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Rock God as Singing Savior, 30 July 2006

Author: dunmore_ego from Los Angeles, California

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

Pete Townshend once said, "What's good about great pop and rock is: it's sublime and ridiculous at once." He should know. He wrote *Tommy*.

The film, *Tommy*, inspired by The Who's 1969 concept album – about a traumatized deaf, dumb and blind boy who becomes a pinball-playing savior – is simultaneously an electrifying musical monolith and a descent into drug-induced kookiness.

Someone had to be high to let Oliver Reed sing.

Blame eccentric satyr director, Ken Russell, whose hallucinogenic vision puts the "higher" in Messiah, jamming the movie with images of sensual nightmare: showgirls in gasmasks, bombers-as-crucifixes, a skeleton with a snake-as-penis, giant pinballs littering the landscape, and Ann-Margret lolling in chocolatey, syrupy goodness.

Oliver Reed is the "nightmare" part. Playing Tommy's stepfather, he excels at his forte (acting) but his painfully off-key ululations, combined with Ann-Margret's melodramatic cheese-vibrato (as Tommy's mum) make the film's early segments nigh unbearable. The creation of Viagra can be traced directly to the scene of Reed getting ready to bed down with Ann-Margret. Responsible for more erectile dysfunction than prostate problems or testicular cancer combined, that scene still sends a shudder of horror through my supple thighs.

When the real rock musicians enter the fray, the film suddenly finds its feet. During Sonny Boy Williamson's *Eyesight to the Blind* - the first actual "rock" track - Eric Clapton is The Hawker Priest, The Who his acolytes, with Crazy Arthur Brown giving communion, under the graven image of Marilyn Munroe. Oh, sweet Blasphemy!

An indefinable verve is captured on screen when real musicians mime their own instruments and vocals, which actors-playing-musicians could never hope to achieve: Entwistle's fingers clearly ravage the bass fretboard, as Townshend smacks down his Les Paul and Clapton bleeds the blues.

Tina Turner burns it down with her crazy-eyed Acid Queen and Elton John (in arguably the best re-arranged song for the movie) plies his big-booted pinball wizardry, while Keith Moon eats riotous scenery as a leering lecher. But it is when Roger Daltrey opens his mouth as the adult Tommy that the film finds its wings as a bird of prey.

In his first on screen role, The Who's lead singer, Daltrey – whose vocal timbre and awe-inspiring, full-bodied delivery simply bespeaks rock superstardom – single-handedly elevates the film from an average musical to a legendary rock opera. As soon as that shirt comes off, he is the personification of Rock God. Thirty years after the film's release, his long-haired, bare-chested, tight-panted visage is still an icon of rock rebelliousness.

The stirring final track (*Listening To You*) sees him bare-footed and bare-chested, climbing a mountain, in full-throated passionate song, more than ever resembling that which the rock opera itself tries to deconstruct – a savior.

The messages may be in the music, but even writer-composer Townshend would not be able to reconcile the paradoxes inherent in those messages.

Throughout this magnum opus, though Townshend exhorts not to place faith in media-engined, merchandised entities, his own rockstar livelihood relies on the music-buying public doing just that. Even as his messages denounce those who would blindly worship icons, in creating this scintillating monument to rock, he himself becomes an icon to be worshipped.

Maybe when the album and band were in their infancy and walking an unknown path between ephemerality and longevity, *Tommy* needed to make sense. With Townshend's concepts morphing constantly during the writing, recording and eventual filming of *Tommy*, he would never adequately explain it, but nowadays he does not need to. *Tommy* has achieved transcendence, as much a part of human culture as death and spam.

There are allusions to Oedipus, The New Testament and even nods to *Beneath the Planet of the Apes* (Holy Bombs as graven images).

*Tommy* the movie propelled *Tommy* the album back to No.2 on the Billboard charts, six years after its initial release. Townshend once said about performing *Tommy* The Rock Opera live, "All I remember from that tour was Roger's chest."

Townshend dedicated the *Tommy* album to his Indian spiritual mentor, Meher Baba. Thankfully keeping the lyrics free of mystical raving, profundities can be found passim: "You've been told many times before / Messiahs pointed to the door / But no one had the guts to leave the temple." "Each one of you has freedom / In your heart, without my grace."

But oft-times the hokeyness bleeds through: in *We're Not Gonna Take It*, Tommy instructs his legions to simulate his Unaware state by plugging their ears, mouth and eyes, to attain enlightenment by effectively "freeing" their senses from the distractions of the world, then singing that "Pinball completes the scene" – Huh? Of course! The eternal correlation between pinball and nirvana…

The traumatic deadening of Tommy's senses can also be applied to any society. How often we close our eyes and minds to the truth, because those in charge tell us with no uncertainty: "You didn't hear it, you didn't see it / You won't say nothing' to no one / Never tell a soul what you know is the truth!"

Only the epic finale touches upon any kind of inexplicable epiphany, yet is more than enough immortality for Townshend never to have to compose another tune: "Listening to you, I get the music / Gazing at you, I get the heat / Following you, I climb the mountain / I get excitement at your feet…

Literally shouting it from a mountaintop, Tommy the son ends a story where his father began it years ago, and director Ken Russell ensures that the Messiah metaphors, the chintzy and great rock music, the stunning imagery, the insightful themes will all take a backseat to this last scene's smoldering idolatry.

All you will remember is Roger's chest.

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