
Sensation”. But again this was something, if you like,
that serves as an example of my thinking in spiritual
terms, rather than the frustrated adolegcent terms I had
been thinking in, up to that point. ““We’re not Gonna
Take It”, the whole finale of Tommy (excluding ‘“Listen-
ing To You, I Get The Music”, which was composed at a
much later date), was again something written before
Tommy had actually been formed as a total idea, and
that particular song wasn’t about Tommy’s devotees at
all — it was about the rabble in general, that rabble out
there; the consensus rabble; how we, myself as part of
them, were not going to take fascism, we’re not going to
take dreary, dying politics; were not going to take things
the way they were, the way they always had been and
that we were keen to change things.
one person. When I write something today, I might write “Eyesight to th
e Blind’, I incorporated, because it
actually mentioned the words, deaf, dumb, and blind, in
it, and then it turned out to be quite fundamental to the
whole idea. The whole concept of ‘Holiday Camp” was
something that came up much much later toward the
end of the recording session, and Keith suggested that
the whole thing be set in a Holiday Camp and I picked up
on that. As we were leaving IBC studios one day, I said to
Keith and John as they were walking down the stairs,
“I’ve really got to do something with this whole business
of the ‘establishment’, the ‘church’, or what turns out to
be the ‘church’ at the end of the story. I’ve got to work
out something to give it life, to make it real, to make it
palatable, but not something churchy, which would
make the whole tone of the album pretentious”. Keith
said, “Well I’ve been thinking that it would be a good
idea to set the whole thing in a Holiday Camp”. I said,
“What a great idea”, and Keith said, ‘Well O.K. I'll
write that tonight’’. I thought, ‘God Almighty, if Keith
goes off and gets into writing songs about Holiday
Camps, I don’t know how they’re ever going to fit in”. So
I said to him, “Don’t worry Keith, I’ve already written
it’. I think he took my point, because he didn’t actually
write anything that night, and when I got home I wrote
the short piece called “Ernies Holiday Camp”. Keith got
the credit for it because it was his idea, and also I felt,
it turned out just as he himself would have written it.
23
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| Hey nt eS Lp nb try to gain wy trust
| Cos T dont do it none of “your Ways, though think I must!
You say i dont propose no. answers, just break things down,
| But they aint my questions youre pubtin round
| Just look at me and my brothers, look et our smiling WEY y -
| For you lost us at sunday school and the Lord gained us todsy!
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| Didnt make it, better rake ib, commmon bake ie’ ‘fren your head.
| We dont heave to take it from you or anyone,
| Be aint gonne take it gonna break ib no ioe
| it shall be done.
beer re“in_ your early stages
: cS... ane. a lot More ——t:
A Rilection of Pete T, spinster lyrics from the time when “T. ommy’ ’ was still at the ideas stage, before the album, the opera and the film.
The whole focal point of Tommy, the real beginning was
“The Amazing Journey”. Here is the story as it stood at
that time before we began recording :—
| awoke on Tuesday morning
My illness much improved
In fact | felt fantastic,
My spirits ache removed.
And so | tried to move again,
At first it was a Strain,
And so | fell back on my bed,
My head and heart in pain.
At twelve my mum brought dinner,
At four my mum brought tea,
At eight my mum brought supper
And ten o clock brought sleep
And sleep brought moods and yearning
To travel just once more,
That one amazing journey
| slept through once before.
Sickness will surely take the mind
Where minds can’t usually go
Come on the amazing journey
And learn all you should know.
- Avague haze of delirium creeps up on me.
eR kag ide Bt sfoa0 SERA RR IL
ne z :
Then at once a tall stranger | suddenly see
He's dressed in a silver sparked glittering gown
And his golden beard flows nearly down to the ground
His eyes are the eyes that transmit all they know
And sparkle warm crystalline glances to show
That he is your leader and he is your guide,
On the amazing journey together you II ride.
The dream that I'm dreaming Is a vision it seems
- For now reality itself appears in dreams
| know that here's my Master, my guide and saviour.
The face so young, the hands so clean, the eyes so bright
And the build so lean, as though the man has lived just today,
But the wisdom is clear and so is the way.
My bedroom fades as | fall through my life,
The illness is gone and my Master's ahead, calling me on.
We walk through the city, the streets | know well,
Until we arrive at a place | don't know,
The grass seems to relish our toes and our heels,
And the flowers the wind and the pollen the bees
Fishes lay writhing in shrinking puddles of silver.
The tall trees, gotden leafed, joined hands overhead
Making a shadowed avenue. No shafts of sunlight
But lines of nodding seekers, clothed in the robes
Of their order. And pointing the way to us.
They pointed within and my Master decided
28
That at least they were faced the right way
Even if rooted to the spot by preconceptions.
One spoke and said, We one day will follow.
So we took off our shoes and set off through the hollow
Tunnel created by the sun seeking trees
And set off on our journey
Forever at peace.
Soon we spotted a pinpoint of light
Far off in the distance and just within sight.
The master decreed that the end was near
But this singing sensation was a sign.
As we drew nearer the first ray of light
A shock wave hit us and threw us apart
|am alone. More alone in my ignorance now than ever before.
At least before | thought | knew what life was about.
Despite the knowledge that | know this is a test
['m petrified and clouds of worry and fear smelling
Like animal sweat and shivering, quaking besets me.
The darkness of this place is unbelievable.
It's so dark it clouds my mind. As though this
Is where nothing only exists. But fear.
And now an oasis, like rebirth, the rush of blood
And the straining, basic drive to see the light.
Trapped in womb-like darkness, my mind is
Creating its own lying illusion to save its sanity.
Here, my mother, here my father, here other
Reasons to cling to prejudged life as | know it.
Warmth and cool, food and love, belongings of
Immeasurable value pile up around me.
| value them myself.
Placing a label on each friend, article and emotion
That appears.
And then without warning | was back at my Master's side.
Immediately aware of the object of the first lesson.
| had learnt that whatever situation my Master prescribed
| should accept without question. Not immediately reverting
To the illusory plan and skating on the ice of life's pleasure.
With guidance from my beloved Master, who seemed to
Know the overgrown path so well, we quickly found the
shaft of light we had spotted earlier.
A little taller at his side | travelled on.
We travelled for what seemed like an eternity,
The Master never speaking or making any signs,
Just smiling occasionally and then bowing his head as we walked
As though concerned with things outside himself.
The things we saw were unparalleled in beauty.
Loaded with knowledge and meaning, each vision imparting a little
Of each. Awesome mountains, never so huge.
Yawning holes in the earth so deep that we had to wait
Four long years to hear a replying question to my shout.
| would have fallen asleep and missed the echo when it came
Had not the Master awakened me in the nick of time.
He knew when It was due. He seemed to know every inch of the way.
Pointing out every wonderful sight, intense chemical colours
Bubbling in molten metal ; incredible rippling hues in
The spray of the waterfalls as the fine sunlight struck them:
Birds of the air and other animals that I'd never seen before
SO ancient, so new, ranging between indescribable beauty
And indescribable ugliness. Everything was being absorbed.
sometimes, though,the Master would halt. Looking at me harshly
He would send my contented and happy soul to aspot —
Way, way, back on our path. | would have to retrace all my steps
To find him once more. Sometimes the awesome beauty of
Many of the wonders on the way would hold me up.
He would always be patiently waiting when | finally arrived at his side
Not speaking a forgiving word, but reminding me
By his very existence that | am forgiven.
| o@ Worm Jnsect
& Reptile
forties db tnt weve mainte: Hebel nd it neds inser Mal MeV Drs ROU iso Mab werd bose fess
preaneltossttrPmosire testi rrr wove rel liv Pv Pet VoL oA Pett myo rv et relied an oon arihw ne inc oel eC tt
ce SRC IO
"Thame Aoviionded shee.
Chart showing Creation, Evolution, Reincarnation, Involution
| am lost. An eternity must have passed since | felt enlightenment.
Eons must have passed since | made any progress towards my Lord.
| am perpetually praying to him for guidance, but he never answers.
_|am beginning to believe that he has carried on without me.
One life is all | know. The present life.
And yet because of my ignorance of the Infinite
| cannot enjoy it. | am sad, poor, wrapped in indignity
And not aware of any of the knowledge | may have
stumbled upon in the past. Is there a past/ a future ?
Is there an eternity ? My pathetic cry for reward falls on hardened ears.
As time passes boredom forces me to amuse myself.
| marry and justify a lifetime of obsessed moneymaking
In order to keep my family. | justify an eternity of oblivious
Dreaming to counter the strain of all my money making.
And again, like a flash | see the vision of my Master.
Ever patient. Totally forgiving. All knowing, waiting
At the exact spot | left him. | quickly run towards him,
Bringing my wife and family, bringing my business partners
And odd acquaintances who had shown interest in my Amazing Journey.
| know the ground so well, and we hurry along, occasionally
Waiting while some of our party absorb an amazing sight.
There is no real rush, we are again aware of eternity.
Soon | was back at my Masters side, even taller.
| now had company on my amazing journey,
Apart from my Master, all those in my heart,
Funny how they all learnt from what | had been through,
How easy it was my love to impart. :
The Master looked fondly at my wife and our children,
‘ Emluhor,. ee i + boaliz 45, ; i
according te
oti ot
and Realization, according to Meher Baba. (see key, below right)
His eyes informing them that his will was theirs.
And | for my part spent every hour with the family
Waiting until they were ready to start.
But soon came the time when no more help was in me,
To teach them all more | had to learn more myself.
And so with the Master | set off once more
And nearer myself and my goal | headed forth.
The path this time was rough and uphill,
| often took rest while my Master stood still
And wondered how he, no stronger than, could manage
To climb without fatigue and decline.
The mountain grew steeper and the crags sharply bent
The crevices full of fresh snow and ice, crystals reflected the Sun,
So brilliantly that | nearly lost my balance several times.
Each time the thoughts of the Master would enter my mind,
And the very knowledge of his presence would save me.
Up, up, in search of the summit we climbed. |
Each time a new height was attained a new one became apparent.
Then one morning as the sun's mellow warmth awoke me
| realized my position. Here was the tallest mountain in
The whole of the universe, and yet when! climbedit
What did | find ? Only myself. If | had climbed a mountain
Any higher | would still only find myself. Maybe if |
Searched every jungle in the cosmos | would find the throne of the LORD.
Perhaps if | ransacked the Ocean floors on every planet
In every galaxy, in every universe in the infinite cosmos
| would find him. The Master gravely shook his head and |
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. | had to find the answer myself.
So here | am again. Completely in the dark.
Reading every book | can lay my hands on,
Listening to every Tom, Dick, or Harry who can offer an answer,
Or even a question. Complete confusion reigns in my mind
And once more my heart sinks into the mire of life.
When the wind blows, | am chilled, even though | am the wind.
When the midday sun shines, | sweat, even though | am the sun.
When the stars twinkle in the heavens | wonder how, though | know,
Tossed like a paper plane in the wind, like a cork ina storm,
| look for answers. Occasionally | grasp some minor detail
Of evolution which helps me on my way. And so encouraged |
Lecture my children, telling them how wise | am in my experience.
And they in turn, laugh and tell me of things so new that 2
| bow in shame and reverence to them, aware only of my ignorance.
| await. A slave of evolutions infinite, unending drive towards..........
ACTOS ieee ae ap
Each time | questioned, | fell.
Eventually, numbed by nillness and negativity, | slept.
Though | was sleeping, the world still went round and round.
Mothers gave birth to children and Undertakers collected the dead.
And as | lay oblivious for millions of years, men killed men,
And laughed at their victims, learning nothing.
And then receiving forgiveness, forgot that forgiveness
And remembered only that which they'd been forgiven.
. They died, only to be followed by men-with more hate
And more lust. Men abused men and were perpetually re-incarnated
Until they learned to love their brothers. Indeed,
To learn that other men were their brothers, not their slaves
Or enemies. Life after life they would experience until
They could only forgive. And when they kissed, thought only
Of that kiss, and not of the pleasures of the seduction,
Or the deceit of their love for another. When they gave gifts
Thought only of the giving and not of the reasons for giving,
Or of what might be gained by giving.
Giving without having to justify giving.
Taking without having to justify taking.
Loving without having to justify loving.
All this went on. As one man attained these merits,
Another man was conceived without them. as one child was born divine,
Another was born mortal.
As one man found within himself the truth, another began to look.
And so it went on.
As it was when he first began to sleep, |
It was when he awoke. And when | awoke it was by my Masters side.
| was delighted and warmly greeted him and caressed him as though
We had not seen each other for years, but the Master
Acted as though | had never been away. As though | hadn't been
Through countless reincarnations since | first Slept.
| knew yet another truth.
This chart (left), painted by Rano Gayley under the supervision of Meher Baba, is a pictorial
version of the book God Speaks.
God in the Beyond Beyond State represents God as pure Essence, infinite, original and
eternal, unaware of anything, even of Himself. God Is.
God in the Beyond State represents the Oversoul (Paramatma), essentially the same as
God in the Beyond Beyond State except that here surged the whim to know Himself and
He became conscious of infinite power, knowledge and bliss; and simultaneously conscious
of Illusion which manifested as the Creation. By completing His journey through the
worlds of forms He sheds the illusion of their apparent reality.
Reading counter-clockwise, the first forms taken by souls emanating from the Creation
point are gaseous. As consciousness evolves, souls take the innumerable forms indicated,
experiencing increasing impressions (sanskaras). Arrivin g at the state of man, the soul has
achieved complete consciousness and reincarnates innumerable times until it is ready to
experience involution, all of which takes place while embodied in the gross world.
While getting free of sanskaras, the ascending soul gradually becomes aware of the seven
planes and higher spheres until it is liberated from all bindings and becomes one with God
(God-realized).
The first three planes depict subtle awareness; the fourth portrays the vast powers and
energies encountered there; the fifth is the plane of sainthood and is in the mental sphere;
_the sixth is the plane of illumination and the seventh is the plane of God-realization, i.e.
unity with God.
29
| longed for the day when my Master and | could be as one,
That very longing threw me back, but this time not far.
| had learned so much from all, the experiences | had known
That | too, was gaining some of the power of my Master to control myself.
We journeyed on again, this time, quite simply, the Master
Showed me the wonders of my own mind. Everything | imagined became
Reality and all | had experienced was laid out before me
In order that | could recap and benefit from all | knew and thought.
When | had gazed in awe at all | already knew the Master
Showed me the creatures from all over the cosmos.
Each one more confounding than the next, but all with the same aim.
Each one amazed me and many were completely beyond
Anything | had ever imagined. Many existed on planes and spheres
Beyond my imagination. Many lived in terms of existence that
Defied explanation, many had to be viewed through the body of
One of their kind in order to utilise their radically different senses.
And see them atall. —
The story is poetry, sometimes good, often terrible. It was
all stream of consciousness stuff, but when I read it back
then, it staggered me. I realised that I had described a
story that I could never have dreamed of myself let alone
put to music.
But the strangest part of all is that there was no develop-
ment stage between this Hesse-like tale of mystery and
spiritual intrigue, and what we today see to be Tommy.
I just lived with the story, invented a name for my hero,
Tommy, and started to write songs. I got Tommy’s name
from mid-air, but it suited. The middle letters were OM
which was aptly mystical, and it was an English name
associated with the war and heroism. It was also fairly
eee to To-Me, again you can see the obvious spiritual
ent.
Tommy became deaf, dumb and blind when I realised that
there was no way to get across, musically or dramatically,
the idea of our ignorance of reality, as I had learned it to
be, from reading Meher Baba.
Meher Baba talked of our lives being led in an ‘illusion’ ;
that we were dreaming; that reality was Infinite, and
that we would realise that Infinity only through denying
the lust, greed and anger of the material world, through
love, and starting our journey ‘“‘back”’ to God. |
I realised that there was a parallel in the shape of the
autistic child. Strangely enough, I have now come across
the treatment of Professor Nordoff who managed to bring
autistic children out of their ‘dream’ through a com-
bination of love and music.
This was a straightforward analogy because the word
‘illusion’ is used by Meher Baba in a mystical sense. In
other words the illusion that we live in, is one where our
senses are fully functioning — we have our five senses and
we have our emotions, and so on and so forth, but there
are whole chunks of life, including the whole concept of
reality, which escapes us. We don’t really know who we
are, we don’t really know how we got here, and we don’t
really know what our aim is, we don’t understand the
concept of infinity, and our minds are unable to accept it.
We don’t understand suffering or what causes it, we
don’t understand life itself or what motivates it, we can’t
accept death and we feel it to be unjust (although it is
part of the wheel of life). So I decided that the hero had to
be deaf, dumb and blind, so that, seen from our already
limited point of view, his limitations would be symbolic
of our own.
With a background like this, even The Who could not
disguise the heavy mystical qualities of the story of
Tommy. Even though the original plan was eventually
lost and the story made more real and organic, the music
more contemporary and reachable than the dreary stuff I
had recorded on demos, there was still a strong thread of
spirituality. Our record producer Kit Lambert said that
he had to remain detached from the theme’s aims in order
to be objective. I think he warmed far more to the idea of
‘Rock Opera’ than ‘God Opera.’ Still, while we were
pottering about in the studio at IBC trying to pull an
unfinished story into shape, while I was rewriting lyrics
to songs about other things to make them fit, while John
was busy at home dealing with a ‘commission’ from me
to ‘write something horrible’, while all this was going
on, Tommy was carrying on where the above story left
off.
The malleability of the story of Tommy, the fact that it
Bi cg
Two people who were closely
involved with the Who’s
Tommy album: Kit Lambert
(right) who produced the
original album, and Mike
McInnerney (below) who con-
ceived and painted the album
cover (bottom of page).
me
ae
(Above) The religious nature of Russell shows itself. ve
(Below) Peter Townshend works closely with dubbing. editor
Terry Rawlin Beal. left ) _and editor Stuart Baird ( centre).
seemed to stand up, even in a highly edited or abridged
form, allowed The Who to select only material suited to
the simple line of the group, to be featured live on stage.
I will never forget that tour, the finale of Tommy never
failed to mesmerise me along with the audience. It
always felt to me like a prayer, I always felt myself full of
Meher Baba when we performed it.
Our managers’ skill at promotion and exploitation turned
Tommy into a world-respected work. We performed it at
opera houses all round the world.
In Germany we are, to this day, excused local taxes
because we are considered to be a ‘cultural’ event. In
New York we were the first group to play at the Met., and
later Woodstock brought Tommy into the charts again
and to its second life.
Its third life came when it was ‘symphonised’ by Lou
Reisner. Lou had some arrangers put the score across in
a fully orchestral way, using traditional techniques. The
original Who version was adhered to as a basis, although
every part was played by a different notable Rock singer
or personality. I was charmed by the record Lou Reisner
made, as it brought to life the whole original idea I had
for “Rael”. At last I was to hear something I had written,
played by a grand orchestra. Later on, particularly after
being involved in live performances of this version I
grew disenchanted with it. It seemed bleak, even though
it had much that the original never had and brought
Tommy to a whole new audience.
One of the new audience was Ken Russell, who admitted
to me that he preferred the orchestral version to the
original group version. I think he grew to change his
mind, but it goes to show how Tommy’s long and varied
history has affected an expanding audience.
When I first came to meet Ken Russell he lived up to his
reputation. He was describing a film he was forced to
abort, about the Rabelasian monks. Hairy stuff I can tell
you. Chris Stamp, one of our managers, and myself,
listened quietly, and wondered if he was really the right
man for the job. We had been totally convinced up to that
point.
I felt convinced, more through a coincidence than any-
thing else. I’m a great believer that coincidence is an
indication of higher forces at work, although I'll be first
to admit it’s a small world and all that. On the day I met
Ken Russell I was strolling around London recording
street noises in stereo for the ‘““Quadrophenia”’ album. I
had my tape machine in a suitcase and the mikes con-
cealed in a holdall.
At the time I was after ‘casual conversation’. I saw an
interesting group and sidled sideways up to them
pointing my holdall into their midst. The conversation I
heard was fascinating. In the group were Ken Russell,
Chris Stamp and Mike Carrearas, who were all unhappy
that they hadn’t been able to locate me that afternoon
for a meeting they were about to have. As you can
etn I just felt all this meant that the film HAD TO
Later meetings with Ken revealed a very spiritual man.
He was deeply interested in the mystical thematic frame
of Tommy, and I showed him, or talked to him about, all
of the material discussed or revealed in this article. One
thing that he seemed keen to do, however, and this was
clearly a necessity, was to make the story work on an
everyday level.
I had tried desperately during the recording of Tommy
to make the story work. When Tommy walked out of one
door I wanted everyone to feel he walked into another
in the next song. In the end though, Tommy was dis-
jointed and took quite a lot of explaining. The death
sequence, for example, where Tommy’s father kills his
mother’s new suitor, had no ‘moment of death’. I had
originally intended this to be added on the surface some
amazing heart-shaking sound that would let you know
the terrible deed had been done — before the parents
launched into, ““You Didn’t Hear It, You Didn’t See It!”’
On the original Tommy album, it is easy to forgive those
who listening, asked, ‘‘Didn’t see what?’’. In the film, Ken
Russell redesigned the whole sequence. The Mother’s
lover kills the father, the father then becomes an allegory
for the ‘Master’ I talked of in my early notes. The vision
of Tommy’s father serves as the symbol of his spiritual
focus. Even so, quite a few people, after seeing the film,
asked me, ‘‘What did they do with the body?”
31
As you can see (right) Ken, in the first few pages of his
script, had introduced a lot of visual material, a lot of
action that did not have suitable music. Later in his
second draft script he introduced a number of other
places where new action was brought in to strengthen up
the story line. One song in particular I remember writing
was called ‘““Deceived”’.
I based this rather lor'g song on the chords of “I’m Free”’
as I didn’t want too many new musical themes brought in.
I felt Tommy already had a few too many. ‘‘Deceived’’ was
a song set towards the pinnacle of Tommy’s success as a
spiritual leader. He cried out to the world through loud
speakers on the streets, and via the media, that war,
politics, religion, all were useless for those who were
searching for truth. ‘““Deceived” was a powerful song that
was excluded eventually from the script. It ended up
much abridged as “TV Studio’’.
?M FREE-?M FREE
Turn your backs on wars there’s peace ahead
TM FREE -1M FREE
Time for change, forget the pointless deaths
TO ME- COME TO ME
Walk beside me free of wordly fears
WITH ME - BE WITH ME
Leave behind false promises and tears
SENSATION -I’M A SENSATION
SENSATION -T?M ASENSATION
And I’m waiting for you to follow me
DECEIVED —- ALL DECEIVED
As silence reigns the stocks and shares still rise
REPRIEVE —- AT LAST REPRIEVE
They capitalize on every tear and sigh
VM FREE -?M FREE :
Truth to hear and speak and truth to see
TM FREE-TM FREE
Forget them all, the way is clear to see
?M FREE-?M FREE :
I’m waiting for you to follow me
DECEIVED —- ALL DECEIVED
The hypocrites and war lords turn to craw
REPRIEVE —- AT LAST REPRIEVE
The wars you fight in only pay for more
SENSATION -?M A SENSATION
SENSATION —-T?’M A SENSATION
And I’m waiting for you to follow me
BE FREE - COME TO ME
The men you mourn all stand among you now
BE FREE - BE WITH ME .
They dance around the stone to which you bow
TM FREE -I’?M FREE
Forget them all the way is clear to see
?M FREE-I’M FREE
Don’t waste every lifetime looking back
SENSATION -T?M A SENSATION
SENSATION -?M ASENSATION
And I’m waiting for you to follow me
Good morning converts
That was your new Messiah
Calling out for you to come and follow him
So jump on the buses
Never mind the fares
Off you go to Tommy’s
The answer to your prayers
“Champagne” was another song Ken wanted me to write,
this time the song was included in the film. Ken felt that
people would want,to feel Tommy’s mother was a real
person. What had wealth done to her now that her son
was a famous pinball champ? In fact ‘“Champagne’”’ turns
out to be a heavy Ken Russell statement (overstatement?)
Lous
As the giant sun sinks below the horizon the camera pans with it to CAPTAIN &
MRS WALKER lying side by side on a mountain top. They have just made love.
With linked hands they walk down the mountainside in the gathering twilight.
They kiss in a glade near a waterfall and drink of its sparkling water. Darkness
falls as they walk off through the wood ~ metallic paper strips (anti-radar
devices) fall softly around them like diamond snowflakes. __
As they come through the trees into the open we see a balloon barrage Floating
on the night air like a captive cloud. Ack Ack shells burst in the sky like
white lightning.
The COUPLE hurry through burning, deserted streets towards the station as unseen
planes drone overhead. Searchlights try to sweep them from the sky. In an
orange glow the FIREMAN stokes his boiler. The LOVERS hurry past the engine and
have barely reached the first carriage before the GUARD blows his whistle. Doors |
slam. A quick tearful kiss, clasped hands breaking apart as the train moves off. |
CAPTAIN WALKER disappears into the darkness, waving, waving. MRS. WALKER waves
too. She cries as she looks into the empty, black night.
CAPTAIN WALKER's Wellington revs up on the tarmac. He clambers in. Chocks away. |
Soon the climbing plane is merely a silhouetted dragonfly against the moon.
MRS. WALKER at home looks out of her window through a web of criss~crossed paper
at the moon. The room is dark and she too is in silhouette.
CAPTAIN WALKER in his Wellington is surrounded by a kaleidoscope of bursting star ,
shells and flak. His face shows not fear but a strange, heightened awareness of
the beauty exploding around him.
&
In her darkened bedroom MRS WALKER stands before her dressing table mirror, |
staring with dreamy fondness at a large framed photo of Captain Walker's nandsome
smiling face. She picks it up, kisses it, holds it by the side of her own face
ana looks in the mirror at the happy couple. CRACK: - the mirror mysteriously
fractures right across the middle of Captain Walker's face.
CRACK! An explosion just outside the cockpit sends CAPTAIN WALKER's plane
spiralling hopelessly out of control.
MRS WALKER works on the assembly line at a munitions factory. Empty shell cases
approacn her in slow procession. She fills each one with a handful of highly
polished ball bearings. Music while you work. An OFFICIAL, accompanied by the
FLOOR MANAGER, comes up to MRS WALKER and hands her a telegram. She hesitates,
senses what it contains, then opens it quickly - a prolonged pause then collapse
to the floor and a flailing hand grasping a box for support. As it overturns
silver balls cascade and run all around her.
alin ch a libiaton Gow 'ts & Bot
Colourful bunting, Union Jacks, flags and streamers. VE day. The camera pulls
back to reveal a hospital delivery room. MRS WALKER sweats in labour. A son
is born. Great jubilation and cheering - not for TOMMY (or is it?) but for
the General driving oy in a car outside - part of the victory parade.
) By the side of the bed a bunch of flowers.
The camera moves towards them. The petals drop off - only the skeleton stalks
remain. Dissolve through to a single poppy.
Possble Shadowing, jyulely betroos ” boas,
Remembrance Day. The poppy is on a small wooden cross in MRS WALKER's hand.
Guns boom. By her side TOMMY stands to. attention. The guns are quiet. The
2 minutes silence is over. MRS WALKER plants her cross among a thousand similar
crosses and kisses TOMMY. Zoom into crosses and ranks of artificial red poppies.
Red fills the screen. .
bas
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Dissolve
Red fills the screen. The camera pulls back to show a red-jacketed holiday
camp host. Heshakes hands with MRS WALKER, pats TOMMY on the head. The TWO
GROWNUPS Took at each other and are attracted to each other. He carries her
suitcases to a chalet. TOMMY follows behind.
sae res.
LATER. RS WALKER & the REDCOAT are smooching together at the camp dance.
TOMMY sits by himself sucking an orangeade through a straw. Later all three
of them leave the camp. Now they are home. MRS WALKER tucks TOMMY in. The
REDCOAT, having discarded his jacket, lurks discreetly outside the door. On
TOMMY's bedside table is the portrait we saw earlier of CAPTAIN WALKER. Next |
to it is a model of his Wellington bomber. MO1 kisses TOMMY good night and
goes out. TOMMY looks at his father's photograph then closes his eyes. The
room grows darker. CAPTAIN WALKER smiles at TOMMY from his photo frame.
A bar of light appears beneath the door. The door opens. The figure of a MAN
stands silhouetted in the doorway. He walks towards the bed. It is CAPTAIN
WALKER. Softly, gently, he touches the head of his sleeping son, tiptoes back
to the door and turns for a last look at TOMMY, who wakes up to see the
silhouette a split second before it closes the door.
oveemle TO BE —- REWRETT
OEM
#. into the number and can
DEEL s :
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25
crawling towards sofa 37
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rolling about in the
late hits picture -
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Nora's hand enters frame and
takes flowers from bowl and
Starts to rub the flowers in her face
Music ends on cut to Frank en rering room
Pt Pet el tb ff id tt OD OOOO OS 22000000
on decadence in contemporary society. A brilliant scene
in the film I think, the music for this song was again in-
spired by “I’m Free” of the original version. In fact, the
only other song written specially for the film. ‘‘Bernie’s
Holiday Camp” took as its base the “Tommy’s Holiday
Camp” of the original.
