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Roger daltrey tommy1/31/2024 But there was something in the ambition of Townshend’s “Rock-Opera” that had it sitting, waiting to be orchestrally arranged. Yes, The Ox and Moon the Loon were crucial to anything by The Who and their contributions to Tommy can hook you on the music outside of the absurdity and sledgehammer-subtlety of the concept. So just when I was sure I never needed to hear it again, nor any other iteration along comes Roger Daltry’s symphonic Tommy – and fuck it’s good! It’s overwrought and overdone and/or I wiped myself out to it. I even signed up for the early 90s Broadway recording and the late-80s Who reunion double album that featured a giant Tommy medley.įrom there I moved on to almost anything else from The Who, moved away completely and then came back to anything other than Tommy. So clever, funny, weird – the music just brilliant. When I was a teenager – and I can’t have been the only one that did this – I overdosed on the film and original recording. I remember hearing Roger Daltrey interviewed in the lead up to this – he was boasting of being in fantastic voice ( which is true, his last couple of solo releases and the recent Who recordings show a lead vocalist re-born) and was saying he aimed to take Tommy on the road as a full symphonic show. Well, all on his own AND a giant orchestra. Russell cuts between the crowds, the arena, and a dizzying series of close-ups of the games (at times, we almost seem to be inside the pinball machines), and the effect is exhilarating and exhausting.Need further proof that Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend are locked in a strange professional marriage? Well, after countless new tours as, effectively, The Two, Rog takes the summer off and tours one of Pete’s most personal set of ‘work stories’ all on his own. Elton John, wearing skyscraper shoes, is the defending pinball champion. Then there's the great pinball tournament, which is the movie's best single scene: a pulsating, orgiastic turn-on edited with the precision of a machine gun burst. This scene is the occasion for Tommy's first smile, as well it might be. The scene begins with Tina as the hooker upstairs from the strip parlor operated by Tommy's wicked stepfather, and ends with a psychedelic stainless steel mummy with acid in its veins. Tommy's odyssey through life is punctuated by encounters with all sorts of weird folks, of whom the most seductive is Tina Turner as the Acid Queen. She has one number that begins in an all-white bedroom with her sexy red dress slit up the side to about the collarbone, and ends with her slithering through several hundred pounds of baked beans. He is aided by his performers, especially Ann-Margret, who is simply great as Tommy's mother. To make money on a rock opera attacking those who would make money on a rock opera: that was the brave moral stand taken by Tommy.īut none of this matters, because Russell correctly doesn't give a damn about the material he started with, greatest art work of the century or not, and he just goes ahead and gives us one glorious excess after another. How the makers of the film feel about this commercialization can be gauged by the prominence with which the end titles inform us that the sound-track album is available on Polydor Records. Tommy's enraged fans turn on him and what they perceive as his hypocrisy. Tommy is on the level, but the people around him begin to commercialize on his fame in order to peddle T-shirts, record albums, and other artifacts. Stardom brings him a fortune, he becomes the leader of a quasireligious cult, regains his senses, and gets his own Tommy T-shirt. By then the hero (who started out in life as a blind deaf-mute) has become the pinball superstar of all time, even though he can't see the machine. The message of Tommy, if any, is contained mostly in the last thirty minutes (of which we could have done without about fifteen).
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