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Stock photos are not used. Photos of actual item serve as a description of sleeve condition. Look at them. There is a reflection of light on some of the vinyl ~ not a scratch. 

Tommy is the fourth studio album by the English rock band The Who, a double album first released in May 1969. The album was mostly composed by guitarist Pete Townshend, and is a rock opera that tells the story of Tommy Walker, a "deaf, dumb and blind" boy, including his experiences with life and his relationship with his family.

Townshend came up with the concept of Tommy after being introduced to the work of Meher Baba, and attempted to translate Baba's teachings into music. Recording on the album began in September 1968, but took six months to complete as material needed to be arranged and re-recorded in the studio. Tommy was acclaimed upon its release by critics, who hailed it as the Who's breakthrough. Its critical standing diminished slightly in later years; nonetheless, several writers view it as an important and influential album in the history of rock music. The Who promoted the album's release with an extensive tour, including a live version of Tommy, which lasted throughout 1969 and 1970. Key gigs from the tour included appearances at Woodstock, the 1969 Isle of Wight Festival, the University of Leeds, the Metropolitan Opera House, and the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival. The live performances of Tommy drew critical praise and rejuvenated the band's career.

Subsequently, the rock opera developed into other media, including a Seattle Opera production in 1971, an orchestral version by Lou Reizner in 1972, a film in 1975, and a Broadway musical in 1992. The original album has sold 20 million copies and has been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. It has been reissued several times on CD, including a remix by Jon Astley in 1996, a deluxe Super Audio CD in 2003, and a super deluxe box set in 2013, including previously unreleased demos and live material.

Recording[edit]

The Who started recording the album at IBC Studios on 19 September 1968.[21] There was no firm title at this point, which was variously referred to as Deaf, Dumb and Blind Boy, Amazing Journey, Journey into Space, The Brain Opera and Omnibus. Townshend eventually settled on Tommy because it was a common British name, and a nickname for soldiers in World War I.[22] Kit Lambert took charge of the production, with Damon Lyon-Shaw as engineer. Sessions were block booked from 2pm – 10pm, but recording often spilled over into the early morning. [21]

The album was recorded onto eight track tape, which allowed various instruments to be overdubbed. Townshend used several guitars in the studio, but made particular use of the Gibson J-200 acoustic and the Gibson SG.[23] As well as their usual instruments, Townshend played piano and organ and bassist John Entwistle doubled on french horn. Keith Moon used a new double bass drum kit owned by roadie Tony Haslam, after Premier had refused to loan him any more equipment due to continual abuse.[21] Though Townshend wrote the majority of the material, the arrangements came from the entire band. Singer Roger Daltrey later said that Townshend often came in with a half-finished demo recording, adding "we probably did as much talking as we did recording, sorting out arrangements and things."[24] Townshend asked Entwistle to write two songs ("Cousin Kevin" and "Fiddle About") that covered the darker themes of bullying and abuse. "Tommy's Holiday Camp" was Keith Moon's suggestion of what kind of religious movement Tommy could lead. Moon got the songwriting credit for suggesting the idea, though the music was composed and played by Townshend.[25] A significant amount of material had a lighter style than earlier recordings, with greater prominence put on the vocals. Moon later said, "It was, at the time, very un-Wholike. A lot of the songs were soft. We never played like that."[26]

Some of the material had already been written for other projects. "Sensation" was written about a girl Townshend had met on the Who's tour of Australia in early 1968, "Welcome" and "I'm Free" were about peace found through Meher Baba and "Sally Simpson" was based on a gig with the Doors which was marred by violence.[27] Other songs had been previously recorded by the Who and were recycled; "It's A Boy" was derived from "Glow Girl", an out-take from The Who Sell Out, while "Sparks" and "Underture" re-used and expanded one of the instrumental themes in "Rael".[28] "Amazing Journey" was, according to Townshend, "the absolute beginning" of the opera and summarised the entire plot.[28] "The Hawker" was a cover of Sonny Boy Williamson's "Eyesight to the Blind". A cover of Mercy Dee Walton's "One Room Country Shack" was also recorded but was scrapped from the final track listing as Townshend could not figure out a way to incorporate it in the plot.[29]

