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Tommy at the Met
This article is from Time, 6/22/70.
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AT THE WHERE?
Last week, like Parsifal finally reaching the shrine of the Holy Grail,
an English rock quartet known as The Who made it to Manhattan's
Metropolitan Opera and sold out the house twice in one day. The fateful
occasion, twin performances of their so-called rock opera "Tommy," was
the first time any kind of pop music had ever been heard at the Met. The
historic program had been arranged by Rock Promoters Nathan Weiss and
Bill Graham, who made the deal with Met General Manager Rudolf Bing.
"Perhaps," said Bing, "some of these young people will come back when we
do Mozart and Verdi."
Whether they will or not, the two concerts were the absolute apex
of the hippie social season. If the kids who turned up were not dressed
to the teeth, they were at least dressed to the noses. In addition to
the usual headbands, see through tops, togas, bell bottoms and union
jack-ets, many of the girls had their noses painted in art nouveau pinks
and blues. Bare feet pattered up and down the red-carpeted aisles while
the sweet, light, pervasive smell of pot drifted through the darkness
toward the ceiling.
Onstage stood a mighty fortress of loudspeakers, looking like one
of the barricades in "Il Trovatore." As the thundering music began to
jar the building, Met Assistant Manager Francis Robinson cowered inside a
soundproof booth at the rear of the hall, touching his fingertips
incredulously to the trembling walls. "Feel it," he said. At the end,
when the group was booed for refusing to play an encore, Tommy's composer
Peter Townshend put the audience down emphatically by filling the hall
with a distinctly nonoperatic four-letter word. Bing was more
restrained. "I didn't understand a thing about Tommy myself," he said,
"but then I don't understand everything about Don Giovanni either."
THINGS TO COME
In truth, Tommy is a creation likely to cause a certain
perplexity in the mind as well as in the middle ear. Thematically it is
a parable about a boy who grows deaf, dumb and blind after watching his
father kill his mother's lover. Because of his exceptional sense of
touch, however, he becomes a pinball champion. Later, miraculously
cured, he becomes a pinball messiah and finally the leader of a
quasi-religious state. When he insists that his followers play pinball
with their mouths gagged, their eyes blindfolded, their ears plugged with
stoppers - in sum, with his old handicaps - they rebel and overthrow
him. Tommy's empire falls into ruins.
To the young, who have been known to feel that parents and the
leaders of the state are deaf, dumb and blind to them, Tommy has strong
symbolic meaning. Yet its arrival at the Met, via the Fillmore East,
several European opera houses and a record sale of $2,000,000, is less of
a triumph for music than proof of the maxim that if you say something
loud enough and long enough, people will believe it. Tommy is not an
opera, of course, but an extended song cycle. It does have its moments:
Pinball Wizard, for example, is explosive, driving, topnotch - hard
rock. As a complete piece of musical theater, though, Tommy is
pretentious and embarrassing stuff from one of the most gimmick-prone
groups in all rock. The Who's favorite pre-Tommy stunt was to smash
their guitars, loudspeakers and drums at the end of every set. At the
Met, save for their own vaudeville antics onstage (singer Roger Daltrey
twirling his mike like a lasso, Peter Townshend playing his guitar with
showy windmills of his right arm), there was no drama, no staging, no
characterization. So little, in fact, that though The Who played only
two-thirds of the complete work at the Met, no one, not even the critics,
seemed to notice.
For the young, Tommy strikes a responsive chord not as a living
musical drama but as a hopeful sign that pop forms like rock may have the
vocabulary and expressive scope to deal with important subjects on a
broad symphonic and operatic range. Every troubled society or social
group needs its own encouraging myths and fables. From that point of
view, for the rock world Tommy is at least a start.
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