Ken’s real contribution to the evolution of Tommy came
with his visual reaction to many of the stories’ surface
events. The “Acid Queen” he saw asa superb opportunity
to put across the seedy glamour of the hooker/pusher
with real venom. In “Champagne”’, the musical demands
made on myself can be easily appreciated by glancing at
the timing sheet I was presented with, when the number
was extended to include a bit of extra decadence. (above)
” The early part of the script which needed extra music and sound effects from
Townshend. The love scene (above ) and the blitz scene (below) both had
musical backing. (left) A time-sheet for the champagne sequence. Townshend
had to invent a sound effect resembling chocolate hitting a picture.
Writing the new material for Tommy was a pleasure in
fact, I felt several years later, detached from Tommy.
The Who as a group only played a short section of it on
the stage, and most of the new music and incidental music
came easily. But for me, the real Tommy still lies in
three or four songs, a few pieces of paper and the mystery
that only a writer can ever understand. The mystery of
writing something that takes on a life of its own and
leaves you far, far behind still] trying to discover how to
turn the dreamlike events of Tommy’s life into fact. Ken
Russell’s film reveals that it was a dream, that it could
never, as we had eventually got it down onto record,
ever happen in reality. In my head it happened, and
maybe one day... maybe one day nothing.
SO YOU record the world’s first rock opera,
and the critics go wild, and it sells like hot
pintables, and your band gets more and
more famous, and everyone loves you and
the film offers come flooding in and the next
year you’ve got a box-office super-smash in
the movies as well. Right? No ladies and
gentlemen, when the film business and the
music business push their heads together you
get something like a dinosaur. Dinosaurs
move slowly.
Of course, to make a film of ‘Tommy’ was
a natural development. As the years went by
it was subjected to various interpretations,
from ballet to school end-of-term entertain-
ment, but somehow the film didn’t get made.
Pete Townshend: “I suppose one thing
that slowed us down was that initially we
were very ambitious for it. It was an am-
bitious recording project, and when it was
finished we got such good critical acclaim
from the British Press we naturally thought
it would be easy to set up the sort of film
we wanted because it was such hot property.
But the film industry at the time was very
belligerent, and still is in its old frame of
mind, and there were contractual loopholes.
We had to offer it first to Universal, who
were tied up with our record company in
America, MCA, and this is where the first
hold-up came. They agreed to finance it and
distribute it and Kit Lambert (manager) was
appointed to draft the screenplay, which
actually turned out to be very similar to the
one Ken has done now. Universal hated the
screenplay, but they took two years to say so,
and by that time I was getting very frus-
trated’.
There was a three-sided row going between
Pete, Universal and Kit Lambert. Universal
hated Lambert’s screenplay, and there was
no way they’d put up the money for his film
of ‘Tommy’. Pete was frustrated and blaming
Lambert for the film not getting made. “‘Our
relationship never really recovered’, he says.
“‘T saw it very much in black and white at the
time’. The two-year delay had somewhat
dampened the project’s hot properties, and
although the ‘Woodstock’ film revived
interest in it, as did the Lou Reisner orch-
estral production, still they couldn’t find the
right man to make it. Ken Russell was
approached, and said he’d like to do it,
maybe in 1975 because of his other plans.
That didn’t help feelings of frustration and
impatience either. They met other potential
directors: ‘““They would insist’’, says ‘Town-
shend, ‘‘on buying me long drawn-out
lunches ‘to find out where your head is at’
and to ask me how I felt about it because
they wanted to ‘fit in with your ideas and
conception’. In the end I thought if they
wanted me to come up with the ideas then
they could give me the money and I’d make
it’. But the film industry doesn’t chance its
investments on guitarists and writers, even
if they do have good ideas. And anyway, as
Townshend has explained (see his interview)
he was just as eager for someone else to take
‘Tommy’ and give it their works. Chapter
two rather than a filmed re-make.
Someone like Ken Russell? In the end,
Russell was the man—probably the best man,
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and possibly the only man to make the film.
Robert Stigwood took the role of something
like the fairy godfather who helped the dream
come true. He got the deal together, nego-
tiated the money, set up the deal with
Columbia, got Russell together with the
Who again, put in a lot of his own money,
and accepted the traditional responsibility
for casting. Townshend had his own ideas
about casting (again see his interview) but
Stigwood insisted on some good box-office
pullers—like Ann-Margret, Jack Nicholson
and Oliver Reed. In the event, Townshend
came round to his point of view and admits
that those people, to whom he objected in
the early stages, work well in the film. It
must have been a struggle though: “‘Robert
Stigwood rang up and said he’d got Jack
Nicholson, and I said ‘Who’s Jack Nichol-
son?’ and he said he was one of the biggest
stars in America at the moment. So I said
‘Can he sing?’ and he said no’”’. Townshend’s
reaction was: “I’m not having another
fucker in this film who can’t sing. Oliver
Reed’s giving me nightmares as it is’’. It
turned out that he could sing, and that
Reed’s style fitted the part. Such is the stuff of
movie legend.
The mechanics of setting up a project like
‘Tommy’ are approximately this: the money
is raised—quite how is shrouded in myth and
mystery, but somehow it’s there, at least on
paper. The machine then grinds into action
from the production office. The director is
decided, and he gets a working script done,
if it isn’t already there: in this case Russell
wrote his own. Then he starts assembling the
crew—both the technicians and the actors—
well in advance of shooting. Apart from the
stars, the key members of the team are the
executive producer, art director and assistant,
lighting camera man, costume designer,
props man, locations manager, set designer,
and (in this case) musical director and
choreographer. And the accountant—most
important. Working in the film industry is a
specialised branch of accountancy, and on
‘Tommy’ the man was Bobby Blues. The
director comes with the shooting script, and
the accountant goes through it, costing each
scene. He’ll then say ‘you’ve got this amount
of money so you either have to cut this, this
and this or get more money’. Russell is
reputed to have vowed to make his film his
way if he had to raid every one of Robert
Stigwood’s piggy banks to do it. Ultimately,
the money is the producer’s responsibility.
We are still a long-way from starting to
shoot the film: the locations manager goes
out looking for suitable places, bearing in
mind not only their suitability for the
camera, but whether they’re near decent
hotels, whether they can get extras easily,
whether the catering van can get up to the
set and a million other details including
whether there’s a pub nearby: film crews
don’t appreciate being kept dry. The props
department goes into action, buying up
anything from correct-period furniture to
fake palm trees. The art director, his
assistant, and the set designer get working on
the sets and specially designed equipment,
the costumes have to be designed and made,
and the. shooting schedule is drawn up.
Accountant, producer and director are
heavily involved in all this.
It had been decided early on that there
would be no dialogue, that the soundtrack to
the film would be entirely music, so simul-
taneously Townshend was in the Who’s
Ramport Studios getting it recorded. Rus-
sell’s script called for two new songs and
a great deal of re-writing of the original
‘Tommy’ material. The songs had to fit with
Russell’s projected timings for each sequence
and the words had to explain what was
happening—often in a much more literal
way than the original had done. Yet both
had to be flexible enough to expand or
contract to ideas that might occur to Russell
while he was filming, or in case some things
didn’t work out as planned. As it turned out,
the music needed every ounce of flex it
-could muster.
The Who put down much of the basic
music, with the actors singing their lead parts
(with the exception of Young Tommy, Barry
Winch, whose part is sung by Alison Dow-
ling). But there was a host of guest musicians
involved in the sessions: Elton John brought
his whole entourage—band and Gus Dud-
geon, his producer—to record his version of
‘Pinball Wizard’, and among the others on
the sessions were Ronnie Wood and Kenny
Jones of the Faces, Philip Chen, Alan Ross,
Tony Newman, Caleb Quaye, Nicky Hopkins
(who did most of the piano work), Jess
Roden, Mick Ralphs of Bad Company,
Russell used 40 members of a group
of hell’s angels - the Black Angels
from Sunderland - in the sequence
for ‘Sensation’ He was totally
amazed when they began the fight.
This was not the usual staged fight
between stunt men, but a real no-
holds-barred punch-up. They kicked
and punched each other using bike
chains as weapons. Although some
were badly cut, Russell got them to
do the whole sequence three times.
They referred to the number of takes’
he does, when they made him an
honorary member of their group.
The leather jacket they gave him had
the words “One Last Time” printed
in studs across the back. (Far left)
Setting up to shoot the angels’
camp-site. (lop) The fight starts.
(Left) Waiting with a boot in the
throat foralens adjustment. (Right)
They stop fighting and start dancing
when they feel the effect of Tommy’s
powerful ‘strange new vibrations’ as
he flies overhead on a hand-glider.
Chris Stainton, Mike Kellie, Fuzzy. Samuels,
Graham Deakin of John Entwistle’s band
Ox, Mylon LeFevre, Paul Gurvitz, Vicki
Brown, Liza Strike and Margo Newman.
Townshend brought in people with particular
talents for specific parts: for instance Jess
Roden came in to do a wailing, soulful voice
part behind Roger Daltrey’s lead on
“Listening To You’.
A lot of the backing vocals were done by
Townshend and Billy Nichols, who worked
continuously in Ramport for three weeks.
They'd experiment for hours with different
woice effects, always towards a_ specific
complement to part of the scripted idea.
Billy Nichols recalls being surprised at
Russell’s demeanor in the studio—he came
to the sessions more often than not—which
was far from the overbearing ego-mania the
man’s public reputation had led him to
expect. There was even one piece Townshend
had done on synthesiser which Russell said
he could not use for the film because he
wouldn’t be able to match it visually.
“Towards the end of the sessions,”
Nichols says, “che seemed to get a little bit
crazy. As the music was getting finished he
would be walking around the studio with a
stick in his hand, beating out rhythms,
getting more excited, suggesting more ideas,
maybe getting a bit more pissed than he
would have done earlier on. You could see
he was beginning to feel things happening,
beginning to see what he’d be doing with
the music’.
Nichols also pointed up the difference
between the musicians who came in to
record, and the actors who were relatively
new to recording studios. -
When Paul Nicholas came in to do his
Cousin Kevin song, he completely changed,
completely assumed his acting as well as
singing role as soon as he was in front of the
microphone. “‘He became a different person,
he was so evil. I was watching and I felt like
punching him, I thought ‘you bastard’. . .
and then he came out and said ‘was that all
right then’? Changed back again. He did it
in a couple of takes’’.
He remembers just one time when Russell
was really taking an active role, directing the
way the music should go: mostly he left it to
Pete, but at the end of ““We’re Not Going
To Take It’’ there had to be a kind of angry
crowd backing voice track, slowly building
up resentment and anger to the point where
the kids rebel against Tommy and his set-up.
It took them all one night and another
session to get it down, and Russell stood
behind the mike, urging them on and getting
them at it.
In many ways, those sessions at Ramport
laid the foundations for the film as import-
antly as Russell’s script: Russell was
obviously drawing inspiration from them,
and Oliver Reed says Townshend’s reaction
to his voice gave him the idea of playing
Frank as a kind of burlesque. But if Towns-
hend found Reed funny in that strange
Situation, the actors like Reed must have
found the situation equally odd. “‘I met Ken
in an Italian restaurant”, he said, ‘‘and for
once [ didn’t have to pay the bill, and we
went to the studio and there was this huge
pint pot of brandy which concealed most of
Pete Townshend who sounded like a cement
grinder because he eats potato crisps all the
time and Ken was filling his face with
currants, nuts rather, and I sang a few notes
and Pete fell about .. .”’ Ah, rock and roll
the poor man must have wondered what he’d
let himself in for. He rose, of course, to the
occasion and by the time the film was
finished he proved himself the equal even of
Keith Moon. .
While all this was going on, shooting had
not even started. But the team was gathering
—carpenters, electricians, make-up people,
the camera crew, assistant director, caterers,
continuity girl, lights people, technicians and
labourers or all kinds. For ‘Tommy’, the
total crew was 88. The film business is almost
completely freelance, with a crew coming
together to make one picture, then splitting
up and changing partners for the next like
some vast amoebic mass. Russell likes to use
people he knows and has worked with
before, and quite a few of the ‘Tommy’
people went with him to make ‘Liszt’—bu
by no means all. :
The script was sorted out, the locations
set, and the budget set at something around
one million pounds for a shooting schedule
of 12 weeks. It ended up costing around two
million, with shooting extended to 22 weeks,
with some special effects left to do. Mr.
Stigwood can’t have hidden his piggy banks
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THE LOCATION they chose for Tommy’s
Holiday Camp—the Glade Of Contempla-
tion to which Tommy’s followers come to
experience deafness, dumbness, blindness,
pinball and the rampant consumerism of
Frank and Uncle Ernie—was a scrapyard. Of
course, being Ken Russell’s film of “Tommy’,
it wasn’t just any scrapyard: This was
Harry Pound’s place on the sea-front at
Portsmouth, and the scrap is mostly ex-
services stuff—anything from old battleships
and military tanks to buoys. The former
pride of Britain’s Senior Service gets its
come-uppance here at Harry Pound’s:
it’s used as props in a Ken Russell movie.
There are huge mounds of buoys painted
silver—the props department had to scour
Hampshire to get enough silver paint to turn
them into outsize pinballs. There are rows of
pinball machines that’ve have seen better § ey
days, all waiting an ignominious end as ‘tgs
effects man Nobby Clarke and his team stuff nll
them with paraffin-soaked carpet underfelt.
The fire department stands by, slightly
nervously. It would be no joke if Harry
Pound’s scrapyard was to catch alight. It’s
possibly one of the most awkward locations
in the history of the cinema, and it’s freezing
cold. ee pre OS ae 7 aS (Top left) Close-up shot of a pin-table being destroyed.
In context of the ‘Tommy’ story, the scene | oa ef * (Above) Ollie, lying in mud, jokes with Ann-Margret.
is this: having achieved fame, fortune and -_ | (Top right) Russell hits Ann-Margret witha bottle made of
near-Avatar status as the Pinball Wizard, [J S sugar and partly filled with red dye. As it smashes she is
the deaf. dumb and blind boy welcomes hi < k PF” ye ome realistically splattered with blood. The dye used for blood is
’ eo eet coe | © 0) = knownas ‘Kensington gore.’ Russell paints on more ‘gore’ to
followers to his holiday camp, where they are [iim 1 4 bloody face (left and below right).
told they must share his experiences if they | “* j (Right) Roger Daltrey gets another boot in the face.
are truly to follow him. They have to pay to Ye os . i (Below left) One of the less comfortable things about being a
get in, they have to buy their Tommy t-shirts oe film star. After hours of shivering in a muddy puddle, Ollie
and their Tommy crosses . . . they begin to 3 | demanded, “Let’s make this an art film Ken!”
realise they’re being conned. They turn on “g m= (Far right) The camera precedes the line of revolting converts
Tommy and his entourage with their battle : se march ee Pe ae Ce coe destroy it.
cc 3 : 39 more peaceful view of ‘The Glade of Contemplation’ as it
hymn ‘“‘We’re Not Going To Take It’’. As : | oe called! a chown on pases 34.8 95
the tide turns and the revolution gets heavy,
Tommy finds his mother and step-father
dead... :
Oliver Reed and Ann-Margret are lying in
the freezing cold, on the muddy ground of
Harry Pound’s junkyard. Ken Russell and
his team are standing over them, trying to
work out their best camera angles and shots.
Someone suggests they move Ollie over a
bit—so he’s lying half in a puddle. Ollie’s
the complete professional, really earning his
money: he and Ann-Margret even have a
technique for stopping shivering (corpses
don’t shiver) when the cameras are running.
But move him into a puddle? “Hey Ken”,
he says. ‘““Let’s make it an art film”.
It’s been a trying few days in the junkyard:
the giant pinballs have to constantly be
re-painted as people clambering all over them
with muddy shoes keep taking the silver off:
the weather hasn’t been kind to the crew—
blazing sunshine alternates with pouring
rain, playing havoc with the continuity. The
fight sequence has demanded stunt-men as
Ollie Reed gets stabbed, and Ann-Margret
has to be hit over the head with a bottle and
kicked. Now Ann-Margret is expensive,
and accident prone. Everyone is nervous
that she might really get hurt, and in the
end Ken Russell takes the plunge himself.
Two bottles made of sugar are brought
up, so they only have two chances for
this take. The director kicks over one and
smashes it—everyone on the set breathes a
huge sigh of relief. If anyone else had goofed
like that he would have exploded. They get it
in the one take—without accident to Ann-
Mareret. Russell also puts the boot in
without damage. The show goes on.
Now that they’ve reached the uprising
scenes, it’s important that they carry on and
finish, whatever the hardships: with the
42
leading characters covered in mud and their
clothes in rags, it would be virtually im-
possible to maintain accurate continuity the
next day. So they press on. The next scene is
where Tommy has to run for his life through
a corridor of blazing pintables—a sprint
through some 140 yards of flame. Most of it
looks OK, the space is fairly wide, but there
are sections where the gap between the tables
is pretty narrow: the camera is on a track,
it’s covered in asbestos and the operators too
have protective suits. Russell doesn’t bother
—he’s too involved in what he’s doing—and
of course Roger Daltrey has no choice.
Nobby Clarke demonstrates his flames, the
firemen have given what seems to be a
slightly reluctant OK, and Roger Daltrey
seems to be finding it hard to believe he’s got
to run through that. He’s really being put
through the hoop on his debut film, doing
things that a more hardened actor might well
refuse to do. The hairdressers, make-up
ladies and dressers have formed a kind of
Save Our Roger society, and suck their teeth
in righteous indignation: “Just look what
that man’s making our Roger do now.”
He does it, running hard through the
flaming corridor, and gets through. They
take it. Right says Russell, we can get -
another take out of this. He does it again,
they take it. Right says Russell, just once
more. Daltrey does it again, he’s exhausted:
the third time a sudden burst of flame
caught his hair and singed him a bit. With a
sigh of relief that it was the final take, he
falls back against a giant pinball, and springs
away again. It was red-hot and burnt his
arm. Daltrey and Russell walk away,
knackered, from the set: from the assembled
crew, a voice calls out ““Ready when you are
Ken’’,
He shouldn’t have joked about it—he
_ thought they’d finished for the day.
Among the crew, the production team of
‘Tommy’ weren’t exactly noted for their
generosity; they weren’t given to handing out
free booze or anything. So a kind of wry
amusement mixed with grumbling hostility
greeted the arrival of crates of whisky and
brandy on the set that afternoon. A little: pas
sweetening was afoot for the extra overtime
request—they wanted to shoot the final bit
of that fire sequence, where Daltrey has to
leap through yet more flames and past a tank.
Of course they did it.
Perhaps that wasn’t a typical day in the
life of the ‘Tommy’ film, but neither was it
_ that extreme. And it made a fine piece of film.
Pete Townshend regards it as one of the
movie’s best sequences: “It seemed to bring
the whole thing home to me. It gives the
story a stark reality I had not realised, and I
personally found it staggering and very
moving.”
Setting up some of the more elaborate
scenes is an operation worthy of some of the
Great Campaigns—for instance, the Pinball
Wizard filming at the King’s Theatre, |
Southsea, where Tommy beats the reigning
Pinball Champ (Elton John). They rented
the theatre by the day, but there was a show
each evening which meant the crew had to
work through the night dismantling the
show scenery and’ erecting the Pinball
Wizard set in time for filming to start at
7.30 in the morning. The set was built in
sections and had never been fitted together
before they had to do it for the first day’s
filming—a fact which irritated Terry Snow.
“If they’d paid out £1,000 they could :have
had that theatre for a week day and night,
and they wouldn’t have had to pay out a
fortune in overtime’. It was a scramble to
The most dangerous thing Roger Daltrey had to
do was to run through a 100 yard long corridor of
blazing pin-tables. This was for the final part of
the ‘lommy’s Holiday Camp’ scene. Tommy had
just seen his mother and her lover killed and the
camp totally destroyed. He stumbles through the
burning camp singing, “See.me, feel me.” As it is
a fairly close tracking shot, it had been decided
that a stunt-man would not be used. The camera
and crew were protected by asbestos sheeting (above).
Russell was too involved and excited to get burned.
The pin-tables (over 80 of them) had been carefully
prepared by special-effects man Nobby Clark and
his team. They were stuffed with paraffin-soaked
rolls of carpet underfelt and fitted with concealed
gas jets. Twenty firemen with hoses at the ready,
and a water tender stood by. A previous fire on
this particular site (a scrap yard) had taken days
to get under control and they were worried by the
stunt. Originally only one take was thought
possible but Russell got three. On the first, Roger
singed his eyebrows and hair, and after the second
he badly burned his arm when he rested against a
giant pinball which had become red hot. He is
holding his arm during his third run (right). Russell
had some footage of the fire at Southsea pier edited
into this scene at the end (see report pages 70 & 71).
ancl Rhe” nv re: ‘
If your child ain’t all he should be now
This girl will put him right
Pil show him what he could be now
Just give me one night
I’m the Gypsy—the Acid Queen
Pay me before I start
I’m the Gypsy and I’m guaranteed
to mend:his aching heart
Give us a room—close the door
Leave us for a while
He won't be a boy no more
Young, but not a child :
I’m the Gypsy—the Acid Queén
Pay me before I start
I'm the Gypsy 'm guaranteed
to tear your soul apart
Gather your wits and hold on fast
Your mind must learn to roam
Just as the Gypsy Queen must do
You're gonna hit the road
i ST Ee ee ee te ee
My Work’s begun, now look at-him
He’s never been more alive
His head it shakes his fingers clutch
Watch his body writhe
I'm the Gypsy—the Acid Queen
Pay me hefore | start
I'm-the Gypsy. lm guaranteed
to break your-little heart
If your child ain’t all he should be now
This girl will put-him right
Pil show him what he could be now
-Just give me one more night
I'm. the Gypsy—the Acid Queen
Pay me before I start
I'm the Gypsy I’m guaranteed
to tear his soul apart
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha-. ; .
abla eens
Pete Townshend couldn’t get into ‘prancing
around on stage pretending to play with an
unplugged guitar.’ So the Who had several
tons of amplifiers set up and played live for
filming the ‘Pinball Wizard’sequence.
When Keith Moon starts destroying his drum-
kit and Pete starts smashing his guitar (below
left and right) the crowd react like the true
professionals they weren't. About two hundred
storm the stage helping to make it one of the
film’s most exciting scenes.
Unfortunately a girl was hit by a piece of guitar
and rushed to hospital in true ‘Sally Simpson’
Style. Afterwards Townshend seemed more
upset than the girl who felt ‘quite honoured’
He gave her the guitar bits as a momento.
Despite playing live for the cameras, this is
the one song which Townshend did not pro-
duce, and on which the Who did not play. Elton
John’s own band played on it and his record
producer Gus Dudgeon produced it.
(Above left) John Entwistle ‘guards’ bass
while (above right) Keith Moon slaughters.
drums and (left) Pete Townshend smashes
guitar. Whilst waiting (far left) Townshend
takes a small ‘tipple’ and surveys the audience.
After three days hot, hectic and repeti-
tive filming for ‘Pinball Wizard; the
1,500 extras gave anemotional standing
ovation to Ken Russell and crew.
(Left & Above) Elton gratefully stands
on a box whenever his boots are not in
camera. This scene with the crowd
behind him is shown in film clip top
right. Clapping, cheering and ‘atmos-
phere’ were recorded and mixed with
Elton’s studio tape giving it a ‘live’feeling.
(Right) Elton tries out his huge new
‘hovver-boots’ for the first time.
(Below) Close-up shooting of pintable
using a special prism lens which films -
at a 45° angle. The pinballs appear to
zoom Straight at the camera.
hed to climb a step-ladder to put his boots on, or rather to be put
ie boots. But once strapped in (right) he could walk about with them.
lommy, the Pinball Wizard, battles with the Pinball Champ. The
sewwide the musical backing. Originally the Who were going to appear
te of scenes. Early on in the filming however, Roger doubted this
and they all agreed. Roger and Pete, who wasn’t overstruck with
ampway, persuaded Ken Russell to drop the idea. Apart from this
wath Elton John, the Who as a group make only two other appearances.
| The set was reassembled weeks later at Shepperton Studios to
extre close-ups. Director and star look tired and bored.
get it ready in time each day, especially as
inevitably there had to be re-painting where
sections had got knocked about in the move.
The scene required some 1,500 extras to
pack the theatre in rival groups, one lot
cheering Tommy and one lot the champ.
Most of these came from the local technical
college, and part of the deal was that their
Student’s Union would be allowed to film the
making of the film. Robert Stigwood gave
them some money for equipment. Also in
payment to the extras and at their suggestion
the Who gave a free concert for them when
filming was finished—a concert Townshend
considers one of the band’s recent best.
With a mass of film equipment and crew
_and 1,500 extras packing a small provincial
theatre, you have to take precautions against
accident. The fire brigade and the St. John’s
ambulance people were constantly in attend-
ance during filming, and although there were
several people fainting and a few getting a
bit crushed, there was only one real injury: it
was when the Who are playing and the crowd
had to storm the stage. The signal for this
was Townshend smashing his guitar and
throwing the neck up in the air, but one take
he threw it a bit high, and it came down on a
girl’s head. “There was blood everywhere’’,
remembers Townshend’’, and she was carried
off to hospital. But she came back a few
hours later and told us she was ‘very
honoured’ to have been smashed over the
head by Pete Townshend’s guitar. I gave her
the guitar’. Shades of Sally Simpson.
Elton John’s giant pinball machine came
in for one of Ken Russell’s sudden flashes of
inspiration during filming. He wondered
whether they could fit it with something that
looked like a keyboard so Elton could play
as he sang as he played pinball. They tried
chrome studs at first, but it didn’t look right,
and then John Clark nipped down to
Woolworths and bought a toy organ key-
board which they grafted on to the machine
and pasted with glitter. Mr. Russell was
pleased.
Filming the scene, they went through the
song in short sections, over and over again,
but when they’d finished the extras demanded
they play the whole thing through. You’d
think they’d have been sick to death with the
thing, but they stomped and cheered at the
end, and gave the director a standing ovation.
Mr. Russell was moved.
For the Preacher’s ‘Eyesight To The
Blind’ section, Russell had the idea of staging
it in a shrine dedicated to St. Marilyn, where
the crippled and the blind come to worship
images of Marilyn Monroe with the faith
that they will be cured. “‘I used the Monroe
images in that particular sequence to show
how pop heroes can become defiled. It’s
something I’m particularly conscious of since
the film I shot at Lourdes (one of his first,
amateur, films) where people put a blind
faith in graven images like the Bernadette
statuette. It doesn’t really matter to me if
people get comfort from these kind of things
—if their faith is strong enough, it may in
fact cure. But it is difficult to distinguish
between the divine and the commercial—
who is to say whether Marilyn Monroe was
less divine than Bernadette’? The scene
involves a vast church hung with Marilyn
portraits, a 10-foot statue of Marilyn on a
rostrum towed by 10 girls in Marilyn masks,
blond wigs, and costumes made from
Marilyn photos and press clippings, with
Eric Clapton strolling down the aisle doing
‘Eyesight To The Blind’ flanked by a slightly
uncomfortable looking Pete Townshend and
‘John Entwistle. “I’ve piddled about with
acting, but I don’t feel comfortable doing
it’, says Townshend. “I do most of my
acting on the typewriter’. If Clapton looks
slightly bemused on the screen, it could be
because he was, and it could also be that the
brandy was flowing like canteen tea. Or as
Townshend put it: “Everyone was pissed
out of their brains that day. It was great to
have Eric in the film and get him down
there—it was all part of his coming out
therapy”’.
For the extras playing the blind and
crippled seekers after healing, they brought
in genuinely blind and handicapped people—
which inevitably will cause some controv-
ersy. Legend had it that the people hiring
them assumed—this being a Ken Russell
‘film—that they'd have to get authentic
extras, but that Russell was mildly surprised
when they all turned up. But then legend has
a lot of things.
Pete Townshend again: “‘Obviously I
didn’t speak to them all but those I did
speak to seemed happy to be in the film.
Some said they identified with Tommy,
feeling normal inside yet crippled outside.
It was pretty gruelling for them, pretty hard
work, but they could have quit any time
they wanted to. A lot of them had listened
to ‘Tommy’ and had much better credentials
for getting a lift out of it than you or I’.
The filming was done in a de-consecrated
church in Portsmouth, but even so it caused
problems—both within the unit and without.
A local vicar got hot and bothered about it,
and one of the Sunday papers ran one of
those “‘Bearded Film Director Stages Hippie
Pop Orgy In Church” stories: all it needed
was senior citizen and a dog. In the sequence,
when Tommy reaches the Marilyn statue to
touch it, the graven image topples over and
smashes into a thousand pieces. This meant
they had to provide one robust Marilyn for
the main shooting, which they made from
fibreglass, and two plaster ones for smashing.
The figure was too big to get through the
door of the church, so the fibreglass one had
to be made in sections and assembled inside.
But the plaster ones had to be made on the
spot—and then hidden from view while the
rest of the filming was going on. And they
were so fragile they couldn’t be moved
around a lot. They’d calculated that the
statues would break at the knees, so Russell
lined up the shot on that premise: they had
two chances. Take one, the statue cracked
... at the ankles. They missed the shot. Take
two, they got it.
