Re: Tommy

[William Sherman -Visualization <wsherman@ncsa.uiuc.edu>]

Phil wrote:
>Maybe I'm being naive, but the way I understand it, the following 
>lyric makes it all perfectly clear to me:
>
>"Captain Walker didn't come home
>His unborn child will never know him.
>Believed to be missing with a number of men
>Don't expect to see him again"
>
>I don't see how this can be interpreted as anything other than 
>literally, 

Yes, interpreting it literally is fine - just don't make too many
false assumptions:  "missing" does not mean "dead" and "expect"
does not mean "can't happen."

Captain Walker is missing, and not expected to return, so Mrs.
Walker gets another lover.  But then Captain Walker does return,
hence the confrontation and killing.

>although this still doesn't explain what the trauma Tommy 
>went through was.  This lyric implies that Tommy never even saw his 
>father, let alone see him murdered/commit murder.  I reckon that 
>Tommy's trauma was nothing more than seeing his mother screwing 
>another bloke........

Regarding the Broadway version: I don't think Pete really changed
the story that much.  I think the Broadway version just makes the
entire story much easier to understand - hence if you didn't
understand it from the album (which is understandable), you
might find the play to contract your understanding.

Now we can get back to bicker and argue about who killed who ...

	Bill

/*************************************************************************/
/* Bill Sherman	 (wsherman@ncsa.uiuc.edu)                                */
/* National Center for Supercomputing Applications -or somthing like that*/
/* University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign                            */
/*     Og - "You want to do mankind a real service?  Tell funnier jokes" */
/*  Spinner - "but facts don't always reveal the truth"                  */
/*      Robin - "Yeah, but I always figure that's the writers' fault"    */
/*************************************************************************/