Entwistle readily agreed, and accomplished the task so successfully that it made Townshend wonder what experiences of his own he might have been drawing on (Mike McInnerney's sleeve artwork for Tommy, below). Struggling to get the required songs written, he asked bassist John Entwistle if he'd have a crack. Townshend spoke frankly here about the bullying and neglect he'd suffered as a kid, and also retains some incomplete but murky memories of suffering "some weird shit" at the hands of his sinister grandmother. Townshend also needed to lean on his band-mates for help with some of the darker pieces on the album, like "Fiddle About" and its tale of the repulsive child-molesting Uncle Ernie. Daltrey had found himself, as he put it, "inhabiting the music". Kit Lambert had decreed that Townshend should sing them, so the latter was taken aback to discover that Roger Daltrey, competitive to the hilt, had already recorded them in especially heart-rending style. There was a telling moment when Townshend recalled coming to the recording studio one day, intending to sing the plaintive high parts in the song "See Me, Feel Me". While the earnest, ever-analytical Townshend was consciously attempting to smuggle Importance into rock music, egged on enthusiastically by The Who's cultured and epicurean manager Kit Lambert, it was the way the four members of The Who interpreted and transformed the material and how a wider audience was able to see itself in the songs that has given it lasting power. He also acknowledged the importance of drummer Keith Moon's Goon Show-like antics in "Tommy's Holiday Camp", which brought a bit of music-hall silliness to the album's themes of trauma and spiritual search (Pete Townshend at the piano, pictured below).Īll of which went some way to explaining why Tommy has remained one of the benchmarks of rock's golden years. When Cohn, who'd loved The Who's early and frantically wired-up singles, complained that the Tommy concept was too po-faced and quasi-religious, it prompted Townshend to create the scintillating "Pinball Wizard" to lighten it up a bit. But Townshend himself was not blind to the dangers of Tommy's mystical pretensions.
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