IN CASE you're getting the impression that
22 weeks in the life of the “Tommy’ movie
was all problems and grumbling and
narrowly-averted disaster, remember the
exploits of Mr. Moon and Mr. Reed, which
have already established themselves in the
mythology of both rock and film business.
Remember also the night Eric Clapton spent
hammering on Ann-Margret’s hotel-room
door yelling “‘Ann-Margret I love you, I’m
yours Ann-Margret’. And remember the
time some of the production’s most valuable
livewires decided to tease Harry Benn into
wetting himself and reaching for the tran-
quilisers.
It was while the unit was based at Hayling
Island on the South coast, and Pete Towns-
hend had just bought a Grand Banks boat,
which had been delivered and moored down
there: To celebrate, Townshend took Moon,
Ollie Reed and a few friends out to the boat
for a bit of a party. They drove round the
island for ages in Pete’s Mercedes and
Moony’s Rolls, trying to remember where
the boat had been moored, eventually found
Lefi top) Clapton joking with photographers.
Left middle) Arthur Brown gives ‘communion:
Left bottom) Russell talks to some of the blind.
Above left) Apprehensive Pete Townshend, John
Entwistle and congregation follow ‘preacher’ Eric.
Above right) The painter gives a final ‘touch-up,
Below left) Blind follower kissing the statue.
Below centre) The lighting cameraman; Dick Bush.
Below right) A gaggle of Marylin Monroes rest.
The billowing clouds of incense, the swaying disci-
ples in Marylin Monroe face masks, the repetition
of John Entwistle’s eerie bass-line and the atmos-
pDheric lighting of Dick Bush, all combined made
filming ‘Eyesight to the blind’ a moody and weird
occasion. In fact a sunday newspaper ran a
‘Bearded Hippie Film Director Pop Orgy Sensation
In Local Church Horror Drama’ type of feature
about it a few days later. The real stars of the
filming were the disabled and blind extras. Their
cheerfulness and stamina introduced both fresh-
ness and reality. Clapton had to wait ten hours
before acting, but if he was a bit ‘laid back’ as the
preacher, his guitar playing was most outstanding.
“Tt was all part of his coming out” said Townshend
Arthur Brown was later brought in successfully
to pep up the proceedings but his singing wasn’t
included on the ‘Tommy sound-track’ record album.
Yr tee.
‘
The climax to ‘Eyesight to the blind’ comes when
it is Tommy’s.turn to seek a cure from the statue
of Saint Marylin. His mother forces his hand to
touch the idol. He is reluctant and struggles. The
statue topples and falls. It hits the ground and
smashes into tiny pieces. This was a difficult piece
eetremineie UE ei TS ae ea
of action to film and proved troublesome. As well
as the main fibre-glass statue two others to be
broken, were made in plaster. They calculated the
statue would break at the knees, fall and land with
ms head on the second step behind (see series of
pictures). The first statue however broke at the
ankles and landed in the wrong place. This meant
that the high speed camera filming it in slow
motion, missed the shot. After a discussion they set
up the second statue in a different position. It
smashed beautifully and was captured by all three
cameras. Two statues are not enough for Russell
anna
who likes to have as many different ‘takes’ as he
can get. (Above) Sitting and brooding deep in
thought, he surveys the wreckage of the second
statue - ‘There’s no more to play with today.’ Not to
worry, the footage he had, made a very dramatic
ending to a scene that was rich in Russell symbolism.
it, borrowed a tender and rowed out clutching
bottles of brandy and rum. Then the fun
started—Moon set the tender adrift so they
were marooned aboard, which was fine
except he’d left a bottle of brandy in it. Then
Moon decided he’d had enough and went
up on deck: the others heard a splash and
went up to find a little pile of clothes and
no Moon.
the water, Townshend getting more and more
worried, when they heard a giggle, and found
Moon shivering behind a mast. Later on,
Ollie actually did jump in, but he got back
aboard safely. Harry Benn, the associate
producer, would have been a worried man if
he thought his expensive stars were marooned
in the middle of the Channel somewhere, so
they decided to let him know—they sent out
distress calls over the radio for an hour and a
half... and no one heard or answered. The
jokers really were marooned.
When morning came, Ollie and Moon
swam back—going from buoy to buoy until
they got ashore and were able to borrow
PVVTLEVENERTERELTERTTUT TAT LTT EL IEASELLLL Lk ee dn ns Gene TT TUNETATUTILITIVELIRTTETIOLIATTITITTIFER TILL LTAR LEGS
They were desperately peering out across.
another tender.
tranquilisers.
HOWEVER MUCH can be laid at the
director’s door when things go over schedule
or budget—and there is a strong argument
that the original estimates were decidely
unrealistic—it has to be remembered that
especially on location the whole operation is
largely dependent on luck. Perhaps that’s
why so many film people tend to be super-
stitious. The weather can prohibit filming for
days at a time and accidents and Circums-
tances Beyond Our Control can cause
frustrating delays and accountant’s heart
failure. :
‘Tommy’ had its share of rough luck—not
least some bouts of unfriendly weather. But
there were two fairly spectacular incidents.
You will recall that Ann-Margret has earned
the nickname ‘Slugger’ for being accident
prone, and that while she was making
‘Tommy’ she received damages of £620,000
for a serious fall she had at a Las Vegas
nightclub: she had to have extensive plastic
surgery, and she woke in hospital in a cast,
Harry didn’t need his
with her jaw wired up, and covered in
bandages. The same day that news of her
award was announced, she was doing the
‘Today It Rained Champagne’ scene, in
which she gets steadily drunker and drunker
on champagne in a vast, white room as she
watches her son on TV. It is Tommy’s hour
of triumph, he’s become the pinball champion
of the world and he is lionised by his
followers, but his mother gets more and
more depressed and maudlin thinking that all
this means nothing to Tommy, the deaf,
dumb and blind kid. The set is fantastic—all
white drapes lit from the outside, and she
feverishly switches channels on TV between
the news and adverts for Rex Beans, Black
Beauty chocolates, and soap powder. Finally
she heaves a bottle through the television
screen, and out floods first soap suds, then
beans, then chocolate. It fills the room, and
Ann-Margret wallows about in it. 7
On the set they’d got to the bit where
soap suds are foaming out of the TV and
filling the room. But then she starts to look a
bit weird, and the foam around her starts
PLSD LUMA)
(Left) Ann-Margret runs riot in baked beans and
almost turns ‘Tommy’ into a dirty film. |
(Above) Foam filled the room and she was soon
quite literally up to her neck in it. Unfortunately
as She was dancing around she cut her hand on the
jagged glass of the TV screen. The crew didn’trealize
until the foam turned pink and she turned white.
She was hurriedly carried out (below) to a studio
car which rushed her to the nearest hospital.
(Below right) Three hours and 24 stitches later she
arrives back on set, her arm heavily bandaged.
(Right) The huge apparatus that causes all the
mess is being tested. Tanks full of beans and choco-
late empty downa chute to the TV set. Then they are
forced out under pressure. 200 gallons of beans or
chocolate pour from the TV screen with each tip.
on the jagged edge of the TV screen, was
rushed to hospital, and had to have 24
stitches. The accident was carefully kept out
of the Press at the time.
Apart from the anguish that caused the
producers, it meant that one of the leading
actors, who appears right through the film,
was out of action while the wound healed.
The unit had had great difficulty booking
hotels in the lake district in peak holiday
season, and now filming there had to be put
back two weeks and all the bookings
changed. Somehow they managed it—but it
wasn’t one of Fate’s kindlier acts.
Then of course there was Southsea Pier—
which burned out during filming in a blaze of
painted woodwork and publicity. It was a
beautiful old wooden building, still in use as
a theatre at the resort, which they’d chosen
as the location for the ballroom at Bernie’s
Holiday Camp, where Nora begins to melt
into Frank’s arms. Somehow, a small fire
started while they were there, and the fire
brigade were called, but as the building was
NN Ade AMD Ah 1
going a bit pink. She’d cut her hand and arm’
ABER TULARE JU hl AREAS TD)
it could be brought under control and the
theatre was completely gutted. They kept the
cameras running through the whole thing,
and Russell even used some of the footage in
‘Tommy’ during the final scenes where
Tommy runs through the burning pintables
and on to the beach |
It was an expensive accident—both in
goodwill (the unit wasn’t vastly popular in
Southsea after that, and they still had
several scenes to shoot there) and in com-
pensation for the extras. The wardrobe van
had been caught by the blaze, and many of
the extras lost their belongings. The claims
they put in shed a strange light on the sort
of things film extras carry around with them.
They ranged from meticulous people who’d
claim for a pair of plimsolls worth 95p and a
jacket worth £2 with half a packet of wine
gums in the pocket, to the other extreme.
The film company suddenly realised that
some of their extras were among the best
dressed in the country—owners of Astrakan
coats with bulging wallets and expensive
entirely made of wood the fire spread before
‘about the difference between Russell wearing
PEPE DD) |B
AUDLEY ALE
sunglasses in the pockets.
The accountants had to smile as they
signed the compensation cheques.
IN NUTSHELL form, Ken Russell’s object
for film-making is: ‘To entertain first, and
the preaching comes secondary. Most of my
films are based on that premise’. It seems
simple enough, but the concept of the film
director as entertainer conceals a seething
mass of details which would be enough to
daunt the most ardent of. people. The
skeletal outline is clear enough: having
assembled your crew, worked out your
schedule, got your cast, found your locations
and made sure you have people around you
to look after forseeable problems, you point
the camera and make the film. Nothing is
ever as simple as that, but as the man at the
head of this vast army the director-as-general
has a responsibility to.ensure the headaches
are as mild as possible. Apart from laying in
sacks of aspirin, how does he do it?
It’s a wonder there aren’t more directors
with acute schizophrenia: people talk wryly
Ann-Margret hasn’t eaten beans since the time she
had to roll around 6" deep in them (above).
(Above right) Ken Russell covers her with yet
another bucketful, and many more follow (right).
This fantasy sequence had gallons of soap suds,
baked beans and liquid chocolate pour out of a TV
set. At first masses of the stuff was made up by
colouring soya beans and cornflour. It all went bad
when filming was postponed because of
Ann-Marsgret’s accident (page 59). Real beans and
chocolate were eventually used. During filming two
valuable rings, lost by Ann-Margret, were recovered
when over 4,000 lbs of beans from the studio floor
<= eT Oe 7 > Oar Oe Re ere F
were carefully sieved by hand.
his producer’s hat and Russell the extrava-
gant, creative film maker. It’s hardly sur-
prising he explodes under the pressure.
He has a basic method in that he keeps his
main crew as much a family affair as
possible: wherever he can he’ll use people
with whom he’s: worked before—from the
actors to the continuity assistant. People
suggest that he likes to get the measure of
people, and often hires them because they’re
not likely to outshine him, or people he
knows he can shout at with impunity. That
charge may be unfair, though there may be
an element of that in his reasoning: what is
probably more important is the ‘devil you
know’ idea. He’s not a man to hire incompe-
tents, even if they are submissive, but there
could hardly be anything worse than
finding out after a couple of days shooting
that you’ve got a ‘difficult’ actor who'll put
your schedule late with every tantrum, or a
key member of your technical team who’ll
spend more time arguing than getting the
job done. He’s quite careful about picking
new people, as John Clark’s account of how
he came to be the Art Director on “Tommy’
shows.
Clark was working with the Associate
Producer, Harry Benn (a _ long-standing
Russell clan member) on another film while
they were setting up the ‘Tommy’ deal, and
at that time Russell wasn’t sure that he
needed an art director to interpret his ideas.
One interesting thing about Russell is that
he can’t draw—he can see everything in his
head, but can’t get it onto paper and he
relys on his wife Shirley and a friend, Paul
Dufficey, to translate for him. Harry Benn
was pushing for Clark, but neither Russell
nor Clark was sure: there were meetings,
which as Clark describes them sound like
fairly amicable fencing bouts, with each side
retiring occasionally to think about the
other. Eventually Russell asked him to join,
and Clark agreed: “‘I said I would as long as
it was clearly understood that I’m in charge
of what I’m responsible for”. He didn’t want
to risk being accused of falling down on the
job when someone else had been meddling.
Clark’s no-nonsense attitude and Assistant
Art Director Terry Snow’s assertion that
Russell likes to surround himself with
talented people ‘‘on the way up’, would
appear to belie the charge that Russell
prefers meek yes-men. Clark also said to
him: “I hear you’re not the kindest man on
the floor’—another often-quoted thread of
the Ken Russell legend. He is reputed to have
a most ferocious temper on the set.
Pete Townshend: “‘As a man he’s very
warm and gentle with a large family he loves.
But what happens is occasionally he lets go
in the way I do sometimes on stage or when
Moon and I go into one of our numbers in a
hotel: his eyes start to roll and his head
shakes and he goes out of control, and in
many ways I think he enjoys it, it’s a release
for his frustration and suppressed energy’’.
Townshend had but one nasty moment with
the Russell temper: he was having a slight
contretemps with the film sound people,
which they were taking personally, when
Russell intervened: ‘‘All I said very quietly
was: ‘Don’t shout at me mate,’ and he
dropped his voice and it was over’. Ollie
Reed tends to take him quietly aside. The
moral seems to be that if you allow yourself
to be trodden on, the director will tread.
“*Tommy’ saw two assistant directors come
and go after Russell had bawled them out in
front of a crowd, but with the third he met
his match. Jonathon Benson had a calm,
upper-crust BBC cool and he wouldn’t let
Russell’s outbursts ruffle him. “‘Ken just
wouldn’t give him any nonsense’’, said one
observer. ‘““He was in a world of his own,
did his job, and Russell just didn’t get angry
with him’’.
Russell’s method as a director is full of
contradictions. He’s a film director who
doesn’t like to direct actors (another reason
he likes people he knows and who know him)
and prefers them to follow his basic idea
more or less by intuition while he gets on
with the more technical aspects: he likes to
use the camera himself a lot. He’s a man who
emcourages anyone from the leading actor
to the clapper boy to come to him with
ideas, yet he can be as dictatorial as the next
man, going through take after take after take
The luxurious and clean white room (top left) as
Nora starts to have a nervous breakdown. ,
Determined not to be the only one covered in beans,
Ann-Margret attacks Ken Russell. He retaliates
and a light hearted bean-fight (top right and
centre) breaks out between them on the set.
Camera and crew were protected from flying
chocolate and beans by plasticsheeting (above left).
The lens was fitted with a special ‘window’ which
had to be wiped down after each take (left). |
Robert Stigwood, Tommy’s producer, makes one of |
his rare appearances on the set. (above).
The near-impossible task of cleaning up the set for
filming to re-start with the room clean (right).
to get exactly the shot he wants. He hates the
whole movie industry showbusiness charade,
and much prefers to leave studios alone
and shoot on location; yet he also has his
Cecil B. De Mille streak of extravagance. He
writes his own scripts and is as conscious as
anyone of budgets and time, yet he constantly
re-writes and changes as new ideas occur to
him while he’s shooting. Especially with a
musical, this can wreak havoc with the
schedules. Though the soundtrack had been
completed in advance of shooting, Russell
allowed his inspiration to take him far away
from his original ideas in several sections.
It can happen by the merest chance: there’s
one whole sequence where, in the original
script, people leave their office desks and
factory benches, come out from behind bank
counters, even walk off military parades as
Tommy’s message is piped through public
address systems by Frank and Uncle Ernie—
the basic idea being to show how the
Tommy evangelism was getting out of
control. Russell dropped the scenes but
in the film Daltrey glides over various scenes
and the people change, feel the power as he
passes by. Hell’s Angels stop fighting and
dance, Teds in a cafe stop loafing round the
gambling machines and dance, blind people
line up outside a home and look up as he
passes. The Hell’s Angels got in there
through Shirley Russell advertising for a
leather coat for Cousin Kevin to wear
during his tormentor sequence, and someone
from a group called the Shagrats sent in a
fantastic garment, completely covered in
motor-cycle badges: it was too late for
Cousin Kevin, but by way of the Shagrats,
Shirley and Ken got to know a really tough
bunch of Angels who impressed Russell so
much that he wrote them into the film.
Improvising on the script like that not
only put days, and eventually weeks, on the
time the film takes to shoot, but involved
Pete Townshend in an enormous amount of
extra work, locked in the studio for twelve
hours a day, seven days a week, changing
and adapting the soundtrack to fit what
Russell had actually filmed. This inspira-
tional approach to filming has financiers
No detail was spared for this short but dramatic period
setting scene of the London blitz. These sequences, up till
“It’s a boy” were originally going to be in black and white.
(Left) Extras dressed as firemen, policemen and ARP wardens.
(Above) Typically Russell: Satin, feathers and gas-masks.
(Right) Captain Walkerand Nora uncovera dead boy’s body.
(Below) Two cars and a whole street were set alight. The
period fire engine, doing its second blitz, is still in use.
pulling their hair out and caused a certain
amount of animosity amongst the crew, but
is also part of the reason Russell makes great
films rather than being merely a good man
on the production line.
Set gossip also centered around his habit
of doing a great many takes of each scene,
and then—after taking something 13 or 14
times—often using the second or third one.
There is obviously method in his eccen-
tricity—first that he likes to provide himself
with as much raw material as he can get by
the time he comes to the editing stage, and
secondly that he likes to be sure to get it
right. This is his perfectionism. Perhaps the
most extreme example was on part of the
**?’m Free” section which involved Daltrey
running through a field of bright yellow
mustard flowers. Russell had Daltrey run
through that mustard field 32 times before he
was Satisfied, and there’s nothing much you
can do wrong filming a man running across a
field. That day his reputation as Ken “‘just
one more last take’? Russell was firmly
entrenched. The advantages for him are
obvious, but the disadvantages are that
people get bored and tired and lose their
enthusiasm for the scene if they have to go
through it over and over and over again. In
another shot, Daltrey had to run through a
commando training course and get thrown
ina judo fall by one of the soldiers: they did
it again until eventually Daltrey made a
mistake in the way he fell and was out cold
for half an hour or so.
But Russell proved with the Acid Queen
shots with Tina Turner, that he could
get it together in just a few takes. Tina
Turner simply had to leave the country after
a couple of days because she had other
committments, so Russell knew that if he
wanted her in his film it had to be done fast:
the crew hardly knew what had hit them as
the scenes were shot and finished in swift
succession in a couple or four takes.
Perfectionism isn’t merely the director’s
prerogative, naturally. One of the most
staggering things about a production on the
scale of ‘Tommy’ is the amount of time,
money and trouble that is spent setting up
-and filming scenes that will last a matter of
seconds or minutes in the actual film.
They’d spend a whole day filming in exactly
the right location with hundreds of extras to
get just a few shots for the ballroom section
of Bernie’s Holiday Camp, where Nora
Walker is falling in love with Frank. It’s just
part of the section where she takes Tommy
to the camp, meets Frank, dances with him,
goes swimming, enters the Lovely Legs
competition, wins, and goes home with
Frank as Tommy’s new Uncle—but every
part has to be right. One of the opening shots
in the film is where Nora and Captain
Walker are running in their evening clothes
through a blitzed street: setting up and film-
ing that scéne seems, to the outsider, to take
an almost unbelievably disproportionate
amount of trouble compared to the amount:
of time it is on the screen.
There was an area of Portsmouth that was
being demolished and the local council were
persuaded to leave a couple of streets to be
blitzed by the film crew. In this context, set
dressing takes on a whole new meaning: the
art direction team got busy, knocking away
i bits of houses with the help of a man with a
bulldozer and a ball and chain: Nobby
Clarke started work with his gas jets and
paraffin rags, preparing the fire effects, and
the idea of real explosions was tried and
rejected: the props department took im-
mense care in getting period cars in the
street ready to be overturned and set alight,
placing the right kind of curtains, ornaments
and furniture in the houses—and as every
collector knows, Thirties and Forties stuff is
fetching a fair price at the moment. They
got a period fire engine, which is still in
working order as a reserve for the Hampshire
fire brigade, dressed the extras in ARP
uniforms and clothes of the time, rehearsed
little incidental pieces of action—like some
people being rescued from a burning house—
which probably wouldn’t be noticed in the
film because you’re looking at Ann-Margret
running through in a ball gown, organised
emergency fire and ambulance services to be
on standby in case of accidents, and dealt
with the fears of nearby local residents. They
were going to film through the night, and a
local deputation came to point out that there
were old people in the area who might be
frightened by explosions.
Actually to film it, they had to use a
battery of carbon lamps which introduce yet
another complication into each take: the
lamps burn rods of carbon, which frizzle as
they give out a fierce, bright light. Before
each take the chief electrician has to check
with the man on each lamp that the rod is
long enough to last, and if not they have to
wait while he turns off the lamp, unscrews the
rod, puts another one in... if they’re all
going out at different times, one detail like
that can prove incredibly complicating.
Building Uncle Ernie’s organ was another
example of a great deal of trouble and
expense for a very short time on celluloid. It
is a fantastic creation—a huge organ-cum-
cash register built on the chassis of a Mini
Moke which Uncle Ernie plays at the
entrance to Tommy’s holiday camp. They
tried all sorts of ways to do it, including
mounting the construction on a milk float,
but as it had to go uphill at a fair lick, they
decided to use a petrol engine. It took weeks
to build it, and in the end was something of a
rush job because it was needed on the set,
and instead of moulding it out of fibreglass
it had to be done in plywood, which isn’t as
flexible as the designers would have liked.
They had to hire a man from the maker to
drive it, because none of the crew was
prepared to squash in sideways and work the
rather oddly-positioned controls. Squashed
in beside the driver was another geezer who
had to operate the cash-register mechanism.
Originally, the machine was going to be
featured quite heavily in the film but as the
emphasis for devilry switched from Uncle
Ernie to Frank, so did the opportunities for
using the Organ. It was an expensive toy:
four and a half thousand pounds for one
scene. It is now resting in the props depart-
ment at Pinewood.
One final Russell idosyncrasy: tradition-
ally while shooting, the director looks at the
previous day’s rushes every morning, but
although the rushes are always shown on a
Russell film, neither the director nor the
actors go to see them. Thus on “Tommy’ it
was some time before he realised that several
sequences had been shot out of focus
because of a defective lens. They had to be
shot again.
JUST AS work goes on before shooting
starts, so it goes on when all that is finished.
Each scene has to be edited into shape and
to the correct length to fit the music, or the
music has to be altered to fit the scene, the
whole thing has to be strung together, the
special effects have to be done, and the sound
has to be dubbed.
Film Editor Stuart Baird used to work
while the film was still being shot: he’d get
cas
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together the rushes and do a rough cut of the
scene which he’d then show to Russell: on
‘Tommy’ Russell and Baird seemed generally
to agree—there were no major alterations to
Baird’s initial ideas, which is another
example of Russell liking his key people to
contribute their own ideas to the project and
of the sympathy between the director and his
team. Like everyone else, Baird has his
reservations about ‘Tommy’, but he is
particularly pleased with his work on the
Sally Simpson sequence, which is very sharp
and makes its point well in quite a short time.
Dubbing the sound proved to be a rather
complex procedure which eventually took
four months or so. They had to do several
different mixes—one for the quintaphonic
system, one stereo, one mono, and one
double-stereo which is mainly for cinemas in
America which like to use stereo with an
extra pair of speakeis at the back. The mix
in each case is different to suit the possi-
bilities of each system, and the technique of
mixing music to go with the images on the
screen in any case is different from mixing
for records. Pete Townshend became quite
closely involved with the process, and early
on learnt the differences between record and
cinema: the film sound people also say that
they learnt a lot from working with “Tommy’.
To mix for the quintaphonic system, they
had to bring in three mixing decks and have
one in the dead centre of the dubbing
theatre—sometimes there were more than 50.
music tracks to be assembled.
It was an extremely long and hard
process, which involved them working long
hours—even late on Christmas Eve. As it
happened, they were working on_ the
Christmas sequence that night, and things
started to get a little crazy: Townshend and
the technicians were slaving away while
Russell went out for a break, and he came
back to find they’d decorated the dubbing
theatre with paper chains, and were sitting
there in rabbit masks. They all turned to
look at him—he took one glance and went
home.
“IT’S OBVIOUSLY difficult for me to be
objective’, says Pete Townshend, “But I
remember getting a chill up my spine after
seeing rushes of the ‘Acid Queen’ sequence.
Tina Turner is so right for the role (remember
his original idea was to have Tiny Tim?) and
she brings to the part that aggressive
feminine thing that chills you in the same
way that parts of ‘The Exorcist’ chill. It was
the only sequence that the censors were
particularly worried about—they seemed to
think it was pure horror, although apart
from the snakes in the skeleton there is
nothing very nasty visually. It’s really Tina’s
portrayal that’s so terrifying—her face”.
The Acid Queen is a sinister mix of Soho
sleaze, drug mythology and urban voodoo:
Tommy is taken to her in the desperate (and
vain) hope that she can cure him. She
doesn’t, but she leaves her mark.
The Acid Queen is Tina Turner: it is also
a complicated mass of tubes, syringes, lights,
mirrors and fibreglass that cost a lot both in
heartache and money. It was Shirley
Russell’s idea: it came to her in a restaurant
one day, and she made a rough sketch of it
there, and then a full colour design, which
she passed to John Clark who made the
working drawings and got the thing made.
The idea was to have some kind of sinister
machine—all lights and mirrors—with
syringes pointing through to the inside. Tina
Turner does her dance, is dressed in a cloak
and has a helmet put on her head: the helmet
is the head of the Acid Queen (or the Iron
Choosing Tina Turner for the part of the
‘Acid Queen’ was a piece of ‘mastercasting’
by Robert Stigwood: Her face expresses just
the right combination of lust and menace.
Her fast sinuous dancing brings out all the
power, excitement and horror of the song.
She had to keep to a tight schedule, so flew
into England one day, recorded her song at
the Who’s Ramport studio the next, filmed
for four more, then left for a U.S. concert.
Russell therefore had no time to get over-
involved or bogged down. The scene was one
Of the fastest filmed, and one of the best.
(Top and left) Nifty hand-held camerawork
was needed as the ‘Acid Queen’ danced and
glided in and out of Tommy’s nightmare.
(Far left) Attended by handmaidens in her
attic hovel. Filming in the small, crowded
mattress-lined room was hot and unbearable.
(Below left) Shy and awestruck little girls
talk to Tina Turner during a coffee-break.
Just as Russell was satisfied with a take’
outside the sleazy strip club (below), it
was noticed that a dog had been sitting in
view. Both dog and Russell seem bewildered.
(Right) The sinister beauty of the ‘Acid Queen?
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At times the Acid Queen was no lady: The dancing hooker/
pusher played by Tina Turner changed from woman to
machine. The machine was designed so that when someone
was placed inside they were injected with a coloured drug
through its 68 syringes. Tommy was its victim and we catch
glimpses of his different painful and pleasurable hallucina-
tions, as the machine opens and closes during his ‘trip: The
Tron Maiden’ as the machine was called, was the invention
of costume designer Shirley Russell (Ken’s missus). It was
the film’s most spectacular ‘prop’ and proved to be the most
troublesome to construct. Unfortunately its real beauty
is not apparent on the screen and it looks, at times, more
like a flimsy scale-model,
instead of an 8 ft. mirrored
monster costing over
£10,000. The fibre-glass
body, supported by a steel
frame, is covered with
chrome and mirror. It
could spin, light up and
fill and empty the
syringes, all by remote
control. Roger Daltrey
wanted to buy it when
shooting was completed.
(Right) Working on the
Tron Maiden. (Far right)
Ken Russell considers
a worm’s eye view. A copy
of the machine without
While in a
restaurant discussing “lommy,
costume designer Shirley Russell
drew out the first rough sketch of
her ‘Acid Queen’ machine (above),
and later a coloured drawing (top
left). The complexity involved in
transforming these into the fin-
ished mechanical work of art on
the right hand page can be judged
by the working drawings (top
right). Alternative helmet design working parts was made
rejected by Ken Russell (right). The in the U.S. for publicity
and promotion purposes
finished machine (top, next page)
NRO ONAN
Maiden as it became known on the set) and
she metamorphoses into the machine. Tommy
gets inside the machine and the needles
inject him with thousands of shots of a well-
known hallucinogen. As he goes through his
acid experience, the front of the machine
opens to show him in various fantasies—as
Jesus covered with poppies, as a skeleton
with snakes crawling over and through him,
dressed in a loincloth, in the guise of his
father...
There: were other ideas: he was to be
covered in butterflies, but that didn’t work
out: and in ants. Originally, the snakes were
to be crawling all over Daltrey, but one of
the handlers got bitten early on, and they
decided not to risk it and used the skeleton
instead. Then when they counted the snakes
afterwards they found they were one short,
but the handlers were confident it would die
in the cold of the night. Days later they found
it, curled up in an inaccessible corner of the
machine, still alive—Daltrey had been in and
out of the machine several times while it was
still there. Ken Russell, incidentally, is
terrified of snakes and spent the whole time
up a step ladder, brandishing a stout stick
and with his trousers tucked into his socks.