Recording at IBC was slow, due to a lack of a full plot and a full selection of songs. The group hoped that the album would be ready by Christmas, but sessions dragged on. Melody Maker's Chris Welch visited IBC studios in November and while he was impressed with the working environment and the material,[30] the project still did not have a title and there was no coherent plotline.[25] The Who's US record company, Decca Records, got so impatient waiting for new product that they released the compilation album Magic Bus: The Who on Tour which received a scathing review from Greil Marcus in Rolling Stone over its poor selection of material and misleading name (as the album contained studio recordings and was not live).[31]

The Who took a break from recording at the end of 1968 to tour, including a well received appearance at The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus on 10 December.[32] They resumed sessions at IBC in January 1969, block booking Monday to Thursday, but had to do gigs every weekend to stop going further into debt.[33] A major tour was booked for the end of April, and the group's management insisted that the album would have to be finished by then, as it had been well over a year since The Who Sell Out.[34] Kit Lambert wrote a script, Tommy (1914–1984) which he professionally printed, and gave copies to the band, which helped them focus the storyline, and also decide to make the album a double.[33] The group were still coming up with new material; Lambert insisted that the piece should have a proper overture,[34] while Townshend wrote "Pinball Wizard" so that Nik Cohn, a pinball fan, would give the album a favourable review in the New York Times.[35] Lambert wanted an orchestra to appear on the album, but Townshend was strongly against the idea, and time and budget constraints meant it could not happen anyway.[34]

By March 1969, some songs had been recorded several times, yet Townshend still thought there were missing pieces.[36] John Entwistle had become fed up with recording, later saying "we had to keep going back and rejuvenating the numbers ... it just started to drive us mad."[23] The final recording session took place on 7 March, the same day that "Pinball Wizard" was released as a single.[37] The group started tour rehearsals and promotional activities for the single and Lambert went on holiday in Cairo. The mixing was left to Damon Lyon-Shaw and assistant engineer Ted Sharp, who did not think IBC was well suited for the task.[38] The album overshot its April deadline, as stereo mastering continued into the end of the month.[39]

Release and reception[edit]

After delays surrounding the cover artwork, Tommy was released on 17 May 1969 in the US by Decca and 23 May in the UK by Track Records.[40] The original double album was configured with sides 1 and 4 on one disc, and sides 2 and 3 on the other, to accommodate record changers.[41]

The album was commercially successful, reaching No. 2 in the UK album charts, and No. 4 in the US.[42] It sold 200,000 copies in the first two weeks in the US alone, and was awarded a gold record for sales of 500,000 on August 18.[43] "Pinball Wizard", "I'm Free" and "See Me, Feel Me" were released as singles and received airplay on the radio. "Pinball Wizard" reached the top 20 in the US and the top five in the UK. "See Me, Feel Me" reached the top 20 in the US and "I'm Free" reached the top 40. An EP of selections from the album was planned to be released in the UK in November 1970, but was withdrawn.[44] As of 2012, Tommy has sold 20 million copies worldwide.[23][45]

When it was released, critics were split between those who thought the album was a masterpiece, the beginnings of a new genre, and those that felt it was exploitative. The album had a hostile reception with the BBC and certain US radio stations, with Tony Blackburn describing "Pinball Wizard" as "distasteful".[39] Nevertheless, BBC Radio 1 received an advance copy of the album at the start of May and gave the material its first airplay on Pete Drummond's show on 3 May.[41] Townshend promoted the album's release with interviews in which he attempted to explain the plotline. Unfortunately, because it fundamentally dealt with the abstract concept of Maher Baba's spiritual precepts, the interviews often gave confusing and contradictory details.[46]