Designing and making the Acid Queen
was a major headache for Art Director John
Clark: it had to stand up to some pretty
heavy treatment—spinning round and round
on a Rolls Royce turntable while filled with
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coloured liquids, the front having to open
and close continually, having to withstand
the heat of lights both outside and inside.
Originally the plan was to shoot it in three
days, after which it could fall apart if it
wished, but shooting dragged on over several
weeks in the event, so the machine was
subjected to much rougher tests than had
been anticipated. Originally it was to be
faced with coloured plastic, but then that
was changed to mirrors which put extra
strain on the fibreglass superstructure—and
the superstructure turned out not to be
strong enough anyway.
Clark admits that was partly his fault: he
was trying to supervise the construction of
the thing while he was in Portsmouth, and
at that distance he wasn’t able to check that
his specification of at least 3/16ths of an inch
had been observed. When he got back he
found that it was much thinner. The machine
was an adventurous experiment, and has
produced a remarkable film effect—but it
wasn’t without a welter of teething problems
and exasperation. Russell would get madder
and madder as the fibreglass would shift
position and the front wouldn’t open and
close properly, and Clark and his team
would be dashing around trying to sort it out.
But as he says, John Clark had an un-
answerable comeback: ““But Ken’, he'd
reason. “I’ve never made an Acid Queen
before. Have you’’?
a
Doyou think it’s alright |
To leave the boy with Uncle Ernie?
Do you think it’s alright?
He’s had a few too many tonight
Do you think it’s alright?
[think it’s alright
Yes, | think is alright
Pm your wicked Uncle Ernie
Pm glad you won’t see or hear me
As I fiddle about
Fiddle about
Fiddle about...
Your mother left me here to mind you,
And I’m doing exactly what I bleedin’ well want to
Fiddling about
Fiddling about _ a
Piddleabout 7
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A tragic and a
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wooden building.
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more firemen arrived
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rescue helicopter stoo#
Although there were
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many extras had their cle
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is included in the film.
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collapses and a holidaym
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The day after the blaze, the local paper, THE NEWS had
coloured pictures of the burning pier on its front page
(above). It carried a special ‘Disaster-Supplement’ (right).
(Top left) Filming inside the beautiful ornate ballroom.
(Top right) Oliver Reed and dancers spot the smoke. (Top) A
picture-postcard of the pier before the fire destroyed it.
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I must have played them all
But Lain’t seen nothin’
like him
In any amusement hall...
That deaf, dumb and blind kid |
Sure plays a mean pinball!
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His disciples lead him in
And he just does the rest
He’s got crazy flipper fingers
Never seen him fall
That deaf, dumb and blind kid
Sure plays a mean pinball!
le’s a pinball wizard
There has to be a twi
A pinball wizard
S’got such a suppple wrist
Ooooo0000000000aaaaaah!
He’s a pinball wizard
He’s scored a trillion mor
A pinball wizard
The V s oe oe Lord
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He’ S scoring
I thought I was
The Bally table king
But I just handed
My pinball crown to him
To him.
Today it rained champagne
A son was born again
A genius unchained
A life of wealth and fame,
wealth and fame
Champagne flowing down just like rain,
F ora our rlove a just deserve, just deserve
Frances and dollars and peacock’s wines
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Affecting mine
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To drive his plight from my mind
See me, feel me, Touch me, h sal me
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Roger Daltrey wasn't really
thrown through plate-glass, it
was ‘all done by mirrors’- two
mirrors in fact - and some clever
editing. He was thrown at mirror
no. 1 by Ann-Margret (above).
Then the camera was stopped
and mirror no. 2 (the broken
one) set up. Daltrey resumed his
position and the camera re-
started. Bits of plastic were
dropped behind the mirror to re-
semble flying glass. He jumped
backwards through the mirror
onto a mattress (left and below).
When the two shots were joined,
it looked as if he had been
thrown straight through the first
mirror. A brief cut away to Ann-
Margret’s horrified face hid the
join, so although the actual
moment of impact appears to be
seen, it is not, it is only heard.
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For the ‘I’m Free’ sequence Russell used a special-effect
known as ‘travelling matte.’ Roger was filmed, against a
blue-lit screen, running on a motorised endless belt (top).
From the resulting film (left circle) two black & white
copies were made using special film which is sensitive
only to blue light. On one, is a black silhouette of Roger’s
running figure on clear film (centre circle). This is placed
in contact with footage of the chosen background and the
two are printed together. As each frame ts copied the black
silhouette of Roger prevents that portion from being
exposed. This gives the ‘prepared background’ with a shape
of clear unexposed film cut out of each frame which
exactly corresponds to Roger’s silhouette. The other
black and white print (far circle) is used in the same
way to mask out the blue from the original film, giving a
copy of Roger running against a white background. When
this is finally combined along with the ‘prepared back-
ground’ we get the desired effect of Roger apparently
running as part of the background scene (right). It’s a
complicated effect. The results aren’t always perfect as a
look at some early shots used for pages 94 & 95 will show.
Rare pictures of Roger Daltrey drowning
(above and right). After falling through the
mirror into water, Tommy is seen in slow-
motion underwater. This, another tricky
shot, was filmed with the camera behind
the observation window of a swimming pool.
In order to sink lower and rise slower, Roger
Daltrey emptied his lungs of air before
jumping in. On this occasion he swallowed
a lot of water and was struggling to get out.
The cameras were still running until it
occurred to everyone thathe was in trouble.
Three people jumped in and pulled him out.
In Hollywood days, an incident like this
would have been exploited for publicity, but
the many ‘mishaps’ that occurred while
filming Tommy’ were deliberately kept out
of the press for fear of ‘over-exposure’
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Some effects meant Roger had to quite literally ‘put his back into it?
Tommy falls through space and into water after crashing through the mirror.
To film this, Daltrey had to drop 20 ft. from a diving board (above) and land
on his back with his arms outstretched. Pieces of plastic representing bits
of shattered mirror were thrown in the air to float down with him. (Below)
The wardrobe master taped a thick towel to Daltrey’s back to cushion the
impact when he landed, but as there were over twenty attempts to get this
shot perfect, his back still got fairly bruised. A tricky technical problem is
overcome when assistant director Johnathon Benson reads the light-meter,
tied to the end of a pole, held out by lighting cameraman Ronnie Taylor.
Ken Russell’s final scene has its climax when
Tommy climbs a mountain to sing, “Listen-
ing to you” and to raise his arms “... as if
to embrace the life-giving sun” To give
the impression of sunlight streaming
through his hair, Roger Daltrey had
to stand with his face inches away
from a powerful lamp (right).
Towels were again used to protect
him, this time to stop his face and
chest getting burned by the lamp
(left). Careful positioning (left)
meant that he obscured the lamp
from the camera (above). The
filmed scene (below) had a huge
orange sun added later as a studio
effect, the same one that opened the
movie, bringing it round full circle.
Daltrey leaps spectacularly from the stage during the filming
of ‘Sally Simpson’ (above). The pile of mattresses (right) made
this a fairly safe and uneventful stunt. But others made up for
it. For Daltrey the film often seemed like a 6 month obstacle
course: Notonly was he burned (p.46) and nearly drowned (p.78)
he was once knocked unconscious for half an hour when he
landed wrongly after a judo throw. Russell insisted on over
30 takes of a scene for ‘I’m Free’ where Tommy ran across a
mustard field. His feet were so blistered afterwards that he
couldn’t walk for three days. Finally, flying a hang-glider for
‘Sensation’ ended with him crash-landing in a patch of thorns.
With Oliver Reed and Keith Moon together on location there were
moments of lunacy. It was probably no accident that their hotel was 15
away from unit HQ. With all the stars, ‘Who’ people, and film technic
coming and going they held an almost-continuous party. Russell was «
vexed that Ollie Reed had eaten all the cockles from their favourite sea-s
pub. Apparently Ollie walked straight from the pub into the sea, disappea
and then returned, soaking wet and placed a handful of cockles on the
saying, “There you are, Jesus” (his favourite name for Russell). Mooney
was his usual lovable outrageous self. Together they created a new ‘low
entertainment (below) when they did an impromtu concert in the studio
(Top row left) Sally Simpson alias Victoria Russell (Ken’s daughter) frighte
other diners with her scar, while Keith Moon (2nd pic top row) just fright
| other diners. (Pics3, 4 & 5) Russell didn’t know that they had switched om
caméra_as he rehearsed a sailors hornpipe. Ollie Reed (Top row pics 6,
was voted ‘Britain’s sexiest actor’ by readers of a magazine while mak
Tommy. (Pic 9) At last, photographic evidence that Townshend is ‘up the
Unit photographer Graham Attwood couldn't resist taking this picture
Britain’s sexiest drummer; Keith Moon. (Right) After some hectic !
P C. Townshend sleeps it off on the floor. (Below right) Uncle Ernie disp:
his huge organ. This fabulous organ-cum-cash register could drive abom
25mph. Moon wanted to buy gy it and turn it into a mobile drinks ca
Most of the 1,500 extras in the ‘Pinball Wizard’ Sequence were students
from the local technical college. In part-payment to them, and for many
of the other extras, The Who gave a private concert in Portsmouth. This
came just four days after The Who had played to nearly 100,000 fans at
the much publicised and televised Charlton Festival. The Portsmouth
concert (above and left) was a totally different affair; no publicity, no
press, no police. Also, it was much better. Townshend said, “It’s one of the
best gigs weve done.” For most of the blind and disabled extras it was
their first experience of a live pop-concert. Most of them enjoyed it, but
found it ‘a bit bewildering? Afterwards one extra who was blind, her ears
sull ringing, jokingly accused The Who of trying to deafen her as well.
83 Loe "NOE towarne
{9 FATHES IVSAAPEY
VE A PUN BALL MEY ASHE
When Tommy first becomes deaf, dumb and
blind, his parents try to make amends for their
crime by lavishing affection on him. They take
him to the funfair, but instead of experienc-
ing the fair, Tommy is taken on an inner
journey by his mind. ‘The Amazing Journey’
is aprofound, mystical and open-ended song:
The perfect tool for Russell’s brand of film
making, where he can indulge himselfina bit
of visual extravaganza. A look at his inter-
view, later in the book, reveals that the
ingredients in this visual cocktail - RAF and
Catholic church symbols - are quite clearly
drawn from his past. The original storyboard
(left) shows Russell’s penchant for fantasy.
2S CORDA BAG PHBAL
SECOND NEE ITS
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(Top right) Young Tommy played
by Barry Winch talks to Russell 2
while filming the dancing scene | a
(top). Hundreds of small images
of lommy dancing in space, were
put together to fill the screen.
(Right) “What a way to spend
Easter.” Captain Walker, played
by Robert Powell on a cross in
the form of a wartime bomber,
having his trousers repairedand
(below left and below) himself
prepared. Images of his father
appear throughout Tommy’s
amazing journey. Another bit of
Russell symbolismwith Captain
Walker being set up
(left) on top of a
mountain.
Filming on fairground rides required a lot
of skill and patience. Much of the footage
for ‘The Amazing Journey’ could not be
used as it was jerky and blurred.- The
difficult task of trying to keep a hand-
held camera firm while being thrown
around at high speed, was that of camera
operator Ronnie Taylor. Seen (left) on the
fast ‘Speedway’ ride as Oliver Reed and
Ken Russell look on, and being steadied
on the ‘Carousel’ (below). Tommy and his
mum ride on the ‘Kiddies Choo-Choo
(above). His ‘amazing journey’ takes
Tommy in a wartime bomber with his father
(above right). Tommy’s trip starts when
Frank tries to make him play ona machine
that fires on aeroplanes (right). Getting
the ‘effect’ of aeroplane-like crosses in
space, was a real cliff hanger. Russell was
not satisfied and rejected it. It was then
re-made, but completed so late that it was
nearly left out. But it seems worth the
trouble as it is such an exciting visual effect.
There’s a man I’ve found
Could bring us all joy!
There’s a doctor I’ve
found can cure the boy
A doctor I’ve found
Can cure the boy!
There’s a man I’ve found
Could remove his sorrow
He lives in this town,
Let’s see him tomorrow
Let’s see him tomorrow
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Through all the various projects and false
starts in turning “Tommy’ from the original ‘rock
opera’ into a film, Ken Russell was always the
Who’s first choice as director. Russell’s life has
included working as a merchant seaman, an
electrician in the RAF, an assistant in an art
gallery and a photographer. His first involvement
in cinema was passive: “It was just something
different, something outside one’s own reality,
and one just dreamed along with it. I was never
particularly interested in the technique of film
making, of how things were done’’.
Music was what first inspired him to make
films, and he still says he’d rather have been a
composer than a film director. His first films
were low-budget, amateur productions, and his
first real success as a film-maker was with the
BBC, working on the arts programme ‘Monitor’.
Among his subjects there were Prokoviev, Elgar,
Bartok, Debussy, Delius and Richard Strauss.
While with the BBC he took time off to make two
feature films—a comedy called ‘French Dressing’
in 1963 and the third in a series of Len Deighton
spy thrillers ‘Billion Dollar Brain’ which starred
Michael Caine as Harry Palmer.
But it was his film of D. H. Lawrence’s
“Women In Love’ which established him as a
cinema director. He followed that with ‘The
Music Lovers’ about the life of Tchaikovsky,
“The Devils’, “The Boyfriend’, the musical starring
Twiggy, ‘Savage Messiah’, ‘Mahler’ and “Tommy’.
Russell says that ‘Tommy’ was first brought
to his attention by Tony Palmer, who was work-
ing with him as an assistant producer at the BBC.
He got the record, liked the music but “‘couldn’t
make any sense of the story’. It was three years
later that he finally agreed to do the film:
‘although I had another project in hand at the
time, about Gargantua, the man with the biggest
prick in the world’’. He went to see Lou Reisner’s
stage production—‘“‘a farce, the worst perform-
ance I had seen of something so good in my
life’’—which didn’t give him any more clues as
to the story, and he decided to write his own
screenplay: “I got Pete to give me every piece of
literature he had about it, and I read through a
pile a mile high. I pointed out there would need
to be some more songs to clarify the story. It
never occurred to me to use dialogue’’.
The following interview with Ken Russell is
by David Litchfield and it originally appeared in
The Image magazine.
What percentage of films that you start actually
see the light of day?
Reasonably high, although there’s one script,
‘it was called ‘The Angels’, I could never get off
the ground. I kept trying, and I gradually sort of
pirated it as ’ve gone along and I get bits of it
into most of my films; there’s a bit of it in
‘Tommy’, there’s a bit in ‘Mahler’. Oh, there is
also another thing that I wrote, adapted rather,
from some stories by Isaac Babel. He’s the best
revolutionary writer, he wrote during the revolu-
tion in Russia, his stories were so ambiguous,
I mean they were straightforward but they could
never quite work out whose side he was on so
they shot him. I find now that I really want to
write all the scripts myself.
But have you done a lot of writing in the past?
No, not at all really, it just evolved out of —
necessity. I’ve generally worked on scripts with
friends whose work I’ve known and who have
been very symphatic towards shared ideas.
John McGrath wrote quite a number of screen
plays but now he’s gone off with his theatre.
Melvyn Bragg, who I worked with ‘at the
BBC, wrote the Debussy film, the Rousseau
film and ‘The Music Lovers’, And then I
started. -
Do you like bringing all the people together
or in an ideal situation would you do the
whole thing on your own?
Well, I suppose that’s the ideal thing.
I’d certainly like to dub the film myself, but
you can’t actually. I operate the camera
quite a bit—there’s quite a bit of my camera
at work in Mahler. I advise on the lighting,
say what I want, what effect I want, I know
exactly because I was a photographer you
see, and I also made three films, shot them
myself, before I joined the BBC, so I know
a bit about it. I like getting actors around me
who are very symphatetic to our mode of
working which is fast and mobile. We shot
‘Mahler’ in about seven weeks, which was
pretty good going. I tend to have a team
of actors I use, not all the time. I always
try and work with the same people I like.
The editor I have worked with and who
has always cut my films, is Mike Bradsell,
although he’s now doing ‘Stardust’ which
will clash and so I’m using his protege,
Stuart Baird. He’s been Mike’s assistant
for years and I have known him since he
was a runner on ‘Women In Love’. I’ve
worked with the same couple of producers.
I sort of alternate between Roy Baird and
Harry Benn, and my wife does all the.
costumes so it’s really a tight-knit group.
You make it sound as if you sort of churn
them out.
Well I do churn them out. You just simply
repeat the process with variations, but having
said that, each film is entirely different. It
really is an odyssey on which you have
adventures on the way.
The point about choosing a composer
like Mahler is that his music deals with the
eternal question of love, death, life after
death, eternity—imponderable sort of things
which I like to explore and find out for
myself and try to answer questions that we
all want to know—and I find that if you can
get-on to this peculiar sort of hypnotic
mystical wavelength which is music, which
is this intangible thing . . . I mean it is the
most mysterious invention of man to
actually conjure incredible sounds out of the
air. If one gets on to that wavelength and
explores paths that the music is about, I
find that I certainly get some insight into the
questions.
Do you ever get to the stage where you
get slightly shattered by the individual?
Oh, that’s the excitement of it. I mean it’s
like a detective story, you’re given the clues
and certain bits of evidence, which is the
music. I’m suspicious of facts because
nobody really knows all the facts. So a book
on a composer which just gives you the facts
of his life is very useful up to a point, but
you’ve really got to listen to the music.
The music tells you if he’s lying.
A case in point is Tchaikovsky, I mean
Moldesty’s brother burnt all his diaries
when he died and this meant that he saw
ones that were dealing with homosexuality,
for instance, and there was a big cover up
job and so on and so forth. But even in
Russia today they don’t admit he was a
homosexual. It doesn’t really matter; the
fact is that they just think he’s a benign old
country gentleman sitting there in a rocking
chair, and wrote these schizophrenic sym-
phonies and they fail to equate the two.
Then. when Melvyn and I assimilated the
facts and started working out the script we
found, for instance there was one scene
which he did document about his
abortive honeymoon which he spent on an
express train with this girl Nina and he said
he just got her drunk and sat up all night.
Well we wrote a little scene, at least Mervyn
wrote the scene, and then I thought we
don’t need words here. I mean the music
must express the drama. Given these two
facts we re-enacted the scene by getting in
this very small compartment which we built
and put on rubber tyres for rocking and
- she (Glenda Jackson) just undressed and he
(Richard Chamberlain) was in the corner.
We rocked it and I played this music as loud
as I possibly could, blaring out on the loud
speakers, and it just seemed to happen
before our eyes. One finds out, maybe it was
like that, maybe it wasn’t but the point is
when you actually do build up an atmosphere
I find that it doesn’t have the absolute factual
reality but has a reality of its own that’s
very close. It doesn’t always work but when
it does you just feel it, everyone gets excited
and surprised, and that’s also why I like
making films.
Do you think about the film’s commercial
potential while you’re constructing it?
No. Well I don’t really think about it,
I think that if it interests me there’s a chance
that it might interest other people. I simply
work on that thesis.
Who do you think are the modern equiva-
lents of the type of people that you make
films about?
Well I would say very probably pop
people. I wouldn’t have said it before I
Russell is the kind of director who
works more with the camera than
with the actors. Although he brings
good performances out of his actors,
it is his visual imagery that is most
outstanding. Experienced actors
like Jack Nicholson and Ann-
Margret (top left)-can be left
to ‘get on with it, whereas both
Keith Moon (top right) and
Eric Clapton (above left) need
more guidance and direction.
Whether in his ‘directors
chair’ (above) or ‘putting the
boot in’ with Ann-Margret
and Roger Daltrey (left),
his involvement is total.
(Below) With Barry Winch
after filming at the funfair.
(Far left) The deep thinker
and the flowery gesticulator.
r do I surmise
92
started work on Tommy because I didn’t
know enough about them, I’d never met any,
I’d read about them of course and I suppose
if I’'d thought about it a bit I would have
still have said that but I mean it’s very
forcibly brought home to me, having worked
with Pete Townshend, Keith Moon, John
Entwistle and Roger Daltrey who are all
totally different type characters, and yet
there is this entity. They’ve got a strange sort
of discipline which isn’t like any discipline
I’ve ever known.
The first time I went into the recording
studios someone was six hours late and I
sort of got very impatient and I phoned
Townshend up the next day and said I was
very upset this person didn’t turn up and,
you know, any other director would have
walked out for good. He said: “‘I’m sorry,
he’s like that’. And then I realised that
obviously they had been waiting for this
chap on and off for eight years and he’s
always been six hours late. Townshend
said: ‘“‘well he sometimes might be five
hours late, and sometimes actually, once in
a blue moon, might come on time’. |
realised that there are différent sets of values
and disciplines, if it works for them being
six hours late and instead of working normal
hours recording, if they work from midnight
till six in the morning, that’s their way of
doing it and at the same time they are very
sort of committed people to their work.
They’ve got a sort of strangeness once they
do start working, they’re very talented and
very dedicated. It just took me quite a bit
to re-orientate my own set, rather old-
fashioned ways with the way they think,
and it’s quite a revitalising process.
Do you write music yourself?
No, I’d like to, I like to become involved.
I mean, since I have been working with
Townshend I’ve suggested certain things,
the development of certain tunes that he’s
already got for instrumental passages which
appear with visual things happening around
them.
Do you work on more than one project at a
time?
I might do. While I’ve been working on
Tommy I’ve been writing ‘Gershwin’ and
‘Liszt’ and finishing off ‘Mahler’, but I like
working like that because it’s a good excuse
to sit down for hours playing endless music,
and I find that the music itself does give me
amazing ideas.
Do you ever stop thinking about film?
No, I don’t really, I never do. The thing
is that when we are researching a film you
read about kindred things. When I’m not
actually filming I don’t go to the cinema at
all unless I have to. I like going to the theatre
occasionally in great spates, after making
a film or after dubbing it a lot when you see
it on the screen, because you get so sick of
the ever-flickering image that you want some
flesh and blood to look at in the way of
entertainment.
When you’re making a film though, isn’t
it rather like a theatre to you?
Oh yes it is then of course, that’s the most
exciting thing, much more exciting than
theatre because I’ve never done anything for
the stage and I find it rather terrifying
because the scenes I hate doing most are
scenes in films where people sit around a
table eating a meal. That’s my nightmare.
Specifically it used to be that I could put
down half a dozen directors whose work
influenced me image-wise, and then I feel
now I have assimilated them and do my own
brand of imagery but we all have to start...
What influences you visually?
Well there are certain things Sometimes I
deliberately look at paintings before I go to
sleep, certainly the Belgian chap, the sur-
realist who’s just dead, does loads of bread
floating about the sky and trains coming
through fireplaces, and other books and
pictures. I look at them before I go to sleep
and I think that is your mind’s most impres-
sionable time. Although I don’t use those
images as such, I like to think that maybe
they trigger off other images, so that when
I do come to write a script I’ve got plenty of
strange things in my head, floating around,
which I can draw on. I went to an exhibition
the other day of Edvard Munch’s work and
maybe if I’d have shot ‘Mahler’ after Pd
been to that it would have looked a bit
different because that exhibition made more
impression on me, I think, than any other
painting I’ve probably ever seen.
It worked on two levels which I always
like doing, I mean, there’s the level of the
picture itself and there’s the subconscious
effect it has on you, you don’t quite know
why. It’s.to do with the shape and also the
content. The trouble with film is that it’s
O.K. for Picasso to do a cubist type portrait
of Brigitte Bardot, but it’s not O.K. for a
director to take liberties as it were with, or
put their own interpretation on a character
who has lived, and I’ve often been criticised
for that. It’s because they don’t look beneath
the surface and look at the shape of the
image. ‘Mahler’ is full of symbolic things all
the way through because in a film that’s only
100 minutes long you’ve got to make every-
thing work. Every dress for instance, has a
« &
or the film’s first song; ‘Captain Walker: Flames by courtesy of bottled gas.
symbolic meaning. A lot of people think I’m
quite wilful and do things just for the fun
or just out of sheer cussedness but actually
it’s all quite calculated on the psychological
effect. So in nearly all my films, especially in
“Mahler’, everything works on two levels
at once and whether the audience knows that
or doesn’t know it is beside the point. That
is why I think some of my films worry people
and they can’t think quite why. In a hundred
minutes I just give an impression of the per-
son as he strikes me that is all—given the
facts, given the music, given all the things
and letting them all just wash through your
head and out into a film. You know it’s a
feeling of the person I want to get, not the
correct positioning of his third shirt button.
Do your films make money? .
The only film that’s gone into profit
that Pve made that’s been admitted, I
mean they send you a lot of figures, but
when they say that the advertising on ‘The
Boyfriend’ cost $6 million, it’s going to take
a long time to make any money you see,
and how can you prove it didn’t without
actually going there and asking to see their
books and so on and so forth? So the only
film they admitted has made a profit was
“Women In Love’, and then you get a few
hundred pounds every so often in excess of
your fee as a director.
There’s a lot of friction between the money
and the creation?
Well, there usually is, but a very good
example of there not being is ‘Mahler’. I
think David Puttnam is one of the best
producers we’ve got. He got the money
from one source or another and didn’t
interfere at all with the film and the cutting
of it or anything, and was as generally help-
ful as he could be. The thing i is that when
you are dealing with the
Americans, and this
is about the first
film that hasn’t
been sponsored by
the Americans, when your
film leaves your hands, unless you’re some-
one like Kubrick who can do what he wants,
you can’t stop them cutting it and ruining
it. “The Devils’, for example: it was pretty
good in those days, four or five years ago,
they allowed everything in although they
kept saying cut out those shots of Oliver
having his legs crushed and they said there
was too much blood, and in the end I said
“do you know how much blood there is in
that sequence ?’’ They said “‘well, there’s too
much”, and I said “12 frames, which is
half a second’’. The thing doesn’t have to go
on a long time to make an impact. It was
only in their minds, rather like when
Alexander Walker said ‘“‘We see vivid scenes
of Oliver Reed having his testicles crushed”’
—that was probably wishful thinking on his
part because there is no such thing, and he
argued on television that it was there.
That’s something about your film-making,
you pack so much into the thing?
Yes, that’s how I like to do it. It’s brain
impact, it’s brain packing, I don’t know.
I mean things do happen enormously fast
anyway. If you’re driving along in a car,
you probably notice sometimes you’re
looking out of the window if you’re being
driven and you pass maybe an alleyway or a
gateway between brick walls and you see
someone in the act of doing something
either getting on a bicycle or throwing a
ball or whatever and you could only see
that image if you’re travelling at 60 m.p.h. for
I suppose about 1/500th of a second. Well,
you've seen it and you know it and it’s very,
very clear and I think films should be the
same. It’s nothing to do with the quality
of the film, whether it’s a good or a bad
film, it’s just a physical thing I think and so
you ve got to pack everything into those two
hours.
I think that ‘Mahler’, for instance, is
probably the best film I’ve done on an artist,
because he was a very interesting man. It’s
probably not as entertaining as the Isadora
Duncan film which was only 50 minutes and
really had to be packed, crammed, and it
contained more information than any film
[ve ever made but I hope put across in an
entertaining manner.
With ‘Tommy’ [I’ve had much more
control because, as I say, it’s been done with
an English group instead of American, and
the original opera is very good, I think,
but there were various gaps missing so far
as the film would be concerned. It just
starts with a murder, you know nothing
about the people at all and with the film
you've really got to associate or be involved
with the people involved in the situation to
arouse the audience’s interest, so we’ve
tacked on a beginning which shows who
the characters are and what their life is and
so forth. It’s very condensed, it only lasts
about five or ten minutes, but it says quite
a lot about them and Pete’s also written
four or five new songs which I felt were
necessary again to build up the characters
or make the plot clearer. But having said
that, there is no speaking in the film, it’s all
singing and it’s all music, and it’s a challenge
and I think it sets out to... I mean it deals
with a pretty big thing, false Messiahs, true
Messiahs, man being God, God being man,
whatever. That’s what interests me. It’s a
recurring theme in my films. I mean, all my
films are very Catholic, but people never
mention it.
Do you think this was because of your
spiritual development while becoming in-
volved in Catholicism rather than Catholicism
itself?
Yes, that’s it, that’s it, yes. I think one of
the reasons I left it was that I couldn’t live
up to it, I mean I wasn’t good enough to
continue and I also didn’t believe in a lot
of it, the more I thought about it.
What sort of education did you have?
Well none at all to speak of. I went to a
succession of nondescript schools, local
schools in Southampton, and then I went
away to the Nautical College at Pangbourne
where I didn’t learn much about tying knots
but I did learn a bit about putting on shows.
We used to have an end of term concert
and they used to always dress up in grey
flannels with a white shirt and cap singing
‘The Fishermen Of England Are Working
At Their Nets’. I changed all that, I got
them all in drag and dressed them up as
Carmen Miranda singing ‘South American
Way’. That was all the rage in the 1940’s.
I used to break bounds.to go and see all the
Hollywood musicals of the time, or the Betty
Grable pin up girl, and I was very impressed
by the star-studded musicals like ‘Star
Spangled Banner’ and ‘Stage Door Canteen’.
They made a great impression on me,
those films, and then I knew I wanted to
make films. I started making my first one at
the college in my last term. I never saw it but
it lasted about three minutes or less.
So you never became a naval officer in
fact?
Well, I was at sea for one trip, that was
enough—lI was Sixth Officer-cum-A pprentice
on a boat that went to Australia and New
Zealand. We had rather a strange captain.
He used to make you stand on the spot, can
you imagine standing on the spot for four
hours in the tropical sun, the ship just rising
gently up and down on an endless swell?
However I like the atmosphere of the sea
and I like things involved with water. The
elements, they play a big part in all my
films. ‘Mahler’ is full of water and fire.
I haven’t got any snow in this one.
What happened after you left the sea?
I was very poor for a very long time and
struggled along and taught
photography at technical
college for £3.10s a week
and it was bloody hard.
~ OSS I suppose the worst period
of my ae was before that when I came out of
the Air Force. I knew that I wanted to make
films then, I just simply knew I had to make
them, and I went to all the film studios
there were, but they all turned me down.
It was a closed shop. I had my ferrible
demob suit from the Air Force, and in those
days in British Films you really had to be
in the know and I was being turned away
from those doors and my gratuity was
running out. I came to the point when I
thought well, I’ve got to get a job. I’m not
going to get into films, I’ve got to get a job
and I looked in some papers and I saw... I
think it was for a carpenter. I was quite
good at woodwork, and I went along to
this factory and I just stood at the entrance.
I saw this clock and I saw the people clocking
in, and I thought Ill starve rather than do
that, so then I went home and I looked up
all these art galleries they used to advertise
on the Underground, of all the shows on in
London and I had a vague feeling that I,
I didn’t know anything about painting, but
I thought, well, there might be more in this,
even though the pay wasn’t going to be so
good as working in the furniture factory.
So I wrote to all the galleries and three
replied. One was the National Gallery, and
I went round to that. I met this curator, I
suppose he was, and he says “‘you’re too
young’. I said I was in my early twenties.
He said “well you don’t want to become
like these’’, and there were all these men in
blue suits, with uniforms, asleep in chairs,
nodding off, and I said “‘No, I don’t suppose
I do”’’.
The last one, called the Lefevre Galleries,
was in Bond Street, I thought well I’m jolly
93
96
well going to get in there so I went along
and I... the day before the interview I
looked at all the pictures on the wall and
they were by someone called Sickert, I'd
never heard of, I didn’t like them, they
were all brown, but I went back and I went
to the library that night and I read all about
Sickert and I went back for the job the next
day, and I met the owner, and I said “Ah
yes, Camden Town period, very interesting,
that was, what, 1891 2 yes probably one of
his greatest portraits’, and he was very
impressed. So I got the job i in the art gallery
at £3.10s. and I guess I began to start looking
at things very clearly because I had all day
to do nothing but look at the paintings.
I left after about six months to take up
ballet because I thought I might have a go
at that—I’d met someone in the Air Force
who was a ballet dancer. I just knew I didn’t
want to be a carpenter or work in my. father’s
boot shop. I just knew I didn’t want to do
that. I tried as I say, ballet and photography
and so forth.
They’re all useful because I’ve learned
about movement, I’ve learned about images.
When you see no possible way out, you
know you have some of this mythical
dream that one day you’re going to.make it
or whatever, but then you begin to think no,
no, I’m not and I’m sick of it, living on
porridge. I used to live on porridge for
years, and it’s not, as I say, that one’s
uncomfortable, it’s just there’s no hope of
changing your existence. That’s the worst
thing.
What age do you think you began to get a
grip of yourself properly?
I think when I became a Catholic, I was
about 28, quite late really. I was too senti-
mental and nostalgic—I still am, I suppose,
but I now know I am and I know how to
combat it. I know not to fall into the trap
and I understand when I’m getting too
ridiculous. At the time there didn’t seem
any way out then suddenly, it suddenly
clicked, like a light going on. I suddenly saw
I could make it work. I started to make
a reasonable living as a cameraman, stills
photographer, it wasn’t great but I struggled
along. Some days, some weeks you didn’t
do much and some you did, but then I
started making these amateur films. Of
course, I thought everyone was a master-
piece and would immediately be recognised
as such and I’d be given carte blanche to
direct any film that came along. I was a bit
disillusioned but at least when you know
you’re on the way, that gives you great
heart. You can take off, and put up with
anything then.
Do you day-dream a lot?
Yes,
dream with a purpose, I just don’t go off
into sort of vague miasmic drifting. The
only trouble is you find that so many things
are going on at once in your head that they
have to come out.
And when did you get married?
I’m 46 now, or 7, born in 1927. I’ve been
married about 17 years. I guess . . . 28 I
think.
So that happened also...
Yes, I became a Catholic and got married
shortly after that.
Your first films were flops; how did you
manage to get another chance?
‘You_see I was very lucky because I only
‘came out of the B.B.C. to make them and I
went back immediately and carried on, so
that was O.K. I was quite fortunate.
Are there any individual films,
people’s films, that still astonish you?
Well I never get tired of seeing ‘Citizen
Kane’. I got tired of Eisenstein, I don’t like
him any more. I used to think he was the
other
best, but now I don’t like him at all. Very.
operatic, pretentious, obvious propaganda.
I’m a great propagandist myself, in things I
believe in, but I don’t believe in necessarily
ramming it down people’s throats in such an
obvious way. I think more subtlety is
required and I don’t think his films are
subtle enough. I enjoy the spectacle of them,
all these galloping horses over the ice and
so forth but really they don’t wear very well.
Take something like the Jean Vigo films,
again I could see them forever, those three
films he did. Those and early German
expressionist films, I still like seeing them
and also Hollywood musicals.
John Schlesinger does four or five films in
a night sometimes. He suddenly decides he’s
going to see them so he rushes round and
does ten minutes in each cinema just to see
what’s happening.
I could almost appreciate that. I wouldn’t
mind... yes, that sounds a good idea.
When you’re working on someone like
Mahler, does he become almost an inanimate
object which you can move round?
I’m not sure, the film changes as you go
along. Every film has a particular quality of
its own and you go along with it. You can’t
really fight what you’re getting, well you
can but I think you’re a fool if you do. You
just go along, which is why I can’t under-
stand certain directors who will sit in a
chair with a camera crew of a hundred
round them waiting for a particular cloud
formation. We know who they are, or who
he is, and to me that’s insanity because I
think films are like happenings and I love
being at the mercy of the elements. A lot of
my films take place outside. I don’t like
working in the studio that much. I like
getting outside as much as possible. I like
finding locations by chance, the sudden
possibility that you might be drenched or
you’ve to use what’s at hand, that’s terrifical-
ly exciting.
Do you find that’s sometimes difficult to
get over to the technicians?
No, I’m generally pretty lucky with the
conditions that I get, I wouldn’t probably be
sitting about anyway. But for instance in
‘Mahler’, when we wanted a storm, a storm
came and it lasted for three days which is
all the time, but productively. I-
‘spiritual goal or vision . .
how long it took us to shoot the film and
then it stopped and I wanted a brilliant sun
sequence and the sun came out and we shot
the summer sequence. In the storm I had
two cameras going, everyone was rushing
around. My wife was directing one scene,
we had the assistant director throwing leaves
in the air . . . I love getting everyone at it
so that all their inhibitions go, and they are
all enjoying the happening.
-Do you think every film director, not only
directors of films but anybody that’s con-
nected with films and making them, has to be
a bit omnipotent, whether you like it or not,
even if you’re not feeling omnipotent, you’ve
got to be up there to sort of create this
excitement so that things do happen?
Of course you have, I mean, unless you
are they won’t get excited and they won’t
do it. If you’re not excited and you're the
one in charge, how can you expect them
to be?
Did you find in making ‘Tommy’ that
there is any spiritual conflict between you
and Peter and did you research him?
No, I could make it a story of his beliefs,
I find they are very similar to mine. He
likes to be involved in . Meher Baba.
I am involved in my own beliefs and obvious-
ly in itself they are the same thing. It’s about
the same subject and everybody has their
own individual approach to it and obviously
it works and he gets something out of his:
. and I do out of
mine. I don’t think that they are that
different because I have talked to him at
great lengths about this. I mean, before I
started writing the screen-play I appreciated
exactly what it was to him and that it was
a spiritual piece, I didn’t want to impose my
own ideas and so I asked him precisely what
he meant by each piece. I believe that people
don’t know why they do things, I think
that an instinctive artist like Pete Townshend
doesn’t necessarily have to explain why he
wrote or what it means exactly and I think
the trouble with the 20th century is that
people want to try and explain things too
much. They like explanations and so there
‘were certain areas where I just sensed that
I knew what he meant so I suggested this in
the script. The first one I did a very long
treatment before I wrote it then he said,
‘“‘ves that’s right, yes that’s right’’. I think
there was only one thing that he disagreed
with, then I wrote the script and there is
nothing he disagrees with in that. Yes, I
researched everything about Townshend all
he had ever said about Tommy and of his
beliefs and read about these things before I
attempted it so I did the same sort of
research but on him. I mean I haven’t
thought of that consciously until now, that
is what I obviously did.
Did you listen to ‘Quadrophenia’?
Yes.
What did you think of it?
Well I haven’t really heard enough to say.
I would have to hear it several times. It
doesn’t mean as much to me, it doesn’t
excite me as much as “Tommy’ because I
am not au fait with the mods, although I
liked it a lot when I was there during the
recording. Again it’s this adventure thing,
it’s this chance thing, this luck thing. We
were there the night they recorded a number
called ‘Rain’ and there was a cloudburst
and they wanted a stereo rain effect. We
were in this caravan outside and bit by bit
the playing stopped except for the piano and
I went in and the floor and the roof had
caved in as they were singing and the rain
had really deluged them. They were soaking
wet and there were firemen with a hose
pumping it out except for the actual man in
the cubicle playing the piano and he was
gamely playing on and he was up to his
| neck in water and when they opened the
| door it poured like a waterfall, which was
very funny.
You seem to be the type of character who
is quite capable of having Jungian type
experiences of grandiose proportions, I don’t
mean put on, something like that happening
and the whole thing assuming incredible
meaning.
Yes I think I am probably given to that.
I think that’s what films probably are to me,
I mean you are given a sentence and it has
to take on a bigger proportion.
In a way films are a sort of indulgence. Do
you ever get any guilt about it?
Oh no, none at all.
Or do you just love it and thank God it
happened?
Exactly, I mean I don’t want to be a film
director I would rather be a composer. I’m
quite content to be a film director, but if I
was given the chance of giving it up, if some
magical person came along and said well,
you can now from this moment on when I
click my fingers know as much about the
technique of writing music and playing the
piano as you know about films, yeah, I
would change like that.
What stops you from sitting down and
doing the hard work and learning?
Well I haven’t time to do it, I mean I
would have to stop making films and I
would probably be very mediocre as a
composer. I could learn the technique of
composing but as I’m not meant to be one,
I'd probably write rubbish. I’ve no idea,
I have no tunes in my head, but I would
rather do that, to me that’s got many more
possibilities than film-making. Of course
you've got the performers who play the
work whether it’s rock beat or classical beat,
but you don’t really rely on them, I mean it
is there and it’s what you’ve written that
matters... like writing is there and nobody
can say it isn’t but if it’s a bad performance
it’s a bad performance. With a film you are
at the mercy of about 80 people, if it’s a
bad film it’s still tough. I could read the
script of ‘Mahler’ before I shot it and imagine
it all in my head and that’s the most exciting
bit for me when I’ve finished the script and
Ive got it all there. It’s then you have to go
through the boring process of making it.
But then when you start looking for locations
and start meeting actors, then it gets interest-
ing again and [I like looking for locations
perhaps more than anything, because it’s
an excuse to go off again and discover
England. It would be lovely if the script I’ve
written of ‘Gershwin’ didn’t have to be
made. I can see it all, why should I go and
bloody well make it?
Well that’s the thing, why is it boring?
Well why is it boring...
Why don’t you just write a book?
Well .. . because I’m not setting myself up
as a novelist.
Couldn’t you get down what you wanted?
No, no no, because that’s the trouble when
people read my scripts they can’t make them
out. They say, yeah, this is very short, there’s
no characterisation in it. They said that with
the ‘Devils’—65 pages, this is a feature film
it’s only going to last 15 minutes. I said it’s
going to last 2 hours and it very likely lasted
over two hours. I said well, ’m not a
novelist, you know, if you want a novel
written instead of a screen play get someone
else. The same thing happened with ‘Mahler’,
the British Film Finance saw the script and
that was 65 pages and they said this can’t be
a feature film and its two hours long, they
couldn’t see it lasting two hours but I knew
it would. My scripts are really shorthand
which I discuss in great detail, and the actors
and everyone get involved in it. As far as a
shooting script is concerned that is what
we'll always shoot, I don’t change it too
much, I mean I take advantage of anything
that might happen and I always take ideas
from anyone, if someone comes up with a
good idea I'll use it, even from the clapper
boy. The script really is like a cartoon as
opposed to a painting, it’s a rough, the
dialogue is there and the instructions and
that’s about it.
Are you very conscious of time?
You see I’ve got this thing that I have
to get as much done as possible in a very
short time, you know I might be knocked
over tomorrow—I’m not going to live
forever. Then I’ve got so much to do that I
want to do, I just want to do it, that’s the
important thing you know before I die I’d
like to make 20 more films, I doubt if I will,
I doubt it very much indeed and then I may
not want to make them anymore but for the
moment I want to keep churning out films
and get them out of the way. I mean it’s
almost like getting the ideas out of your head.
It’s almost like an incredible form of
analysis, isn’t it?
Oh yes, it is, I mean in ‘Mahler’, although
it’s a film about Mahler it’s also about me,
but he’s a Cancer, he was born at the begin-
ning of July. I was as well and I think I can
understand him. I think I can see lots of my
faults in him. I mean his hang-ups are my
hang-ups, when he carries on I carry on.
The fact that he is a composer and I am a
film director is rather immaterial as I say,
I’m interested in the things he’s interested in.
I suppose in every film one does a different
part of one’s personality comes out.
Does it attract you to go back and work
for T.V.? |
The B.B.C. want me to, but they pla
so far ahead it’s very difficult to work it out.
I mean I’ve been going to
do a film with them for
donkey’s ages, they
say can you
do it, say September 1975 you know and I
don’t know if I can or not. I don’t know
what [ll be doing. It’s too far away, it’s
gradually got like that. The good thing
about working on Monitor was that you go
up to Hugh Weldon and say let’s make a
film on Bartok, he would say, tell me about
Bartok . . . how are you going to do it...
right, go and do it. Today, you can’t do that.
I wanted to do a film on Vaughan Williams
for B.B.C. They griped about the budget
so I saw John Colshaw but finally they said
no and so on and so forth but they gradually
came up with the money and then it was too
late and then they said well we can’t make
it until 1976 or something ridiculous like
that. They’ve got too big and they just have
to plan so far ahead. I don’t know why they
do it, but it makes it very hard for any
outside film director to plan anything. The
chap who does it best is Jack Gold who
does very good films for the drama depart-
‘ment and at the same time makes feature
films.
So you think to some extent the B.B.C. is
no longer the rich place for learning the
business that it was?
No, I think it is a very good place for
learning the business. I think we were
particularly lucky in that we were given sort
of more or less carte blanche to do as we
liked. Bearing in mind we were always told,
what I have always thought was my best
lesson, that because we were dealing with
artists we mustn’t be arty ourselves or make
arty films. They should be entertaining films
and that’s the best lesson we ever learned—
to package the information and entertain-
ment into a rather attractive parcel. And I
gradually learned that as we followed the
main feature film on Sunday night when
anyone saw Monitor, the average viewer
would take x number of seconds to get up
and turn it off, so if I had a film on we
would drop the logo thing at the beginning
and put it at the end and I would devise an
Opening sequence for my films which would
stop them turning off. You remember how
I started it the ‘Debussy’ film—a naked girl
is tied to a post and she is being slowly shot
full of arrows ... well they are not going to
turn it off quite as quickly as if I had shown
a more conventional opening.
97
Mother! Father!
Touch me, feel me,
Who am I? :
Where did I come from?
Have you known me?
Have you seen me?
Mother?
You're a hero, you are famous
You're a champion of the young
You are rich, but it’s so absurd
to try to explain all the things
you've done 2
You're adored and yourre loved
Thousands watch you play
pinball—lIt’s a fever and you're
the master of the game
And now that you’re whole
You'll be champion of their very souls
Yes I’m healed
Delivered from silent darkness
No more locked doors or stifled screams
What I see now before me
Is far beyond a game
Beyond your wildest dreams
Those who love me have a higher path
to follow now
And you dear Mother too must be
prepared
—
You'll feel me coming
A new vibration
From afar you'll see me
I’m a sensation!
Tm a sensation!
I overwhelm as I approach you
Make your lungs hold breath inside!
Grounded angels your wings are broken
Time to mend and learn to fly
They worship me and all I touch
Hazy eyed they catch my glance
Pleasant shudders shake their senses
My warm momentum throws their stance
You'll feel me coming
A new vibration
From afar you ll see me
I’m a sensation!
I’m a sensation!
Soon you'll see me, can’t you feel me?
I’m coming!
Send your troubles dancing
I know the answer
Tm coming
Tm coming...
Im a sensation!
You'll feel me coming
A new vibration
From afar you'll see me
Tm a sensation!
Tm a sensation!
I leave a trail of rooted people
Mesmerised by just the sight
The few I touched now are disciples
Love as One, | am the Light...
I am the Light
To so many people, and certainly to people
who know The Who, Roger Daltrey is
Tommy. Obviously, he played the part when
The Who did it on stage, and he even took
part in Lou Reisner’s stage production.
Pete Townshend felt he’d been lumbered
enough: when a production of “Tommy’ was
staged on Broadway, they even dressed up
the guy in a fringed jacket to look like the
well-worn publicity photographs of Daltrey.
For that reason, Townshend was against
Daltrey taking the part in the film to begin
with. ““But Ken made me realise that to
everyone else he was Tommy—he was the
right man with the right voice’’.
Russell possibly had other reservations to
begin with: like could he act? But the first
day’s filming brought Daltrey a baptism of
fire (and water and plenty more) as an actor,
after which he felt happier about doing it.
And Russell decided that he’d do. “‘Roger is a
revelation,’ he told the film company
publicist, ‘he’s incredible, a natural, a
brilliant performer. He’s the only Tommy”.
Russell was impressed enough to want him
as Liszt in his next picture, Ollie Reed
reckons he could be the first singer properly
to make the transition to films since Frank
Sinatra, and Townshend says he surprised
everyone by being as good as he was in a
difficult part.
Roger Daltrey has ways of avoiding a
stigma: “I’m not a film star. The Who is
definitely my first love’, he told the English
music paper Sounds. ““?m only doing the
Liszt film because Tommy is painted with
such a white brush, and dear old Franz will
change all that—out comes the blue paint for
Franz, that'll put the image back where it
belongs. If I never do another film I don’t
want people to say it’s because I’m Tommy,
‘cause I bloody ain’t”’.
He was dubious about doing “Tommy” at
first too: “I was worried about the whole
concept of a film with pop stars in it—we
tend to have an inbuilt image that can do a
lot of damage when you need people to
identify with a character. But there was
slightly less of a problem with me because so
many people, having seen me do the stage
show, tend to relate my face to Tommy.
Really though, I never felt I'd got the part
until ’'d completed the first day on the set
and Ken seemed satisfied—I thought if
someone of his experience wasn’t worried
then it shouldn’t worry me’’. The first day
was the Cousin Kevin sequence where he got
dragged around by the hair, dumped in a
bath of evil smelling liquid, drenched by a
high-pressure fire hose and dried out with an
electric iron. So he earned his wings. As it
happened, that first day began to look like
child’s play as the film progressed. He used
a stunt man only once, in a scene which
involved a jump from a high tower: “The
real problem was we couldn’t find anyone
who looked enough like me. I think you can
tell it isn’t me in that scene, but we had to do
it because it was really dangerous’’.
That jump involved a kite, but Daltrey had
his fun on that machine in another scene.
‘“We were filming in the Lake District and I
had to go right up on the top of this huge
hill and perch there till take-off. We had to
wait for a bit of sun to come out, and
suddenly along comes this fucking great
thunderstorm. Of course it’s great fun
hanging on to a metal kite three or four
hundred feet up in the middle of a thunder-
storm’’. The place he landed in that scene
was covered with thistles, and he spent the
next day lying in bed having thorns plucked
out of his feet. During the Acid Queen
100
sequence he was covered with stick insects,
but they had to abandon the idea: “‘Didn’t
work did it? They just shit all over me and
left. Same with the butterflies—I got covered
with butterfly shit, and it don’t half pen-and-
ink. All for nothing. You wouldn’t think
little things like that could make a mess like
that would you?”’
Then again he nearly got burned alive
during the scrapyard filming: “Apparently it
doesn’t look like it, but I did. I lost a load of
hair and got burned all up my arm’’. And he
nearly drowned when he had to dive to the
bottom of a sixteen-foot pool for the ‘I’m
Free’ sequence so they could shoot from the
observation windows. “‘The only way I
could get down was to breathe out so there
was no air in my lungs: I got down there all
right ... but it was a bit near really. I was
stood on the bottom thinking ‘how the fuck
am I going to get up again?’ and it seemed
to take forever. When I finally broke the
water half the stage crew were stripped off
ready to go in for me”.
He likes working for Ken Russell does he?
‘“‘He gives, so much back that it’s a
pleasure to do it, it’s so rewarding to do it”’.
Ken Russell was the director Roger wanted
to make the film of “Tommy’ from the
moment the idea of making it into a film
came up. “I’d seen a lot of his TV stuff and I
wanted ‘Tommy’ to be like that’’. It’s a long
time since the idea was first thought of, but
Daltrey reckons it has been worth the wait.
‘“As it worked out, I don’t think Ken would
have been right for it years ago, but I think
he is now... what’s so good about it is that
it’s very real, and yet surreal. ‘Tommy’ needs
to be a classic, and I think it’Il become a
classic: I think we’ve all succeeded in doing
at least what I wanted to do with it. We
didn’t need to make a film of it unless it was
going to be a classic, because the music sells
forever anyway and as soon as you put
visuals to it you’ve made a satement. It’s a
very dangerous thing to do as far as we were
concerned as The Who. But I think he’ll get
his classic out of it. I think it’s worked out
just right—a breath of fresh air for us and
for him’’.
Daltrey compares working with Russell on
the film with working with Kit Lambert on
the original album: “He really gives you
confidence and pushes out energy, but it’s
not just that: it’s giving you the feeling that
you’re part of something that’s right, that’s
good and that’s going to be big, which is
what everybody needs. Making the film
actually became a bit like making an album
—_we had the basic story and just built on it
as we went along. I enjoyed almost every
minute”. Among the most _ successful
sequences he feels are the Pinball Wizard
with Elton John—‘‘because the crowd were
so good”’—and the Preacher/Marilyn Monroe
thing with Eric Clapton—‘“because of its
weirdness’. The Acid Queen he regards as
brilliant: ‘It puts something into “Tommy’
in a strange way. One of the things we
realised while we were making the film was
that Tommy never really makes a statement
or does a great deal, but somehow that Acid
Queen sequence makes him seem less
hollow’’.
On the subject of potentially ‘contro-
versial’ sections of the film, he says: “I don’t
think the violence is vicious. Even the Cousin
Kevin sequence is more inferred than actual
—and it’s much more effective than seeing
someone beat the fuck out of someone else.
Ken made the symbolism very surreal in
places—I think he stretches a point here and
there in the original story to make his point,
but that’s what he’s good at’’. And the use of
cripples? ‘“‘Knowing the reaction there was
in some areas of the Press to our original
story of a deaf, dumb and blind boy, I’m
sure that will be misunderstood by some
people. But what should the man have done?
Dressed people up to look like cripples?
Pretended they don’t exist ? For some of them
it was one of the most interesting fortnights
of their lives when they were working on the
film—they were expensive extras and patient
people who worked hard and seemed to
enjoy it”.
If the film is going to resurrect Daltrey as
the Tommy persona, it is also going to bring
a renewed barrage of those ‘what does it
mean?’ questions. That isn’t a prospect he
relishes: ‘“‘That’ll drive me up the wall—I
still don’t know what it means. It happened
on the first day of the film and it blew my
mind: I’m too close to it, it’s like trying to
answer what it’s like to be married. For the
first six months you can give some kind of
sensible answer, but after ten years it’s
almost impossible. It’s part of my life. I
think the spiritual message is made quite
clear by Russell—the beginning and end are
important, and the ways Tommy’s message
is twisted and he’s ripped off by everyone in
sight come over quite clearly. In some ways
it’s just like the rock business—the group,
which is the main source of earnings and
goodwill, is usually accused of ripping off the
public at some stage of their success, and
usually they’re the last people to rip anyone
off. It’s the people on the way to and from
the group who’re responsible for most of
that”.
Daltrey was much involved in the planning
of the final scene where Tommy’s followers
finally get the message that they’re being
conned rotten by the organisation, and they
rebel. “It’s a frustration thing I’ve always
had inside me about politics, revolutionaries
and all that. People dream about revolution
and all that crap, but really what they are is
like the end of ‘Tommy’—dead people,
destruction and nothing. That’s what revolu-
tions really are. They ripped everybody off,
the people rebelled, that’s the end result”’.
ee
"7 Ze
sre worlds ap
rmind.
d she’d try totouch him
aybe |see that she was free
nd talk to her this Sunday .
§ She knew from the start
Deep down in her heart
She and Tommy were worlds apart
But her mother said, never mind, your part
Is to be what you'll be ©
Pe Y a oe
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= ea,
She arrived at six
and the place was swinging
to gospel music by nine
Group after group appeared on the stage
and Sally just sat there sighing
She bit her nails looking pretty as a picture
Right in the very front row
One of the faithful came on the stage
and shouted “Here we go!”
The crowd went crazy
As Tommy hit the stage!
Little Sally got lost as the police bossed
the crowd back ina rage!
Your happy welcome is like a favour
/ must now return
The darkness of my childhood passed
And flames of love now burn
The pinball games I play so well
Reflects a way of life
This meeting is just another game
Let’s play to win tonight
She knew from the start
‘Deep down in her heart
She and Tommy were worlds apart
But her mother said, never mind, your part
Isto be what you'll be
Her cheek hit a chair and blood trickled down
Mingling with her tears
fe en ee | ees i sai
eA
ise A eBse iii a eau Se REG x
ce Anan Late wr ern en ade Dr rs erent BA! UL UL
:
t '
. 5
A Be
Gicoenonsen!
Her pretty face! Oooo000000h!
Sixteen stitches put her right and her dad said,
Don’t say I didn’t warn yer!
Sally got married to a rock musician
Who came from California
Tommy always talks about the day
The disciples all went wild
Sally still carries a scar on her cheek
To remind her of his smile
She knew from the start
Deep down in her heart
She and Tommy were worlds apart
But her mother said, never mind, your saad
Is to be what you'll be.
ass Re ere
“She actually has a very tough, physical
quality about her, and the kind of qualities
that made Glenda Jackson a_ star’’.—Ken
Russell.
“¢ She really should make a rock and roll album.
I think she’s excellent and she has really
suffered from the image which some of her
early films have given her. She has this
cabaret-showbusiness image, and she’s really
not like that at all’”.—Roger Daltrey.
““She’s a very, very, very sweet person but
it’s not a sex thing with her—she’s like an
angel. Both Russell and I fell madly in love
with her and I don’t think any of us proposed
that she go to the bed”.—Oliver Reed.
‘“‘That lovely girl with huge boobs . . .’—Keith
Moon.
Ann-Margaret sees Nora Walker, Tom-
my’s Mother, as: “a woman who goes
through many changes over the years, from a
fresh innocent young girl into a hard, greedy
and guilty woman, but who finally finds her
own salvation. I think (the film) is about
two words—finding God.
“It’s a marvellous part, one of the best
I’ve ever had, and working with Ken Russell
is incredible—he’s brilliant and demanding
and at the same time stimulating and
understanding’.
Perhaps it’s not the part you’d immediately
associate with Ann-Margret. She started in
films as Bette Davis’ daughter in ‘A Pocketful
Of Miracles’ in 1961, starred in the Rodgers
and Hammerstein ‘State Fair’ the next year,
and went on to play lovely girls with huge
boobs opposite people like Dick Van Dyke
(‘Bye Bye Birdie’), Elvis Presley (Viva Las
Vegas’), Steve McQueen (‘The Cincinatti
Kid’), Dean Martin ( Murderers’ Row’), Bing
Crosby (‘Stagecoach’) and Anthony Quinn
(‘RPM’). Along with her cabaret shows and
TV programmes, perhaps ‘personality’ would
have been a more apt description than
‘actress’. |
But then she made ‘Carnal Knowledge’
with Mike Nichols directing and Jack
Nicholson as co-star. She was nominated for
an Academy award, and gained respect for
her abilities as an actress. Ken Russell
offered her the part as Nora Walker in
October before shooting began, and he has
asked her to work with him again.