For Melody Maker, Chris Welch went to the album's press launch show at Ronnie Scott's and although the volume left his ears ringing for 20 hours, he concluded "we wanted more." Disc and Music Echo ran a front-page headline saying "Who's Tommy: A Masterpiece".[43] Critics and fans were confused by the storyline, but Kit Lambert pointed out this made Tommy no less confusing than the operas of Richard Wagner or Giacomo Puccini a century earlier.[47] In a 1969 column for The Village Voice, music critic Robert Christgau said that, apart from the Mothers of Invention's We're Only in It for the Money, Tommy is the first successful "extended work" in rock music, but Townshend's parodic side is more "profound and equivocal" than Frank Zappa. He praised Townshend for deliberately constructing the album so that each song can be enjoyed individually and felt that he is determined to "give his audience what it wants without burying his own peculiarity".[48] Albert Goldman, writing in Life magazine, said that the Who play through "all the kinky complications" of the narrative in a hard rock style that is the antithesis of most contemporary "serious" rock. Goldman asserted that, based on innovation, performance, and "sheer power", Tommy surpasses anything else in studio-recorded rock.[49] Robert Christgau named Tommy the best album of 1969 in his year-end list for Jazz & Pop magazine.[50]

Reappraisal[edit]

Retrospective professional reviews

According to music journalist Richie Unterberger, Tommy was hailed by contemporary critics as the Who's breakthrough, but its critical standing diminished slightly in the subsequent decades, because of its occasionally pretentious concept and flimsy songs that functioned as devices to "advance the rather sketchy plot."[51] Robert Christgau wrote in 1983, "Tommy's operatic pretensions were so transparent that for years it seemed safe to guess that Townshend's musical ideas would never catch up with his lyrics."[59] In his review for AllMusic, Unterberger said that, despite its slight flaws, the album has "many excellent songs" permeated with "a suitably powerful grace", while Townshend's ability to devise a lengthy narrative introduced "new possibilities to rock music."[51] Uncut wrote that the album "doesn't quite realise its ambitions, though it achieves a lot on the way", and felt it was not as well developed as their later album, Quadrophenia.[58] Mark Kemp, writing in The Rolling Stone Album Guide (2004), felt that "in retrospect, Tommy isn't quite the masterpiece it was originally hyped to be", suggesting The Who Sell Out was better, though because of Townshend, it produced several "bona fide classic songs".[60]

In 1998, the album was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame for "historical, artistic and significant value".[45] In 2000 it was voted number 52 in Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums.[61] In 2003, Rolling Stone magazine ranked Tommy number 96 on its list of the 500 greatest albums of all time,[62] maintaining the rating in a 2012 revised list.[63] The album is one of several by the Who to appear in 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.[64]

According to music critic Martha Bayles, Tommy did not mix rock with classical music, as its "rock opera" title may have suggested, but instead was "dominated by the Who's mature style: ponderous, rhythmically monotonous hard rock".[65] Bayles argued that it was more acceptable to audiences than the art rock "concoctions" of the time because of the cultural climate during the late 1960s: "Tommy was considered more authentic, precisely because it consists of hard rock, rather than doctored-up Mussorgsky ... and avoids the typical pseudoromantic themes of art rock (fairy-tale bliss and apocalyptic angst) in favor of the more up-to-date subject of popular culture itself."[65] High Fidelity magazine also characterized the Who's album as a "reasonably hard-rock version" of the opera.[66]

Dave Marsh thought the problem with the album's narrative is that there isn't enough transitional material provided by the lyrics. There are no stage directions, no cast, and narration is restricted to key phrases (such as "Tommy can you hear me?")[46] Key problems included an unclear explanation of what Tommy didn't hear or see in "1921", how or why he plays pinball, why "Smash the Mirror" leads into "I overwhelm as I approach you" (the opening line in "Sensation"), why Tommy tells his followers in "We're Not Gonna Take It" they cannot drink or smoke but can play pinball, and what the "you" is in "Listening to you, I get the music".[67]