104
“TI was genuinely excited about it’’, she
says, ‘“‘because it was so different from the
roles I’m normally offered, and I’ve always
admired Ken Russell’s work.
“The idea of having to sustain a character
throughout an entire film without dialogue
was a real challenge. I only knew about The
Who from my step-children, but I had heard
‘Tommy’ and the more I got into the
concept, the more fascinated I became.
“‘The further I got into the character of the
Mother the more interesting and intense it
became. She really starts out as quite an
uncomplicated and attractive personality but
gradually the guilt builds up, and the aware-
ness of what she has done to her little boy
and what he becomes affects her, and she
becomes harder and more callous.
“I realised that every day was going to
bring something new to the role when I met
Ken, because he likes you to come to the
scene with an idea and then build on that at
the time. That way you get spontaneity and
freshness in the approach. He taught me a
lot about myself and my craft’.
Was she worried about working with a
director of Russell’s volatile reputation ?
‘“‘He is a very complex man, and he has his
moments when he is extremely demanding,
but he always gives his best and I think he
expects the same of his cast. It takes time to
get to know him and what he wants but once
you have established that communication it
is there forever—you know almost without
asking. I’m sure that’s the reason he likes to
work with the same people in so many of his
films. If he has got to know the actors and
they know him, it saves all the time and
trouble of having to explain himself and his
requirements.
“T think you can place what interpretation
you like upon Townshend’s lyrics, but this is
obviously very much Russell’s interpretation.
I think it retains the spirituality and I think
it is a very inspirational film. It ends on such
a high pitch, happy and with hope, that it
left me feeling elated despite some of the
heavy intensity of earlier scenes.
“‘There’s certainly one sequence I'll never
forget, which involved a scene where I am
sitting in this totally white room drinking
champagne and getting very smashed. I’m
watching ‘Tommy’ on TV now that he is
the Pinball Champion and making a lot of
money. I start out lying on this scrumptious
white satin bed with white walls and white
carpet, wearing a silver catsuit dripping with
diamonds.
““As I become steadily drunker and more
maudlin watching my son on TV—the
commercials become mixed up with the
programme and gradually I begin to realise
that all his fame and fortune is worth nothing
if he cannot see, hear or speak”’.
After she’d finished filming, the crew gave
her a chef’s hat and apron, emblazoned with
the word ‘Slugger’. Ann-Margret can’t
cook, and she earned her self-imposed
nickname with a reputation for having
accidents while she’s working.
‘It’s a well known fact’’, says Oliver Reed,
‘that if you get Russell and Reed together
in a film, usually you can sell it anywhere’.
So he isn’t just what you might call modest.
Equally he isn’t a man to nurse delusions
about himself.
He has compared his face to a dustbin, and
described his general image as ‘‘the looks of
a Bedford truck with the promise of a V8
engine’.
A standing joke among film people is that
Ken Russell loves to work with Reed because
he knows exactly what he can get: “Okay
Ollie, moody number eight”’. It’s a somewhat
harsh over-simplification when you consider
the variety of rdles Reed has played, with
and without Russell, but doubtless Reed
would appreciate the implication of profes-
sionalism in his craft.
“I’m exactly the same as I was—the burly
ex-public schoolboy with the moody face.
What I’ve done is I’ve slowed up a bit, my
deliveries aren’t intense as they used to be:
I’ve always said that if in doubt, do absolutely
nothing”’.
One of his first breaks was in children’s
television and his first starring role was in
Hammer’s ‘The Curse Of The Werewolf’
from which he went on to star in six other
Hammer films, which he regards as his
apprenticeship. His “‘intellectual break-
through” was as Debussy in Ken Russell’s
TV film about the composer, and his ‘the
man women of all ages would like to give
them the once over’ reputation was firmly
established with his performance in Russell’s
‘Women In Love’: not only did Glenda
Jackson get the Ollie treatment, but he
wrestled naked, by firelight, with Alan Bates.
‘““Since then’, says Reed, “I’ve hardly been
offered a script in which I haven’ t been asked
to take my clothes off, but I won’t do it
again’’. He does, however,
enjoy being able to say
that a million women saw | [ -
him naked. While making & "
‘Tommy’ he was voted
Britain’s sexiest actor by ash
readers of Photo- play magazine,
and he is fond of saying that he
engenders a violent reaction in
women. They either.love or hate
him, and most love him he says. |
“You don’t have to have classical y
good looks to be a movie star
anymore. I was lucky enough to
become established in the mid-
sixties when the show- business : #F
climate was changing, and had been Sy,
ever since John Osborne wrote | /
‘Look Back In Anger’: the rough
working class, regional-
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accented hero—or anti-hero—was in the
ascendent. You didn’t have to look like
John Mills or Michael Redgrave or Dirk
Bogarde to get on”’
Oliver Reed is hardly a rough, working
class, regional-accented anti-hero. His mode
of private life is that of a right-wing English
country gentleman, his house is a converted
monastery in Surrey with something like 50
acres of land giving him a 20-mile, uninter-
rupted view of the countryside and a seven-
acre lake. He works hard, doing about three
films a year, is fiercely proud of his earning
power; is divorced, and doesn’t like women
to be clever. “I hope I’m clever enough for
both of us’’. He breeds horses, would like
to be the owner of the best showjumper, the
best heavyweight hunter and the Derby
winner all in the same year. He says he
doesn’t have aspirations to direct films, not
yet anyway, but he does have plans to ‘be a
producer. His criteria for accepting a film
part are: “‘if it’s a good worthwhile part,
the script and general set-up smell right,
and—very important this—the money’s
good. Then I’ll go ahead”’.
He says he’s a romantic, and of his house
he says: “it’s an escape for me, I love the
space and opulence. If I have a row with my
girlfriend, neither of us need walk out—we
can go off into separate wings and not come
across one another for days, even weeks’’.
And when he surveys his minor armoury
of guns, both antique and modern, saying
“TI think I could hold my own here, I’m the
last of the warlords” you feel that it might
not be entirely in jest. Oliver Reed wouldn’t
look kindly on an uprising of peasants and
welfare-state spongers. Pete Townshend
found that one of the easiest ways to get a
rise out of him on the set was to yell ‘Vote
Labour’: Ollie spent much of the time in his
caravan listening to Radio Four,
occasionally emerging to
engage the carpenters in con-
versation about the burden of
his taxes.
He has a fine sense of the
bawdy, as is illustrated by
his ‘erotic bet’ with a
barmaid
at his local pub; if he could lose two stone
in weight in a month, she was prepared to
allow him unrestricted access to her ample
breasts for ten minutes. The burly ex-public
schoolboy with a moody face was observed
sucking a baby’s dummy—“‘in training” for
his prize, he said, and presumably also to
stop the food getting through.
But as an actor in his late thirties, Oliver
Reed is now prepared to relinquish romance,
in the sense of having beautiful women melt
into his warm embrace as he Exudes Earthy
Sensuality From His Burly Frame. Frank
may be the Lover in ‘Tommy’, but Reed
plays him—to a certain extent—for laughs.
“I’m getting older now. I think it worries
everybody terribly when they’re 27 that
maybe they’re not as sexy as they should be,
but I think when you reach 37 you’re not
really that concerned. Nobody wants to see a
40 year old fat man kissing an 18 year old
girl, but everyone loves to see a 40-year-old
fat man making them cry, frightening them
or amusing them. My parts are beginning to
change as I get older—I’ve done all my
kissing and I’ve sucked Glenda Jackson’s
knockers enough to last me a lifetime, God
bless her. No, it doesn’t worry me—had I
tried to make Frank into a romantic I would
have failed, because he shouldn’t be a
romantic’.
The part of Frank was fairly nebulous at
the start, and in fact was much smaller than it
ended up. Russell, however, felt that Reed’s
experience should be used more fully, and
Frank took over a lot of business from
Uncle Ernie (Keith Moon). It was Towns-
hend’s intial reaction to his singing that gave
Reed the clue to his portrayal of Frank:
“I sang a few notes and Townshend fell
about laughing in the studio—you see you
can’t take Frank seriously in the film so I
made him a sort of caricature, but not so
ridiculous that he bceomes unbelievable. He
can’t be a bully, and I didn’t want him to be
a bully, I wanted people to maybe identify
with him, have a laugh with him, and feel a
little sorry for him’’.
The sequence with the specialist for
instance, is played with Frank putting on airs
and graces in an almost pathetic way, and
ee Ee ee ae
Reed admits to nicking a bit for it from the
Butler in one of his earlier films, ‘Blue Blood’.
He had Frank trying to match the Specialist’s
suave Harley Street manner, and only looking
uncomfortable. And he played on the fact
that he is not a singer.
‘““Who’s that flourishing American actor?
Jack Nicholson. He seemed to think it was
my normal voice, and his only comment was
‘I don’t think I’m a very good singer (Towns-
hend says he came out as smooth as Perry
Como) but I’m certainly a better singer than
Oliver Reed’. Which somewhat missed the
point’.
Reed enjoys the freedom of his part: “It
was great fun because I could play with the
part and go way over the top .. . there’s no
way you can go over the top in ‘Tommy’ with
the Who’s music and Ken Russell’s directing.
I mean if I was to take my cock out as I did
in ‘Women In Love’ and stick it up a turkey’s
bum, it’s not over the top. Vanessa Redgrave
shoved a crucifix up her’s in ‘““The Devils’’.
In a sense it’s cocking a snook at all the sort
of things I wanted to do...”
The way Reed was able to shape his part in
the film is in some way typical of the way
Russell likes actors to work with him. One
of the standard comments about Russell
from his actors is that he encourages them
to come to him with ideas. A frequent
comment from other people is that he’s
‘volatile’.
“He is’, says Reed “but when he gets
volatile I usually shout back at him and take
him quietly aside and tell him he’s being un-
reasonable. Usually he then comes back and
says in front of people “‘I’m sorry’’. Ken had
a nervous breakdown. He’s one of these
incredibly talented people who lives off
nervous energy and he needs to be under-
stood—that is he needs people around him
who understand his moods. Ken has an
amazing photographic eye, and he used to
be a dancer. There are very few times when
I need direction from him now, so he can
get on with other things and not have to
worry about me. For him that’s one problem
out of the way.
‘*A lot of directors like to work closely with
actors and actresses, but Ken likes working
with the camera, concentrating on move-
ment, the way you move, the way the light
fails.
In a lot of ways then, the actors took care
of themselves: ““The Who knew their lines,
Roger Daltrey knows how to work, and you
only have to capture one third of Moon’s
enthusiasm and push him in the right direc-
tion. ’ve worked with Ken enough to know
what he wants, and Ann-Margret is a real
pro—we all fell madly in love with her’’.
Reed might reasonably be expected to be
intolerant of ‘amateurs’ on the set—it was
Roger Daltrey’s first film after all. But
Daltrey proved himself enough for Russell to
cast him as Liszt in his next picture, and he
proved himself in. Reed’s eyes as well. ““You
have to learn certain discipline as an actor
and Roger was very professional and
enthusiastic. He also seems able to contain
that enthusiasm in front of the camera,
which is terribly important.
*“‘And it’s no use coming on, as one person
did, and just because you happen to be
called on set at eight in the morning and
you aren’t required until 7.15pm you get
stoned out of your mind. Moon had practic-
ally to stick a broom up that man’s behind to
keep him upright. You have to be ready
when required. The only actors who could
get away with that kind of behaviour were
big Hollywood stars, because the people
came to see them and not the film.
“TI think Roger has a seriously quality
about him which will enable him to make the
transition to films—there hasn’t really been
a singer who’s done it since Frank Sinatra.
Paul Jones tried from Manfred Mann, but he
was too nice, like jelly and ice cream is nice.
You have to have a bit of nasty to make it.
And I remember making ‘Beat Girl’ with
Adam Faith—he’s a constant surprise to me,
because every time they say he’s got away
and learned something new he comes back
and to me he’s Adam Faith, he’s just the
same as he ever was. Either you’ve got to
accept that his style of acting is in vogue or
it is not: there’s no way that everybody can
keep pretending that they’ve discovered
Adam Faith’.
Off the set, Reed formed a friendship with
Keith Moon which was compared to a
meeting between King Kong and Godzilla.
“Daltrey said that over the period of the
film, although Moon did some crazy things,
he was very quiet and contented. I could
absorb a lot of his lunacy, the same as I can
with Ken.
‘“‘At first they were going to separate us
during shooting, by putting me in one hotel
and Moon in another, but then they decided
the best thing would be to put us both in the
same hotel but away from the posh people.
We found ourselves billetted with the
plasterers and chippies, which was marvel-
lous because they were much more our kind
of people. Moon has enormous energy and
great enthusiasm’’. (Townshend gets angry
that people will not accept Moon as super-
human).
“*He lives life at an incredibly fast rate and
lives it to the full. I remember he found a
novel way of summoning the night porter at
one hotel where they boasted 24 hour room
service, and he was unable to get a bottle of
brandy at 3am as there was no reply from
the desk. He simply lobbed the colour TV
out of his 14th-floor window, and the fellow
was upstairs in seconds.
“I think I finally made my mark on Moon
though. I taught him to say ‘certainly’ and
‘Madam would you mind?’ in the most
cultured tones, and I gave him a tortoise
called Shell that he’s quite devoted to”’.
The affinity with Moon in one way is
mirrored with Reed’s affinity with Ken
Russell in another; and where Moon’s
aggression and energy often find expression
on stage with the Who, Russell’s often comes
out in his films. “‘I think everybody is what
life or their environment allows them to be.
Russell’s life has probably been traumatic
and I think the figures and characters he
meets in his bouts of depression and in his
nightmare frighten him so much that he puts
them into movies’’.
As a kind of exorcism perhaps. Reed feels
he might represent one of those figures to
Russell in a way: “I think I’m one he thinks
he could meet and knows he could drink
with afterwards, and that probably makes
him a little bit happier when next he dreams”’.
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Come to my house |
Be one of the comfortable people
Come to this house
We're drinking all night —
Never sleeping
And you baker
Little old lady welcome
And you Coa
in this Sone.
Come to this house
Be one of us
Make this your house
Be one of us
You can help
To collect some more in
Young and old people
Let’s get them all in
Come to this house
Into this house
Ask along that man with a big
red carnation
Bring every single person from
Victoria Station
Go into the hospital and bring
the nurses and patients
Everyone go home
and fetch their relations
Come into this house
Be one of the comfortable people
‘Lovely bright home
We’re drinking all night
Never sleeping
j
FOOTIE
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Gist
KING
CHRISTIAN
LAND
Hold on T ommy
They'll come through the floor
There’s more at the door
There’s more at the door
There’s more at the door
There’s more at the door
There’s more at the door
‘There’s more...
We need more room
Build an extension
A colourful palace
Spare no expense now
Come to me now
Come to me now
Welcome! Welcome!
Welcome!
Arctic Cirde
He'll raise your weary spirits high
My son will teach your
Silent hearts to talk
Every home will have his picture
Pilgrims all will touch his hand
Pinball tables gold and silver
Altars to the Master’s plan
Rio, Paris, New York, London
Moscow, Peking, Tokyo, The World
Tommy camps in every city
Millions flocking in like sheep
What they want aint cheap
*S a pity
But who am I to
dreams ?
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(Above) A portrait of Pete Townshend surrounded by the records, musicians, composers, business-
men, family, friends, things and others that have most influenced him. Richard Barnes, who has
known Pete Townshend on and off for fifteen years, compiled the list (which Pete later amended
and added to). On the next page he interviews Pete on influences that led to the writing of Tommy.
1 Big John Patton
2 Jimmy Reed
3 Jimmy Smith
4 Brian Jones
5 Slim Harpo
6 Jimmy Giuffre
7 Bo Diddley
8 Ray Charles
10 Wes Montgo mery
11 Terry Riley
12 Ella Fitzgerald
13 Frank Sinatra
14 Everly Brothers
15 BookerT& The MG's
16 Syd Barrett
17 Acker Bilk
18 Karen Townshend
(Pete’s wife)
19 Tom Wright (turned
Pete onto dope and
blues music)
22 Lincoln Continental
cars
23 John Lee Hooker
24 Bach
25 Debussy
26 Bob Druce (manager
of The Detours)
27 Robert Stigwood
29 Ken Russell
30 Keith Moon
31 EMS synthesiser
32 Chris Stamp and... 41 Ligh I in’ Hopkins
33 Kit Lambert
34 Andrew Oldham
35 ae
( UF. 0 fieNer >
38 Manin oe
(& hen :
B Bob Dylan
44 Kenny Burrell
45 Chet Atkins
46 Bill Graham
47 Snooks Eaglin
48 Purcell
49 The Incredible
String Band
52 The River Thames
53 Pete Meadon
(manager of The.
High Numbers)
24 Ae Saas
Ge sed ate
57 Emma Townshend
(eldest daughter)
ne LP 50 Nik Cohn (pop writer) 58 Denny (Pete’s
s) 5. John istle
grandmother)
59 Eric Clapton
60 Thunderclap Newman
61 Betty Townshend
(Pete’s mother)
62 Pet Sounds LP and
The Beach Boys
63 Guy Stevens (turned
Pete onto early Sue
records and US. R&B
64 Roger Daltrey
65 Mr. Fantasy LP
and Traffic
66 Hank Marvin and...
67 Bruce Welch
68 Green Onions LP
69 Speedy Keen (friend
and pe siciae
tuvned ‘e onto
Meher Baba)
1 Walter Carlos
72 Gib on J200 guitar
Clif Townshend
(Pete? s dad)
74 Aftermath LP
75 Gretch ‘Chet Atkins’
76 Rupert Bear
77 Ichaikovsky
78 The Kinks
79 Delia deLeon (Life-
long devotee of
Meher Baba)
80 Elgar
81 Richard Barnes
(friend)
Also but notshown:- — Gustav Metzke (auto-
Ronnie Lane destructive artist)
Rickenbacker guitars _ Bosendorfer pianos
Trish Jack (friend) Murshida Ivy Duce (head
Simon & PaulTownshend of American Sufi group)
(Pete’s brothers) Pepe Rush (electronics
Ray Tolliday specialist)
Don Stevens (writeron Dr. Alan Cohen (ane-
Meher Baba) © time LSD advocate, and
Colin Jones (Observer now a Baba follower)
photographer) Towser (Pete’s dog) .
Lowrie organs And those we've missed
In the late sixties Pete Townsend became
increasingly interested and intrigued by the
teachings of Meher Baba. He was even more
impressed by Meher Baba, the man, and
although he never met Meher Baba personally
Pete says he “‘fell in love with him”.
Richard Barnes has been a close friend
of Townshend since they met and shared
a flat together at art school in 196l.
He says “‘I noticed an incredible change in
Townshend and his wife Karen about the
time they were discovering Meher Baba. |
was quite impressed.” Here Richard Barnes
talks to Pete Townshend about ‘Tommy’,
Meher Baba, The Who and Pete Townshend.
When you started writing “ITommy’ were
you into Meher Baba? Was it as-a result of
Baba?
I can’t remember exact details but I know
that what had happened was that I had
come out of that sort of incredible LSD
experience that I had in Monterey, and that
in a way made me think that I’'d been knock-
ing myself about a bit with drugs, and I
started to feel this strange sort of responsi-
bility for myself in a spiritual way, and I
thought I must really pull myself and my
life together. At that time I was knocking
about with Arthur Brown a lot, and we were
talking about an opera. I wrote a thing ‘Rael’
which Kit Lambert condensed down to
sort of a five minute thing; it was originally
a grand, lengthy operatic thing. So I think
I was thinking in terms of not rock opera,
‘but in terms of proper opera. I was studying
orchestrations and stuff like that, and I'd
bought a piano, and then I did a lot of
orchestrations and I bought lots of books
about it and I used to speak a lot to Karen’s
Dad about orchestrations and stuff like that.
A reason I was interested in Arthur Brown
DON’T WORRY -
Meher Baba
s
(Above and top) Meher Baba the silent master
who became the spiritual focus for Pete Townshend
and the inspiration for much of the writing of
Tommy. When showed an early picture of ‘The
Who’ on the cover of THE OBSERVER colour
magazine, Baba apparently pressed his thumb on
Townshend’s nose. Although Meher Baba was
always joking and playing tricks, this action was
thought by some to have some mystical significance.
Certainly Townshend has been ‘under his thumb’
ever since, although he never met Baba.
112
was because I thought he had an amazing
sort of rock/operatic voice and he was
going to be the star of it, as it were. Then
the time came that the Who needed an
album and Kit Lambert’s method of getting
new material—because I never wrote any-
thing specifically for the Who ever in my
life, it always happens to be what I’m into
at the particular time—is just to steam in,
and pick up what we had, and he sort of
engineered it into this rock opera thing. I
was, simultaneously to all this, finding out a
lot about Baba. It’s hard to say, it all
happened at the same time. For example
I had written a lot of the songs before we
moved to Richmond and I know that when
we moved to Richmond it was about the
time that this fascination with Baba became
really concrete. I know that it all happened
in the space of two months, one minute I was
freaked out on acid the next minute I was
into Baba. But the fascination with opera
and even with ‘Tommy’ as a concept (it was
originally called ‘Amazing Journey’) was
all happening at the same time.
Originally the ‘Amazing Journey’ was the
story of a sort of seeker, and you saw his life
in reality and in a dream, that sort of thing.
You’ve got a double-barelled plot—one
minute you’d see him from one angle ob-
jectively, and the other minute you’d see him
from the other angle subjectively, so one song
followed another song, followed another
song, followed another song. Originally for
example the section in ‘Tommy’ where you’ve
got ‘Cousin Kevin’, ‘Fiddle About’, ‘Acid
Queen’, and stuff like that, each one was
going to be followed by sort of an impres-
sionistic dream-sequence-type piece of
music like the ‘Underture’. In the end we
just had the one. See I was reading things
like Herman Hesse, and stuff like that,
before_I really got into Baba. I had heard
about Baba but I wasn’t really into all his
stuff. I'd just read a few books.
To me ‘Tommy’ is very much a Meher Baba
story, especially things like Tommy being deaf
dumb and blind. Maybe I was reading more
into it than was intended, but isn’t his blind-
ness and deafness meant to be some kind of an
analogy with for instance, the fact that we
don’t exactly experience reality. We are
conditioned by habit patterns and things and
can only experience what they allow us to
experience. And we are, say, blind and deaf
to reality, Tommy is a literal example of
somebody in that position,
When I first started writing ‘Tom-
my’ he was not deaf, dumb and blind.
The first song that I wrote—‘Amazing
Journey’, that was the absolute first song of
‘Tommy’—that was like the pivot point and
as a song it more or less tells you everything
that you want to know about the story of
‘Tommy’. You know ‘deaf, dumb and
blind boy, he’s in a strange vibration land”’
etc, etc. What the lyrics really mean is that
though he can only feel things, from these
feelings they become like music to him,
and the music that he sort of feels and the
vibrations become important to him, and it
becomes like his guide and his leader and his
master. I was actually going to try to cope
with this on quite a grand scale, I was going
to try to create pieces of music which
represented his feelings at any given point,
but him being deaf, dumb and blind initially
was just a sort of thing I grabbed out of
the air.
Why?
I don’t know really, I think either it
might have been for the reason that you
said, that I wanted to make him kind of
remote, but on the other hand it might just
have come out of the sky. I just don’t know,
because a lot of ideas that I had, songs like
‘Substitute’ for example (which I now look
back on and I reckon is one of the best lyrics
that I’ve ever written) I just wrote out the
top of my head and I don’t really know what
motivated it.
I thought Tommy being deaf, dumb and
blind was there for some definite reasons. Like
you were saying, there are these two situa-
tions; there’s Tommy’s experiences on the one
hand, and what other people outside are
seeing, looking at this remote deaf, dumb and
blind kid, on the other. A subjective and
objective thing. I never sat down and thought
about the story line of “Tommy’ but I always
got the impression that he was meant to be
like Mr. Average, walking around in his own
little dream,and really he’s deaf, dumb and
blind to reality. He can only experience what
he can experience.
As the theme developed, that’s exactly
what I did, and that’s exactly what I meant
to happen. What eventually then emerged
was that I ended up with the parallel, it’s
almost like a device. The device was that
when he came out of his autism and became
normal, that was then such a miracle to him
that that in itself pushed him beyond
normality and into a sort of Saintlihood, and
because his experience in that state was quite |
unique . . . I mean I just see that as a little
device, it’s not really all that important. I
think there were three or four devices that I
used in the thing like that; there’s the deaf,
dumb and blind thing paralleled to the fact
that we’re only an illusion. It was the mirror,
the fact that he could only see himself (this
being a thing about the ego), but also the
fact that he sees himself and the image that
he sees in the mirror he takes to be someone
else, he doesn’t say ‘that’s me’. But when his
Mother finally smashes the mirror, and he
sees himself disappearing, he realises that
that person he sees as God is himself, and so
the actual complete God-realisation from
that is effected. The other devices are like the
pain and the pleasure and things like that.
One other device which I’d actually for-
gotten about is the whole thing about
Pinball; that now to me seems just as daft as
it does to everybody else, but Originally |
had some real reason for having Pinball, it
did come from Nick Cohn originally and it
was a bit of a gag, but I had some reason
why I used it as a device. It was something
to do with it being a game but also it was to
do with his music thing, the fact that every-
thing he felt sort of came through as very
pure, simple vibrations which he would hear
as music. I got the idea that something like
the Pinball game, like what you would feel
when you played Pinball, would make a good
sort of musical piece and it went on and off
from there, it got deeper and deeper. Then I
Started to get into the whole thing about
life is a game, and the essence of the game,
and the importance of little games like that,
as I read that Baba was interested in games.
I thought you picked on Pinball because it
was so trivial. I thought you didn’t want to
get involved with anything philosophical or
anything like that.
That again is true because as I went along
I retrospectively weighed everything that I’d
done because I had to do that to incorporate
a lot of material. I had songs like ‘Sally
Simpson’ for example, and ‘We’re Not
Going To Take It’—they were already
written as individual songs and I incorpor-
ated them into ‘Tommy’. ‘Welcome’ was a
song that was written before ‘Tommy’, ‘I’m
Free’ was written before ‘Tommy’, ‘Sen-
sation’ was written before ‘Tommy’. All
these were written just as songs and it was
only when I started to look around and I
realised . . . what I’m Saying is, it’s very
difficult for me to say “Oh yes I planned it
all”, because in a way a fantastic magic was
going on. But then that always happens with
me, and I think it’s not quite so mystic as it
appears on the surafce. I think at the back of
your head something is going on that you're
not aware of and it makes you write in a
certain way. If you mass everything together
that you’ve written over a year you'll find
it will all have a certain quality to it, and
maybe even a theme running through.
You did say that you were slightly interested
in mysticism and people that are interested
will get out of it what they can. I mean if Bob
Dylan sang, ‘I’m A Blue Toothbrush, You’re
Pink Toothbrush’ a lot of people would get
a lot of deep meaning from that.
Well I get a fantastic amount of deep
feeling from "Mighty Quinn’, a fantastic
amount. I find it to be the most spiritual
evocative song. It suggests to me that thing
about the spiritual hierarchy and I hear the
music and [ think of this great big sort of
Baba as an Eskimo sitting on top of the
world. —
Obviously you don’t sit down and coldly
calculate that ‘Tommy’ is going to be a
spiritual message or anything like that, but
what I was saying was that people are going
to read into it what they want, and at that
time when everybody was getting into that
sort of thing it was a good focus for them.
Well, Pll tell you something really funny:
at the time that we were writing ‘Tommy’ the
music business was very much like it is at the
moment—it was very super-cynical. For
example, at that time the Moody Blues and
people were doing ambitious works, from
their point of view anyway, and they were
instantly getting labelled as pretentious and
at the same time garbage was being pushed
Out into the charts. The Beatles and The
Stones and people like that, the Small Faces
even—anybody that was any good was more
or less becoming insignificant again. They
weren't new anymore, they weren’t fresh,
and a lot of the new stuff that was coming
out was really trash, there was a lot of
psychedelic bullshit going about. All the
main people, like I suppose the Who and the
Stones and the Beatles, were all involved in
acid and were very sort of insipid and sort of
weak fundamentally, as far as the public
were concerned, as a result. What I wanted
to do at that particular time was to be sort
of musico-diplomatic, I wanted to hit
everybody all at once. So I did, cautiously,
put across a spiritual message because I did
feel that I had learnt a fantastic amount
through my life and perhaps even through
dope, which had led me to Baba, and I knew
that Baba was something very special and }
wanted this all to be wound up. But at the
same time I wanted ‘Tommy’ to be rock and
roll, I wanted it to be like singles that you
could pull out and play. You could pull out
‘’'m Free’ and ‘Sensation’ and they'd be
good just as songs. I didn’t really want the
thing to have any musical flow, you know
like themes connecting it, I just wanted it to
be a series of singles that happened to tell a
Story. I even wanted it to appeal to kids.
John Entwistle and I always used to talk a
lot about that... . like his thing about horror
songs, and stuff like that, the whole thing
about how kids are really into that sort of
thing, Grimm’s fairy tales, that John always
used to justify his black humour.
We just wanted it to appeal on every level.
Like a Sufi tale—one of those tales of the
dervishes. It’s a good Story in itself, it’s
exciting, it’s got a beginning, a middle and
an end. It’s a good story from the point of
view of it being ethnic in quality, a Persian
thing, it’s beautifully written, yet at the
Same time deep down below is a thread. If
you're a seeker you get something from it,
if you’re well along the path you get some-
thing from it, and even somebody like Baba,
who’s at the absolute pinnacle of realisation,
you can look at something like that and see
some beauty in it, see something special in it.
That was really what I was trying to aim at
with ‘Tommy’ so that even somebody who
wasn’t interested at all in spiritual matters
would still be able to dig it.
Yes, I think for instance a Marxist could
relate to ‘Tommy’ and see it in terms of a
Class struggle. Atheists and humanists could
see the liberation of man or something. All
kinds of people could identify with something
in it, not because it’s there but because it has a
simple enough and strong enough story line.
it’s also sufficiently vague. I always thought
‘Tommy’ vague. I never knew what it was
going on about. This might have been one of
the reasons for its success, and might have
saved it from appearing incredibly pretentious.
I think you’re absolutely right. | get
really irritated today that if in a rock song
you actually mention anything specifically
that is considered very bad in rock terms.
You know, hitting something head-on.
You’re supposed to skirt round it and flirt
round it in a way say that a Stones lyric
would, and maybe mention it in a sort of
double-meaning, double-edged vague way.
I've always been very frustrated with this
aspect of rock, I don’t get anything from that
type of song. I think that the great sort of
Strata of rock critique if you like, has not
changed in the years since I wrote ‘Tommy’.
They’re still the same, I think they prefer
things to be fairly open ended so that they
can lay their own thing into it. What it’s
doing, and I think this is something I’ve
more recently discovered, is it’s bringing
music which had merits and a message
nearer to the universality of an instrumental
piece. Like if you sit down and listen to a
113
piece of Debussy, one person can see the
Arctic and another can see the Russian
Revolution, you can see anything you like
because there’s nothing suggested by it
other than in a musical way. When you’ve
got words, “I walked into the room and I
picked up my spade, and I work for the
Revolution” type of thing .. . I mean that is
enough to kill anything stone-dead.
You know you were saying you wrote
‘I’m Free’ before you wrote ‘Tommy’,
but the words to it to me are pure Baba or
pure mysticism. It could be Zen, it could be
anything ... ‘‘Freedom tastes of Reality’’...
**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 that Messiahs take you to the door,
but no one has the guts to leave the temple’’.
That says a hell of a lot and it doesn’t waste
any words, and it really isn’t vague is it?
I think ‘I’m Free’ was obviously put to-
- gether after I’d understood quite a lot about
Baba. I think what I was getting at was that
I had the chords to it before and I had the ‘I’m
Free’ thing, but I probably originally wrote
it as a punk song. ‘Sensation’ I wrote about
a chick I met in Australia, and it was called
‘She’s A Sensation’. “Sally Simpson’ was
about a rock star and it was based on Jim
Morrison. I met him in New York and he just
absolutely amazed me—some -bird went up
to talk to him or something, one and of his
bodyguards just punched her in the midriff
and she doubled up and he just carried on
talking, he didn’t see her. Then the same
afternoon at this club he actually tried to
pull this chick, and the way she was... . I
wrote that thing and then realised that in a
way he was exactly like what Tommy was,
and I just re-wrote it. ““We’re Not Going To
Take It’? was a song I’d had knocking about
on the cards for ages about fascism.
When the first Who version of ‘Tommy’
came out, I thought ‘We’re Not Going To
Take It’ was about the fact that people
wouldn’t follow ‘Tommy’ because they
didn’t have the patience. They wanted the
rewards without the hard work, they wanted
Spiritual enlightment and they didn’t want to
do what Tommy said they had to do, meditate,
or whatever it was, and they rejected him.
Now in the film, Ken Russell’s version has
got that they’re being conned by Uncle Ernie
and Frank and that ‘Tommy’ doesn’t know
this, he’s not aware of the fact and he’s
completely innocent. But they don’t follow
him because they are being ripped off. -
That was basically originally the theme.
I mean it was a bit of both in a way. It’s
the way that Ken Russell sees it and a bit
of the way you see it.
It wasn’t that Tommy was conning them?
No, the. whole thing with Tommy was
that in the last count in our version he
realises that they’re being conned and so he
hots things up so they’ll rebel against him.
It’s like a sort of crucifixion thing, he
sacrifices his own aura to them in order
that they can go back to what they were
doing before, because he realises that that’s
the best thing they could be doing. This
is this whole thing about “‘if you follow me”’
you know; Tommy suddenly goes from
this poetic airy-fairy character and suddenly
gets tough; he suddenly says “if you want
to follow me, you’ve got to do this, you’ve
got to play pinball, you’ve got to put ear-
plugs in, if you want to be like me, that is
what you have to do, you’ve got to go
through what I did’’. He knows that to be
completely ridiculous, he knows that what
they needed to do was to go back to live
their lives, but he realised that it had gone
too far. All he wanted at first was to welcome
people to his house, and allow them to be
with him; that was all very nice, but it had
got out of hand.
Because they wanted answers?
NY CS
But you see, there’s sort of a double thing;
first of all Tommy gets God-realisation. and
when the mirror’s smashed he breaks through
and gets an amazing spiritual realisation,
which other people sense because he becomes
a vibration, etc., and they feel this power.
Then on the other hand, that is destroyed.
It’s like a twist at the end of a twist, it’s
like sticking the knife in and then that’s not
enough, so you twist the knife as you pull it
out. This is what I find is very Meher Baba;
Baba sort of gives a clue to something
important, and just as you think you under-
stand, you see a little footnote which says
‘“all the above is irrelevant’’. He always has
that twist at the end of everything. .
I think that one of the most successful
things about the end of ‘Tommy’ was that Kit
persuaded me to reprise what was originally
in the ‘Go To The Mirror’, the doctor scene,
‘See Me, Feel Me’ and the ‘Listening To You’
theme. When it came down to it, what I
thought was so incredible about that was
that here he was, he was still the same guy,.
he was still God-realised and all that, but
this was now the pain, if you like, and the
remoteness and the loneliness and the frustra-
tion, plus being God-realised. In other words
*“Pve done it, but now I’ve got to have the
patience and the love to drag the rest of
humanity through it’ sort of thing. That’s
really what the whole of the end of it is—
that despite the fact he created this big
achievement, he’s not going to be complete,
or not going to be at rest if you like, until
everybody is. And that that will never be.
Deep down inside of every human being is
this feeling that nothing is ever going to be
complete, that the circle will never connect,
and that that in itself is the secret to infinity,
that fact that the circle will never, ever be
completed is the knowledge of infinity
which we have very dimly at the moment.
I think you get it from things like Baba liking
that song “There’s A Heartache Following
Me’, and strange songs like ‘Begin the
Beguine’, and things like that: that the
Avatar’s role (not that ‘Tommy’ was ever
meant to be an Avatar, as such, or a Mes-
siah), is a remote and lonely one, as well
as being an incredibly important and
glorious one.
I was amazed when I read Ken Russell’s
script to find it so close to my original
interpretation of ‘Tommy’,
In the original record when he was staring
in the mirror singing ‘‘Listening to you.
gazing at you’’ etc, who was he singing to?
Was it to himself in the mirror?
No, because the whole thing is at the end,
because the people have walked away from
him, he suddenly sees himself where he really.
is, he suddenly realises completely and
totally that he’s definitely not a Messiah,
that he’s not a complete person, that he’s
still got a place to go, and that the place he’s
got to go, if you like, is total universality.
He’s very much on the path, but...
But doesn’t he make a mistake? I got the
impression that all along he was fooling
himself. He thought that he had reached the
stage of God-realization or at least gained an
~ advanced spiritual awareness. Then at the end
when he was rejected he finally got the
message, And then did he really break through
the veil of illusion or whatever and realize there
was something bigger than himself.
I suppose that’s a possible way of looking
at it. I mean I’ve always imagined from my
point of view that the mirror smash was a
reverse trauma, that the mother is an
important sort of key, a sort of symbol in a
way, but the most important thing being the ©
mirror. In my story, he witnesses the thing
in the mirror. In my story, I imagine that
he didn’t actually go to the room, there was »
just a mirror by the door and he witnesses
the murder in the mirror, and this is where
the whole importance of the mirror comes in.
The only thing that he feels is safe to look
at, that won’t cause him any problems, is
his own reflection, which deep inside he
knows is his own reflection, but he’s sort of
ignorant: So that when it actually comes to
the moment of trauma, this whole thing has
been building up and the mirror smashes
and he sees himself fall into bits, he sees his
own image which he’s been focused on,
that he sort of worships as a sort of leader
and a guide and a friend collapse. Then, at
that point, he realises a lot of other things
about life, in that instant. And the unique-
ness of the way that he’s been living his life,
sort of pushes him. We’re all sort of grabbing
about, doing our thing and he’s in this
pure sort of untainted, silent world, and it
just flings him out and he comes out a bit
ahead. that was really the way I felt it.
Every piece of creative work like ‘Tommy’
must be to some extent autobiographical,
Even a top-ten-songette will reflect something
of the writer, Wasn’t a lot of ‘Tommy’ to do
with your own experiences?
I don’t know. I mean I know the difference
between say writing something like ‘Tommy’
and writing something like ‘Substitute’.
‘Substitute’ is an autobiographical thing,
and ‘My Generation’ is autobiographical,
even though I never went through the ‘My
Generation’ type stuff. I was part of it ina
way, in a way that I can’t really understand,
I can’t really explain. It wasn’t in such a
glamorous way, in a_ Street fighting,
fucking-round-back-corner way, it was the
exact opposite. It was in an un-glamorous,
frustrated, school-boy type thing. I think
there are two ways I can write, even today;
aa SRO ne RE Te RRR RR Sr eee Ri a
a lot of the stuff for example on ‘Who’s
Next’? was written, not from an autobio-
graphical thing, but from an intellectual
point of view. You read something and it
impresses you, and I suppose in a way that
becomes part of your life. It’s the impressions
that you’ve got from something, rather than
actually experiencing it.
Yes, but what I was thinking was some-
thing like smashing the mirror. Tommy’s
experience might have been like, for example,
your first religious experience, or your first
LSD experience, or your first cannabis
experience. When you first turn-on with pot,
you break through that one point of view
you’ve had all your life, and realise that
there. are thousands of points of view. You
suddenly see that there’s a lot more to life
than you ever thought, a lot of subtle little
things: it’s quite an amazing experience—
LSD is an even more staggering experience.
I think in a way that the autobiographical
bit there would tie-up with the Acid Queen
and Cousin Kevin and Uncle Ernie. Uncle
Ernie is like the grandmother thing that I
had, which I found really quite terrifying,
and Cousin Kevin is like just the cruelty
that was tied up in school, the taunts, and
the Acid Queen thing was quite obviously
the thing you get from drugs. Really, to me.
despite the fact there was this great mystical
thing, the thing that really attracted me
about dope, I must admit, and also with
acid was its glamour. It might have been a
secret glamour, but it did make me feel sort of
glamorous and special and sort of different.
It was that athe than getting stoned and
looking at things andtearning about them.
That’s why I made the Acid Queen such a
double-edged thing. On one hand it portray-
ed the glamour and excitement and the chal-
lenge of drugs; and on the other hand I
tried to put across the slimy side, which
is in you. You know, you can’t blame the
drug, it’s in you, it gets the wrong answers,
or makes the wrong reactions.
I also thought that the Acid Queen was
a prostitute, a sexual thing too?
Yes, it is because you have to pay for
drugs. ‘
Were you an atheist before you got into
Meher Baba:: :
’ Yeah, I think I was. I never talked very
much about that sort of thing at college,
nor about things like politics. I mean I’d
been through that Aldermaston march
thing, Ban the Bomb thing, but always playing
in some silly trad jazz band in the back-
ground. Like everybody and his brother
seemed to have had their first fuck on the
Aldermarston march, and a lot of people
went along for that reason, and I was sort
of tied up with that kind of individual. I
remember feeling that the sheer acceptance
of a God, or of something as nebulous
as God, when things like bombs and things
like this were going down was somehow
irresponsible and evil. I don’t know why.
That was the kind of consciousness that
was going on at the time, that people that
believed in God weren’t just idiots, but they
were irresponsible. I still have arguments now
with people who say you’re just opting out
of your responsibilities, you’re not facing up
to what’s really going on in the world, that
there’s fucking capitalist oppression, that
there are things still to be done. The problem
really comes when you start to wonder
what Baba means by responsibility—you
know, “tend to your worldly duties’.
Because inside everybody there’s not just
conscience, there’s also motivation, and you
get this thing sometimes, that you get so
LJ Mos en deren 7 Oe Ree OR eRe CE A A SD Wey,
fucking angry with what’s going on in the
world that you want to do something actual
about it. I think this is really one of the things
which exploded a bit in ‘Tommy’ and made
me run the risk of appearing pretentious,
I thought in the end “well, fuck it, I’ve
got to make some sort of statement about
spitituality, because it seems to be the only
thing I can do’’. Because I’ve been writing
so much in the worst way, you know. I
think it’s a very pertinent point, because,
it’s perhaps getting a bit too intellectual,
but I think that atheistic thinking is often
much more humanitarian than mystical
thinking, at least on the surface.
Yes, I think that what’s going on with
someone who is sincerely trying to under-
stand the world and trying to tell the truth,
is more important than whether they’re
an atheist or into mysticism or whatever.
Baba says that there are many atheists more
advanced on the spiritual path, or whatever,
than people who think themselves religious.
I think deep-down that this is everbody’s
fear, and it’s as much my fear as anybody
else, that there is this great temptation to
lean towards hypocrisy because there are so
many escape clauses that you can give
yourself if you want. I think I’ve learnt a
fantastic amount of very hard lessons from
the Murshida,* but she also can unwittingly
provide me with escape clauses. One sort of.
thing that I know at the moment which is, I
was thinking about this the other day: I
really did feel very much under Baba’s
orders when I was putting ‘Tommy’ to-
gether, I felt in a very fanciful way then,
something I wouldn’t feel now, that really
I was under his thumb. Probably it’s more
the case now; I know much more about
him, I maybe think of him less often, but
I’m much more involved in a life which is
sort of practical day-by-day wearing things
down rather than a kind of flippant love-
affair thing. That was really what motivated
a lot of what makes ‘Tommy’ I suppose the
most ambitious thing that I’ve ever got into,
*The Murshida is the name given to the spiritual lead-
er of the sufi movement. Townshend met Murshida
Ivy Duce, the 80 year old spiritual teacher and
head of ‘Sufism Reoriented’, a number of times
when he visited San Fransisco.
SAU ALLA OO)! LA eee pe see Se ee ms
BS RON ke fot eae on MS eg et ade MSs Me
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and I don’t suppose that Ill ever do any-
thing as ambitious as it again. Take “Quad-
rophenia”: I mean, that was fucking hard
enough to get together, and that was just a
story of a day in the life of a punk, let alone
getting something together which is the day
in the life of a punk and the history of
society and childhood and this and that and
mysticism...
It must have taken a vast amount of energy
and hard graft. How the hell did you do it?
It just sort of came together. I think a lot
of it just has to come back to Baba, it just
has to, because it’s an open and shut case.
What was different about that particular
time was that it was that period when Baba
takes you by the scruff of the neck and
shows you what your potential is, you know
what I mean?
What about things that came out around
the same time?—‘Tommy’ came out in °69,
you were writing it in °67/68 I suppose, what
did you think of things like ‘Pet Sounds’ by
the Beach Boys, and ‘Sgt. Pepper’ from the
Beatles?
Well, I thought they were amazing. In
those days we were produced by Kit
Lambert, and going to the studio was
something to be sort of looked forward to
and dreaded simultaneously, and I always
saw ‘Sgt. Pepper’ and ‘Pet Sounds’ as being
sort of group productions, if you like, by
eroups.
They seem to stand out, I mean as you say,
the group suddenly say ‘‘we’ve been doing
this job, now we’ll do our thing’’. You know,
the Beach Boys were getting into spiritual
things...
Well, I think the thing about both of
them that still amazes me to this day, is the
fact that both of them have very loose
concepts, and in a way the concept of ‘Sgt.
Pepper’ is even looser than ‘Pet Sounds’,
because they’re both such amazing albums,
and they both contain such incredible songs,
a single sort of universal concept breathes
through, that sort of oneness that comes from
anything great. It’s like looking at a great
picture, or hearing a great piece of music.
At the time it came out I thought that Sgt.
Pepper was almost great music but not quite.
Now I think there is no doubt, it’s amazing.
But it was always an L.S.D. record to me.
It wasn’t to me. I still get new things from
it now. I think the thing about it was that it
was so perfect that you couldn’t believe it,
and because it is practically perfect it will
Stay that way for centuries, and centuries
and centuries. And I think the same thing
applies to ‘Pet Sounds’; and ‘Pet Sounds’
is a mono album, as well.
It’s not really a concept album, it’s just
songs, isn’t it?
No, it’s the concept of making a perfect
album, going so far that you’re really trying
to get perfection. It’s something that the
Who have never, ever done—I really got
into the albums, but at the same time I still
had had my basic sort of roots, which were
based in all kinds of strange things. I
realised the other day for example how much
my writing was influenced by Mose Allison.
Didn’t you try to do that even with ‘Quad-
rophenia’?
No, not really. ‘Quadrophenia’ was
slightly different, it was me trying to see if I
could make an album with the Who which I
controlled, that was all. I mean if I had been
into making the perfect album I wouldn’t
have put it out because I knew when we
were putting it out that it lacked dynamics.
I think that the great thing about the film
was it revealed to me that ‘Tommy’ was still
< i oe. ee
115
Good morning converts!
I’m your Uncle Ernie
and I welcome you to Tommy's
Holiday Camp
The camp with the difference
never mind the weather
When you come to [ommy’s
the holiday’s forever
Welcome! |
Get your Tommy T shirts
and your stickers
and your Tommy mirrors to smas
Don’t rush - keep steady!
Have your money ready
Buy your way to heaven
That comes to one pound seven
Bless you love
Buy your shades
and earplugs here
Keep in line,
Ive got a huge supply
Get your lommy record .
You can really hear him talk
Tommy pics..and badges
Half a nicker for the cork
Keep in line, playmates
You lucky people
The camp with the difference
Never mind the weather
When you come to Tommy’s
The holidays forever
very much alive, still evolving. I mean if
you take something more recent like
‘Quadrophenia’ the day that that tape was
delivered to MCA Records it was dead,
from an evolutionary point of view. It was a
statement made and isolated. There’s a
difference between something like that and
something like “Tommy’ because “Tommy’
is evolving and sort of living, so you don’t
mind if it changes a little bit here and there
because it still feels like it’s working. That’s
what I feel about the distinction between
something like “I Can See For Miles’ which
is a statement made and finished and you
either take it or leave it, and something like
‘My Generation’ which I think is still alive.
I don’t think it’s a better record and I don’t
think it’s a better song but it’s better because
it’s still living.
I remember when you were mixing ‘Quadro-
phenia’ you kept going on about, this should
be done again, and that’s not right, and that’s
not right and should be redone . . . but you
said that obviously you’ve got to stop some-
where and get on mixing. Whereas the Beach
Boys’ with that song ‘Heroes and Villains’
took about 9 months, or something, to do.
Well, yes. I’ve got thoughts about doing it
now, doing a solo album, just 15 minutes a
side, but perfect. Then I think, well, that’s
not really what it’s all about. It’s how
precious you want to be, and what the right
result is. I mean these are the times when
preciousness in a way is important. The other
thing about ‘Quadrophenia’ which makes it
very distinctive to me in a sense, and it got
misconstrued in a lot of ways, that it was in
that sort of ilk and now we can be prepared
for more albums like ‘Quadrophenia’ and
‘Tommy’; it was really a grand flourish to
tie up all the loose ends of the Who’s
obsessive thing with adolescence and. rock
and roll, which with people like Roger is
still not dead, you know, but it’s dead in me.
I’m just not interested in punks on the street
anymore, I’m not interested in baggy white
trousers, and kids with their hair cut off.
I’m too old for it, and I just wanted to—in
one big fell swoop—build Jimmy up into
this big sort of super-hero and then flop him
down and leave him where we are today, fully
illustrating the complete emptiness of the
whole thing. And that’s why it’s not a partic-
ularly pleasant trip, in a way it’s a very
miserable sort of frustrated story. But I think
it was important to do. I now feel good about
the possibilities of future albums. I think the
Who could do an album of ‘Moon in June’
songs now, but I’m not sure that my fans
would see it the same way.
What did you think about people saying
that ‘Tommy’ was influenced by ‘S. F. Sorrow’!
Bullshit. ’'ve heard ‘S. F. Sorrow’, but I
actually heart it after ‘Tommy’ anyway.
And there was this thing of this ‘Teenage
Opera’ with Keith West that they kept
talking about, and they released a couple of
singles.
I think they were quite good. In fact, I
know the story, which was that I’d gone in
the papers and I’d talked about doing this
opera, and they just got fed up with waiting.
In fact in two of his interviews he said. that
they’d got fed up with waiting for Pete
Townshend’s opera and gone and got on
with making one. They never finished it
though.
But really, it’s all very well for me to
be influenced by things, but I’m never
influenced by anything that’s going around
now, never, not by the Stones or the Beatles
or anybody. I was influenced by that music
that we used to listen to in Ealing, and that’s
what formed my mind, and that was all my
credentials for the way that I compose and
stuff like that. And obviously a fantastic
amount by Dylan, without understanding a
fucking thing he was talking about or saying,
he still gave me an incredible amount.
To get back to ‘Tommy’, in the original
script a lot of it is this thing called ‘Deceived’
—a whole section, which as far as I can read
in the script was lots of different short
scenes. It was a very political thing, wasn’t
it? It was dropped. Now that would have
changed Ken Russell’s film quite a lot from
your original ‘Tommy’ wouldn’t it?
Yeah. I think basically the reason he took
that out was because of Roger. Roger never
liked the song and never, ever liked the idea
of having it in. He thought it was too long
and drawn out. I think it would have changed
it a bit. All the additional bits that [ve
written in the thing have been written because
Ken was worried that certain points might
escape people, and if you look at them
they’re all heavily laden with information;
like there’s the bit towards the end where
Frank and Nora are in a T.V. studio and
they’re sort of laying it on about the mother
being genuine and sincere and wanting her
son. She really believes her son is a great
man and she wants to allow everybody to
share in him, and Frank is saying ““A Tommy
camp in every city, but who am I to upset
their plans, it could make a million’, really
laying Uncle Ernie on the line very clearly.
And at the beginning of ‘Amazing Journey’
it’s not ‘‘Deaf, dumb and blind boy’’ it’s
‘“Now he is deaf, now he is dumb, now he is
blind’, in case anybody’s missed the point
It’s really so that people who only go and see
the film once get the full impact of it, and I
think ‘Deceived’ was something that Ken
felt was important to get across the whole
idea that the film of ‘Tommy’ had a political
angle. But towards the end he figured it
wasn't really necessary. In other words it was
something which came through when you
listened to ‘Tommy’, that it had a political
thing which was never really specified, in
the way that the drug thing was specified
and the spiritual thing was specified and the
child adolescent thing was specified. But the
\ followers,
~ *Tommy’.
political social thing wasn’t really clearly
laid out, and I think he wanted to lay out
the whole thing about the post war gener-
ation, which comes across a little bit in
‘Sally Simpson’; that thing about a kid
arguing with her parents about wanting to
get into some sort of trip and they say “No,
it’s not going to be good for you”’ but at the
same time saying things which in essence
are very wise and true, which is one of the
things which is so awful about your parents.
On the one hand they’re so stupid and on the
other hand they’re always so right, and that’s
very irritating.
But it was very political wasn’t it? I got
that impression reading it. People just walk
out of their jobs to follow Tommy and lay
down their tools to follow Tommy, and
soldiers walk away from the parade ground,
bank tellers walk out from behind the counter,
production workers . . . all that sort of thing.
Well the idea of it was that Tommy was
giving a lecture somewhere and Uncle Ernie
was piping it through all the broadcast
systems to the outside world, when he was
just talking to a small band of people. It was
to emphasise how the thing got out of scale.
About how Uncle Ernie was exploiting
Tommy?
Yeah. 3
And it was dropped. Actually, in terms of
making a film it was probably a good idea
that it was dropped because it was so difficult
and involved.
I didn’t really ever like the piece of music
written for it; Roger never liked it.
You recorded it?
Yeah. I liked bits of it.
Who sang it?
Roger sang it. It was on the tune of
‘I’m Free’, and it had bits of ‘Sensation’ in it.
It’s called ‘Deceived’, it’s obvious that the
the converts feel deceived by
No, no. It was “‘we’ve been deceived”...
What, by society?
Yeah. Basically the thing Was that it was
all supposed to be like post war, the war
had just gone over and was being celebrated
in a way, capitalism was taking root on the
strength of the war and all this type of
thing, or becoming strong on the strength
of the war. Tommy was just saying that
war is bad and it’s all absurd because he
could see bigger things above it all. In a
way I’m glad that it’s not in because |
always felt that Tommy’s trip towards the
end was that he realised that the best thing
for people to do was just carry on with their
normal lives. It always worried me a bit.
Did it ever occur to you when Ken Russell
wanted to make the film that he would just
use it as a vehicle for his own point of view?
Well, I always felt that this was one of the
most important things. When we _ first
finished ‘Tommy’ we talked a lot about
Ken Russell, and I liked the idea of Ken
Russell because in those days he was a
sort of arty film maker. It was only in more
recent years that he started to get into
things which are more sort of ego manifest.
Then we went through a thing when what
we were really after was a deal which would
enable us to control the film. But we could
never get close enough to that. Film com-
panies would always want somebody else
to control it really. And then in the end in
frustration, because we so badly wanted the
film to get made, we were almost going
to take anybody that came along. We were
involved in some talks with Hammer films
and Hammer films mentioned Ken Russell,
and I thought how amazing it would be if he
would do it because he would make it his
own, and I wouldn’t have to sit there and
explain it all. I mean the great thing about
somebody like Ken Russell is he would
stand by his own work. I just felt that he
was a big enough character to take it and
work with it. Also, I had a feeling that he
would make a very good film because I do
like a lot of his stuff that lots of other people
don’t necessarily like. Like I really like the
“The Music Lovers’, and ‘The Savage
Messiah’ and ‘Mahler’.
If I had ever dug in my heels about
“Tommy’ and said no-one has the right to
change my conception, it would have
killed ‘Tommy’ dead as a concept. A dead
classic. I felt it was still evolving, still un-
finished and still alive. I deliberately allowed
it to become public domain to a point so
it would stay alive. That was why when a
ballet company or a college came on and
asked permission to do their interpretation
we gave them the go ahead. Once you start
to be nit-picking about the rights of this and
that, everything gets bogged down and the -
usual result is that the work dies of asphyxia-
tion. In the case of Lou Reisner’s ‘Tommy’ it
was the idea of doing the production with a
full orchestra that appealed to me—it had
never been performed before to anything
other than the Who’s music. With Ken
Russell I was prepared to make concessions
and compromise some points in order to
have Ken make his alterations—it just meant
another evolution in the concept. I told him
I didn’t care if he altered all the words if he
needed to: “Listening to you I get the
porridge’’—whatever he wanted. I used to
be asked a lot of questions about what
‘Tommy’ meant which should be obvious
after seeing the film. I don’t think that rock *
and roll is something that Ken really cares
intensely about or understands. He is
interested in the phenomenon of rock and
roll because it produces good ideas and
some good music and he was interested in
the spiritual implications of ‘Tommy’. He is
a very English director in as much as he
really understood some of the early wartime
sequences which I am sure no foreign
director could have faithfully interpreted and
he really has-clarified the story line.
Do you like what he’s done?
Yeah. I do. [ think a lot of it falls short
of the kind of technical camera excellence
that is in a film like ‘Mahler’ or ‘Savage
Messiah’, but then I think a lot of that
would be out of place in ‘Tommy’. I don’t
think ‘Tommy’ is really about great camera
work or stimulating shots; I think it’s about
a story and I also think that the most
important thing really is that “Tommy’ had
quite a few sort of humorous angles about it,
which have come across quite well.
Oliver Reed comes out of it very well.
Yeah. I think everybody comes out of it
well. For example, the original doctor song
was supposed to be tongue in cheek, which
was never really grasped by anybody. In
any of the remakes that were done of it,
it was always treated very seriously. But you
look at the words, they’re such a joke. What
are the lines in it? “‘He smiles, he cries, he
pokes his tongue out at everyone”’ or some-
thing like that. It was meant to be fairly
light-hearted, because it lays it on thicker
about Tommy’s remoteness.
Would you have liked ‘Tommy’ to have
been made more as a rock film? The pinball
wizard sequence is obviously like a rock film.
It’s a very exciting part. But something like.
the specialist is very formal and normal.
When we were mixing the album we
realised that stuff like ‘Holiday Camp’ and
‘Mother And Son’ and stuff like that are
very sort of like Ann-Margretty, you know,
they’re very sort of middle of the road
music. It hasn’t really worried me very much.
I mean, if I had done the thing I think there’s
no doubt I would have tried to have made it
more sort of rock universal, but then I don’t
think it would have worked properly
because ‘Tommy’ isn’t really bound in by
that type of thing.
Has it occured to you that maybe the
original Tommy rock concept has been made
into a Mary Poppins? Maybe ‘Who?’ fans will
think that you’ve sold out.
It’s occurred to me, yes. I think to a
great degree you’ve got to live with the
fact that it has been sold out. It’s just that
it should have been sold out sooner.
I don’t mean anything against Ken Russell,
I think he’s done it well, but what I mean is
that they might expect you to get some sort
of ‘acid-rock’ film director to make it with
‘acid-rock’ people.
I don’t know, it doesn’t bother... I
resisted all the legitimate actors in it. I
resisted them all. I didn’t want Ann-Margret
in it. I didn’t want Jack Nicholson and I
didn’t want Oliver Reed in it, because none
of them were rock people and I wanted
people that could sing rock—it was Ken
who said that he had to have those people.
He had to have people that could act and,
if you like, Oliver Reed and Ann-Margret
are the key people in it, they are the funda-
mental pivot of the film. I mean, the fact
that Ann-Margret was a good singer was
convenient and the fact that she wasn’t a
rock-type singer didn’t matter too much
because what we were really interested in
was that fact that happens to be one of the
only good actresses that can sing at all. In
her class she’s a great singer, you know, she’s
not necessarily entirely suited to rock but...
Who would you have cast in the different
roles?
~I made all kinds of suggestions in the
beginning, I had a really crazy cast list. I
wanted Tiny Tim as the Pinball Wizard
because I imagined that it would sound
really great on a hundred ukeleles. I just
thought he was freaky enough and would be
pretty good at it. I wanted Arthur Brown for
the Doctor. I thought that the Mother would
be good by a sort of older jazz singer who
could sing rock, like Cleo Laine or Georgia
Brown or somebody of that ilk, or maybe
even somebody like Joan Baez.
Somebody said you wanted, or you were
thinking of Stevie Wonder, is that right?
Well, this is a really awful story because
Stevie Wonder was offered the part of
Pinball Wizard by Robert Stigwood and I
think was interested in doing it. Then Ken
said you can’t have a blind negro being
=beaten by a deaf dumb and white kid,
because, well, it’s just racially wrong. When
the news got back to Stevie Wonder he was
incredibly annoyed. When he came over to
England, Eric Clapton and I went to see him
and he wouldn’t talk to us. He wouldn’t
talk to Eric at all because I was with Eric,
and Eric couldn’t work out what was going
on. But when Eric saw him again in America
he was really nice to him.
You think you got the blame? I heard
somebody say Mick Jagger was approached.
Mick Jagger was considered for all kinds
of things. He was adamant right from the
very first time I spoke to him that he didn’t
want anything to do with it at all, but
Robert Stigwood kept pushing and pushing.
David Bowie we approached with the
possibility that he might be interested in
doing Pinball Wizard or Acid Queen. The
same with Mick Jagger. And also we were
talking about people like Lou Reed for
Acid Queen. I wanted it to be more surreal,
more sort of Fellini.
Who thought of Tina Turner?
Robert Stigwood.
She’s very well cast. Why did Robert
Stigwood produce it, was it his idea?
Yeah. I should think so. I think the thing
is that he’s had experience with making
films of rock operas before. He knows that
they work and that they make money in the
shape of ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’. He’s an
entrepreneur, and he’s got plenty of money.
He’s always been a great friend of the group
and of Kit and Chris—he’s got an involve-
ment. And through my involvement with
Eric (Stigwood manages Eric Clapton) we
were in contact with him at that time. I
think it generally followed through. I don’t
know—I think there are a lot of things wrong
with the way Stigwood goes about things,
but I think in a way he’s ideal for this type
of thing because he’s the kind of guy that
really leaves people alone. Like he hasn’t
bothered Ken with a lot of stipulations
about this and that. All he wanted was a
good set of marquee names. He wanted
Jack Nicholson, Oliver Reed and Elton John.
Columbia were very willing to distribute
the picture whoever was in it. They are
happier with bigger names obviously, but the
the reason it’s good to have big names and
the reason it does affect distributors is I
think because a name like Jack Nicholson
now is even hotter than it was at the begin-
ning of the year. There’ll be a million people
go to see the film just because Jack Nichol-
son’s in it.
Do you think they’ll be disappointed that
he’s only got a guest appearance?
Oh yeah, I think they’ll be disappointed.
I think the other thing you’ve got to realise
is how many cultist fans Ann-Margret has.
I mean they might not necessarily be dis-
appointed at the amount that she’s on,
but they might be disappointed at the way
she’s portrayed.
In a way, Keith Moon (as Uncle Ernie)
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comes over as quite loveable in the film: he’s
meant to be evil in the script but he comes
over quite loveable.
No, he’s not meant to be particularly evil.
He was in the original script, but then that
role was taken over by Frank. So Uncle
Ernie becomes just like Frank’s stooge.
Everything that you now see Oliver Reed
doing in the film Keith was originally going
to do. I mean all that the Lover was going to
do in the original script was sit there looking
loveable in the shape of Richard Chamber-
lain, and Tommy Steele was on the cards at
one point to be the Lover.
Wasn’t David Essex supposed to have been
in it as well?
Ken Russell wanted David Essex in it,
which was very weird because everyone else
was against. I like him as a bloke, and I
really feel bad about the fact that he was
ever suggested and did the work that he did
and was then turned down, because I don’t
like the way it reflects on me. Because we are
good friends. And I like what he does in its
way, and I really liked him the first time I
saw him in ‘Godspell’, I thought he was
fucking great in that. I think what he does is
fairly lukewarm-alright. It doesn’t worry me
that much. Ken was just hyped up by the
producer of ‘Stardust’, David Puttnam,
by what went on when they were doing
‘Stardust? up at Manchester Bellevue—
5,000 little stupid teenyboppers storming the
stadium.
When this film first started you seemed very
unhappy. Unhappy is the politest word I
could think of. In fact you disappeared for a
bit. I always thought something must have
gone down between Ken Russell and you or
something, or were you just not happy with
the way it was going?
I don’t really know—this is something
that happens to me often. People come up
to me and say “‘Ah, it’s really nice to know
that you’ve got out of a bad scene’, and I
never know what they’re talking about. All
I really know is that I got dragged very low
by the amount that I was drinking and by
the fact that I was like... well, I was away
from home and it was a sort of very low level
of existence. That’s really one of the things
that puts me off touring—what everybody
else in the band likes, getting pissed and
going out. It makes me feel really awful
because I feel generally sort of high and
content just here doing nothing, just being
what I am. All that seems to me to be throw-
ing myself into what I regard as, not decad-
ent, but sort of mucky and nasty. I mean I do
like getting drunk, but it always makes me
a wee bit depressed. I don’t know why—I
suppose because I’m sort of prudish about
it: and: I don't dike to..: ... Ie feel sort of
Christian about it you know—immoral.
There was a point when I was a bit peeved
and that was when the filming first started
at Harefield Grove. That pissed me off a bit -
because I: didn’t know quite what my role
was, as this Musical Director, whereas in the
studio I’d been working and effervescing. I
used to roll up there at 8.30 and sit there all
day—I can’t say that that side of the film
business did much for me.
You said to me once, after ‘Tommy’ this
was, that when you’re on stage you play your
best, and you focus on Baba, you’re playing
to Baba on stage. Do you imagine that he’s
sitting in the audience, or sort of standing on
stage?
Well he sort of constantly comes into my
head on stage; it’s like in any extreme,
troubled situation, which is really what being
on the stage is. I mean it’s very nerve-racking.
122.
It’s great to be in a band like the Who
because you could get away with anything—
you can go on and be really terrible and yet
still feel safe because you’re not stuck out
there on your own, you’re contained within
the aura ofa group witha history and animage.
But it’s still very nerve-racking and it’s
because it’s such a strained situation that
you tend to think of something that gives
you comfort. You think of Baba. It doesn’t
happen quite so much now I must admit; in
the last couple of tours that we’ve done I’ve
been really disenchanted with playing on the
stage, I just don’t get anything out of it. I
don’t think there’s any way to make it
happen other than in a natural way and I
think that what always used to give me great
stamina and enthusiam was the fact that
‘Tommy’ was a great vehicle and that always
made me think of Baba all the time. I'd have
him in the forefront, not subconsciously,
but in the forefront of my imagination right
the way through the performance. | think
the Sundowner (Christmas 1973 gigs in
London), apart from the gig we did at
Portsmouth for the kids who did the film
there, was the last really good gig that we
did. The one at Portsmouth that we did for
those kids was really amazing. The one at
Charlton and the ones in America were
absolute garbage, they really were so bad.
Not manifestly, I mean they could be quite
good, in a way, or above avergae. But there
was really no magic in them for me, they
were very bland. I thought perhaps a lot of it
might have been my fault in a way, I was so
fully occupied in other things.
But I think one thing that might be nice—
a nice bonus from the ‘Tommy’ film—is that
it might enable us to justify playing more of
it on stage again. I mean you don’t often
come up with numbers that are as ballsy as
“Pan ree vs 5
But then again the audience always want it,
don’t they? I always felt that the Who was fed
up with ‘Tommy’ and although the audience
wanted it the Who had had enough of it.
That was very true. I mean we did play
the whole thing all the time, and we were
fed up with it.
It would be great if the Who got together
and did the whole thing an as opera again. I
don’t know whether it’s possible anymore. I
mean is Moony capable of that? It must have
taken a lot of bloody work—a lot of energy.
Yeah, it did. Moony’s a better drummer
now in fact, but... well, we’re all a lot older.
] mean, I find it a lot more difficult to prance
about on the stage. If we're contemplating
a six week tour I’m going to have to go into a
gymnasium, because it really does take a lot
out of you to play. It depends what length
the show is: one and a half, one and three
quarter hours is just about the length of a
football match, and I think anybody can
play football for one and a half hours and
occasionally go into a spurt of energy, but
the one that included ‘Tommy’ used to be
three hours long.
I think that Ken Russell’s film is going to
sort of show a lot of people what ‘Tommy’ is
about for the first time. What I think is so
surprising is that Ken Russell has done such
a literal translation of ‘Tommy’. It got
changed as he was doing it, a lot got changed,
but the script seemed very literal.
Yes. This amazed me because I had always
thought that probably one of the biggest
mistakes the Who ever made, or maybe it
was just me, was doing something as
story-like as ‘Tommy’ and then explaining
it as carefully as I did. Bob Dylan for
example, never says anything about his
songs and from odd things tea Te has said,
he seems to have absolutely nothing to say.
He really hasn’t. It’s like me in a way. If
somebody asked me about ‘Substitute’ |
wouldn’t know really what to say because
] didn’t really write it, it just sort of emerged.
And ‘I Can See For Miles’, I didn’t really
have a lot to do with at the time. And it
wasn’t because I was doped out of my brain
or anything...
You don’t sit down consciously and
intellectually and think: ‘‘I will write a song
about this’’? 7
No. I was just in my little studio playing
for amusement, and often I used to scribble
out lyrics very quickly so that I'd have
something to write and play around with.
If you like, it’s stream of consciousness stuff
and I think Dylan’s writing practically
always seems to be like that—he con-
sciously does it now; he goes into a studio
and if they don’t get it first time round he
scraps the whole thing and a lot of the
musicians who work with him can’t get into
that. I’m the reverse. I still write the same
way, I still tend to write off the top of my
head but once I’ve written it I don’t see why
I shouldn’t cut it. Critics can talk about my
stuff—why can’t I? I just become my own
critic and I analyse my own stuff. That’s
really what happened with ‘Tommy’, and
I think it’s quite good in a way that ‘Tommy’
has been able to stand that.
One very important thing about ‘Tommy’
I think, is that you haven’t really—and this is
a bit sad for people who never saw it—but
you haven’t really heard ‘Tommy’ or ex-
perienced it until you’ve seen it live. And
then when you go back and listen to the
record, although the record’s got everything
that the live performance has, it’s just
nowhere near the same—at all. This sounds
like Roger Daltrey’s thing, he’s always going
on about you’ve got to hear the Who live, but
he’s dead right.
But he also says other things which are
based on that kind of thing—he says that
you’ve got to allow things to emerge from a
road situation, as ‘Tommy’ came from the
road, and you’ve got to rehearse things
before you go into a studio. You’ve got to
play them on stage before you go into a
studio. A lot of this type of thing did happen
with ‘Tommy’. But the thing that’s different
is that at that particular time we didn’t know
that much about recording. Kit Lambert
was still learning and he didn’t really
produce to make a good sound. He produced
to try and get the most difficult group to
record a well-known record. And we’ve
still got the same problem, we’re still very,
very difficult to record—not to make sound
good but to get the excitement that is
obviously in the band, across.
Look at that Charlton thing, you look at
the T.V. thing and you see the group and you
hear the music—and I did as good a mix as |
could and I know the visuals aren’t up to
much—but because you’re not there, the
whole thing might just as well not happen.
It just doesn’t equal what actually happens
out front at the concert. But there’s no
question in my mind that the Who will
probably never reach that kind of peak we
got during that performance of ‘Tommy’
because it was -..
It was more than just a concert, it was a
fascinating kind of experience.
Well it was for us. What was pushing us
on was knowing that this was really doing
us good and that it was really working,
whereas most live performances of any group
not least the Who, are 50% getting through
and 50% frustration. The great thing about
‘Tommy’ was that it was 100% getting
through.
I always watch audiences when I go to
concerts, I find them fascinating. The most
amazing I’ve ever seen was at a Beatles
concert. This was when the Who were
relatively unknown and got a couple of dates
playing at the bottom of the bill on a Beatles
concert in Blackpool in about 1964. I went
along with the group and I watched the
Beatles very closely from the side of the stage.
The young girls in the audience were as
interesting and exciting as the Beatles. All
fainting and going into trances and screaming.
Anyway another incredible audience reaction
but very different, was when The Who
played at the Isle of Wight festival. The Who
just walked on and went Straight into
‘Tommy’, all the way ‘through about a
thousand times better than the record. I
hadn’t seen The Who for about two years and
I was amazed at how professional you were.
I was sitting there in the very front row
transfixed, and I looked around at the half a
million people behind me and they were all
transfixed too. Sitting there with their
mouths open and trembling. That was a
remarkable concert.
I remember your comment afterwards.
You came back and said, ‘““You know, you’re
quite good. You’re developing into quite
a nice little group”’’.
What was incredible about the Isle of
Wight thing was that the Who were totally
and completely in control. We’d just come
back from that lengthy American tour, and
half way through that American tour we
played at a place called Chicago Electric
Kinetic theatre or something, Joe Cocker
was on the bill, he’d done a whole tour with
us. We’d open up with ‘Can’t Explain’,
‘Substitute’ maybe even the ‘Mini-Opera’ and
stuff like that, then we’d play ‘Tommy’ from
start to finish, which was still bubbling
about in the bottom of the American charts
in the 50’s, and then we’d finish up with
‘My Generation’ or something and a great
big, long-drawn-out boogie including ‘Magic
Bus’. The heavy metal. The kids used to
like the heavy metal, but they didn’t know
quite what to make of ‘Tommy’ and so
people just used to sit very quietly and they
wouldn’t clap between numbers and _ they
didn’t know whether to be respectful or what
because this was the Who who at the end
of the act were going to smash up their
instruments. They didn’t know what was
going to happen. Now half way through
this gig in Chicago all of a sudden everybody
realised that something was working—lI
don’t know quite what it was but everybody
all at the same time, just stood up and
stayed standing up.
From that moment on they would always
stand up at exactly this same point, and I
could never work out—I can’t remember
when it was. It might have been ‘Listening
To You’ or at the end of ‘Go To The
Mirror Boy’. It was the first time we’d
created a theatrical device that worked
every time. Like a piece of opera where
when the heroine dies it always makes
you feel a little bit sad. This was the first
thing that really worked, apart from smash-
ing guitars, every time. It was the first thing
that we could rely on. We really started to
explore its potential so that by the time
we got round to the Isle of Wight we knew
exactly what worked and what you skipped
over and got done quickly. It was a great
concert for us, because we felt so in control
of the whole situation. We were able to just
come in, do it and not need to know any-
thing about what was going on. In other
words we didn’t spend time at the Festival
getting into the vibrations, didn’t stay to see
Bob Dylan, didn’t care what was going on.
We knew that stage act we had, with
‘Tommy’ in it, would work under any
circumstances because it had worked so
many times on the tour. I think that was a
great part of that period for the Who,
because we knew the instrinsic stage theat-
rical power of ‘Tommy’. It was rock and
roll, but it was still a piece of theatre that
we knew worked, like Agatha Christie and
‘The Mousetrap’. We knew it was going
to have a long run. We knew we were on to
a good thing and it gave us such strength
and confidence. Now the Who are again
back on the road looking for something
new, I think we’re back where we were 10
years ago. We’re back again in exactly the
same position.
But it must be quite exciting to be in that
position?
Oh yes, it’s nice to be able to afford to
get into that. It’s frustrating sometimes
when people can’t wait because they don’t
believe, if you like, in magic. They believe in
facts. That’s why sometimes it’s very
difficult for me to work things out effectively
inside a group like the Who. ‘Tommy’
met up with so much group opposition at
first.
Was that when you were writing it?
Yeah, you go on and on and on. They
were fed up with the fact that it took so
long to do.
But what did they think about it when you
came and played them bits? Did they think
“‘here he goes , , , he’s got into this Eastern
geezer, this mystical geezer and he’s round
the twist like all the others’’? Because John
wrote two numbers for it and they seem to
fit in very well.
Well, we did talk about it a lot on the
tour previous to the one I’ve just been
talking about, I actually explained the idea
to the group. Roger seemed to quite like the
idea, Keith would always go along with
whatever I suggested, and John quite liked
the idea and was quite keen on writing
something for it. But when we got into the
studio to actually record it and it took months
and months and months, they got very fed up
with it. They got fed up with the fact that
Kit and I were always rowing about it.
Kit wanted the Who to do the backing
tracks and bring in hundreds of fucking
french horns and all that, and I was always
fighting with him that we definitely mustn’t
do that.
Why, because you’d got to do it on the
road or because it’d got to be the Who?
No, because it’d just got to be the Who.
That’s the way it always was, a sort of
unwritten law with the band which I knew
counted.
Did you ever think that ‘Tommy’ would
ever be as successful as it is?
I don’t know. I suppose I always hoped
that it was going to be as big. I still can’t
credit the fact that six years after it was
originally written it is still gaining strength.
Obviously I’ve got this jaundiced point of
view ’cos I know what went into it, but to
me it’s definitely got Baba’s touch on it.
It was the first thing I wrote, completed, and
dedicated to Baba and thought about
sincerely from a sort of spiritual point of
view and to try and do some good etc. . . all
these sort of bullshit Christian sort of
standpoints, rather than adopting a cynical
thing and being deliberately big headed and
cuntish because I thought that was the way
it was best to be. And suddenly everything
was working and continues to work.
Then I got drawn back into what the Who is,
which is just four brats really, and I saw
that as four brats they’re quite successful
because they’ve been going for such a long
time, but ‘Tommy’ is the purest thing
they’ve ever done, and it’s still got this
incredible momentum. It is making a film
when the Who have been trying to make a film
for years and years and years. So with all the
Who’s great record success and everything
else, we haven’t been able to do it on our
own merit. But ‘Tommy’ has.
You’re talking about just a film with the
Who in it?
A film that the Who would make in the
same way that the Who make a record, or
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the way the Beatles made films.
Are you worried that ‘Tommy’s’ going to
get bigger than the Who?
I think it is already.
When it came out you got accepted by
Leonard Bernstein and all sorts of very
serious music people. That must have been
very Satisfying.
Well . . . for example there’s a guy who
writes in the Sunday Times called Derek
Jewell and at the end of the year he picks
all the albums where people have tried to
do something daring—like he'll take Rick
Wakeman album, a Yes album, and ELP
album, maybe ‘Quadrophenia’ or something
and ‘Tubular Bells’, and put them together
and say “this is the new wave of rock
symphonists, people who know how to use
rock and take it on and in centuries to come
rock and roll won’t be understood but these
works will be understood because they have
musical form’’. I still have this feeling that
the most important thing isn’t musical form
but all the fundamentals of rock and roll.
That’s what I still dig. And I still get some-
thing between the lines which has got
nothing to do with music, nothing to do
with the lyrics. I get very upset sometimes
when I see people take a song like ‘Summer-
time Blues’ and then say the reason why it’s
great is because it’s about Summertime or
about driving my ‘57 Chevvy. It’s just a
great thing, and it underestimates it in a
way to talk about it as music. And I mean
I get very upset also when I see something
like: ‘‘Pete Townshend and his own distinc-
tive guitar—take the one note solo in ‘I
Can See For Miles’ where he takes just one
note and plays it, but that one note is
worth every Eric Clapton solo...” type of
thing. I played one note in it because I
couldn’t be ‘bothered to play a solo, and
it’s horrible to hear everything analysed all
for the wrong reasons...
All those people who intellectualise about
pop, and I hope we ain’t doing it, are sad
anyway. I even heard the other day on Radio 3
they mathmatically analysed works of Beet-
hoven and Debussy and all these people and
they said ‘this cadenza was exactly the same
as used by Tchaikovsky in the opening of
his so and so’, and to them it’s all movements
and notes and patterns, very mathmatical and
scientific. Rock and roll throws all that
stuff out of the window, doesn’t it?
But people are starting to get away with it
now because inevitably a lot of those people,
I don’t think they’re rock musicians, are
starting to sell albums these days. Mike
Oldfield and Rick Wakeman and even Yes,
they’re not rock groups by any stretch of the
imagination. They’re into sound and music
and composition. But the thing with the Who
is that its only embarkation into music
proper, I think, was in the shape of ‘Tommy’.
Definitely one of the things that’s great about
an idea like ‘Tommy’, which makes music a
great vehicle for an idea, is that if you like
the music you can live with it over a much
longer period of time because, for example,
you like certain melodies. Say you like the
way that ‘Pinball Wizard’ comes out at the
end of side three or something, you sit
through the whole of side three in order to
get ‘Pinball Wizard’. But then two years
later you discover you're getting into
something else about it, so then you listen
to the whole album and then you discover
something else. I think this is the thing, that
music continues to evolve in the mind of the
listener. I find this now with all kinds of
music that I listen to. I get a completely
different thing now from certain Dylan
128
material, and also from lots of other
stuff that I used to listen to, probably more
from classical music and stuff like that. I
find that by living with something for a long
period of time you start to drop layer by
layer, deeper and deeper into it until you
sort of own it. The thing about music is that
you can possess it, because it is just—it’s
infinitely recordable. It’s very hard to fade
an image in the mind’s eye but it’s quite easy
to summon up a fragment of music that
can bring back all the sort of impressions
that you require.
There is that strange sort of emotional
thing, or whatever it is, that incredible thing
you get from great music that transcends
just listening to a tune. I’m thinking mostly
of classical music now, great music. It has
that incredible sort of spiritual stirring
quality of getting to something within you—
some higher level within you. It’s the only
time when rugged hard men would use the
word ‘‘beauty’’ which they would normally
think was sissy.
Yeah, and on the surface it probably isn’t
at all, but it just summons up that kind of
amazing—I know what you mean. But there’s
been an awful shroud, and probably will
remain so, over classical music—I mean all
classical music is a collection of history’s
hits, and what is an awful veil over it is that
it is now performed without any trace of
emotion. It’s like saying that today’s
orchestra is a Synthesiser and performing
things that were meant to be performed on
5-string Irish lutes on a synthesiser, because
the synthesiser gives a cleaner record
production, or something like that. Thus
equalising everything out. But that thing
that you were saying about the valve that
opens up, I gét that feeling from a fantastic
amount of rock music as well. I get that
spiritual lift if you like, that peak of per-
fection through other things. It’s much more
difficult when a musical piece has got words
because you tend to sort of follow the words
and try and find some meaning in them, but
there are certain fragments of ‘Pet Sounds’
or ‘Sgt. Pepper’ or high spots of the Stones
like ‘Satisfaction’ and stuff like that. Well,
for me that song that they did—‘The Last
Time’—is absolutely amazing. As soon as I
hear that I immediately tend to be higher up
than when I started off. And there are bits
of Rachmaninoff, and the Mozart piece—
the trio piece that they use in ‘Sunday,
Bloody Sunday’. There’s a homosexual
doctor who’s having a love affair with this
boy who’s also having a love affair with a
girl, and he’s very remote and _ lonely
because he’s a homosexual, but every time
you see him in his flat he’s playing this trio
from Mozart, which is a superbly beautiful
piece of music. It justs lifts you whenever
you see him you see through rose coloured
spectacles, and you end up seeing this queer,
fucked-up doctor like some sort of Marilyn
Monroe figure, you know what I mean?
Like ‘Death in Venice’, using that incredible
piece of music throughout the whole film
just to put that point across. Without those
pieces of music, those films would not
happen. There are certain things music can
do which no film, no pictorial image, can
ever do. It can’t switch people up a stop in
that automatic way. You take it to its most
fundamental level, the classic things like
‘You'll Never Walk Alone’—look what that
does at a football match. People that I know
that hate football say that they’ve gone to a
football match and people have started
singing ‘You'll Never Walk Alone’ and
they’ve felt like they're at a Nazi rally.
They’ve just got completely swept away with
it. When it’s finished and the football game
starts they think ‘what the hell have I been
doing? I’ve lost myself in this universal
massive human excrement’. Or whatever.
You know—rugby songs. The fact that you
lose yourself along the line. I don’t quite
know what it is. This is what always makes
me laugh about the pomposity of classical
music—all these Whitehouse-like old dears
that put on bits of Handel’s ‘Messiah’.
What they’re really doing is freaking inside
they’re letting go. They’re having a little
trip. They’re putting that record on, sitting
there drinking their tea, and they’re tripping
out, really freaking—not outwardly, but
it’s all happening inside.
I’ve got George Harrison written down in
my notes, but I don’t know why. Probably
because he was in a similar position to you in
1968 or when you were writing ‘Tommy’. A
rock musician getting into mysticism. I can’t
think of any others who were.
It was very unfashionable because dope,
acid in particular, was still a happening
thing. It made people interested in spiritual
things, they kept taking the tablets, as it
were, and interest just shifted all the time,
from one thing to another. If you like, they ~
missed the stop—they’d keep coming in and
out of the railway station but not ever get
off the train. I think where I was infinitely
lucky, although when it comes to me being |
a viable advertising vehicle it’s very bad
for me to talk about it, was that I had such
a terrifying trip. It really did make me push
the whole thing away. If I hadn’t had that
really awful trip on that plane back from
Monterey, I probably would still be into
drugs. I found it very easy to accept what
Baba said about drugs because it just seemed
to happen that way. J actually felt physically
damaged by it. That’s why I never really
feel I’m doing anything courageous or
selfless by not involving myself in it. It was
very easy to do.
7
(Continued from inside front cover)
This book was put together mainly during the period of the
TOMMY filming by Ken Russell. It was a time of million dollar
budgets, drinking bouts with film stars, Academy Awards, film
premiéres and all the rest. It reflects only a small part of what
TOMMY is all about because it only covers what has already
happened, or at least the significant events. I feel we can do without
further details about “‘Marching Tommy” for instance, evocative a
thought though it is. |
Many Who fans feel the TOMM Y film is not what the Who are
about, or even what TOMMY is about. In truth, it is exactly what it
is about. It is the prime example of Rock and Roll throwing off its
three chord musical structure, discarding its attachment to the three
minute single, openly taking on the unfashionable questions about
spirituality and religion and yet hanging grimly on to the old ways at
the same time.
The TOMMY film was the pinnacle of this gesture toward
musical and verbal freedom. In the future there could be stage shows
on Broadway, and perhaps even another film to satisfy the people
who feel the work has more to offer. but in the meantime the Who
play TOMMY on stage, people play the records at home and I hear
that TOMM Y might soon appear on TV. TOMM Y, apart from its
value as a release valve in the Who’s career, seems to be a cycle in itself,
with its own life. That’s why Richard Barnes and myself felt inclined
to do this book. It has taken us a long time to complete, and probably
could be added to even now, updated in many places constantly;
the imagery and the information contained herein are both a cele-
bration and an analysis of TOMMY, but if we started a new book
today I am convinced it would look different when it was complete.
TOMMY has taken his place in the established order of
respectable ‘“‘safe’’ musical/dramatic works and his heartbeat
quietly throbs.
This book, particularly with its emphasis on the writing of the
story, and the reasoning behind its direction, might remind that
TOMMY is, in reality, a time bomb. His heart is really ticking!
I have been trying to hide from the coming blast for the last ten years
and I hope that this book will make TOMMY more enjoyable,
more exciting, and closer for you too, so that when the bomb finally
explodes we can all settle back and enjoy the Who’s other twenty
albums!