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Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
Tommy
(Polydor)
by Kevin Mathews
PopMatters Music and Comics Critic

Who would have imagined that for its fourth album, The Who -- a band
responsible for such furious outbursts of teenage angst, alienation and
rebellion with glorious sixties anthems like "My Generation", "I'm a Boy",
"I Can't Explain", and "Substitute" -- would deliver a ROCK OPERA?

But it paid off and how! Thanks to the phenomenal success of Tommy, The Who
became the biggest rock group in the world and would remain so for most of
the seventies. The problem with Pete Townshend, the originator of Tommy, was
his restless creativity and his unbridled ambition. Tommy, despite its
conceptual and narrative difficulties (inherent in all so-called concept
rock albums), worked because of the power of the music and the incredible
synergy amongst Townshend, Roger Daltrey, John Entwistle and Keith Moon.
Once Townshend decided to bring Tommy to a different level, these flaws
would become obvious.

The 1975 movie version of Tommy, directed by Ken Russell, an enigmatic
visionary in his own right, earned a mixed reception right off the bat as
Russell's crazed imagination brought bizarre life to its characters. The
film soundtrack would inevitably raise comparisons with the original
material and that was a losing proposition, any way you looked at it.

The main problem was that as an opera (or even a musical), the original
recordings of Tommy failed miserably. It was never meant to be pompous or
bombastic. With lean economy, The Who managed to convey bare-boned concepts
and emotional context within the confines of a rock band (i.e.
guitars-bass-drums) and the odd added instrumentation for colouring.

However, in order for the music to work on screen, Russell and Townshend
felt it necessary to make Tommy sound bigger in scale. Well, they did,
filling in perceived gaps which transformed what was innovative
powerpop/fledging rock music in 1969 into turgid mid-seventies prog rock,
the kind the punk rockers would rail against not long after this movie was
released.

Worse still, as many cast members were not pop singers by any stretch of the
imagination -- Oliver Reed and Jack Nicholson for example -- the decision to
allow these actors to "sing" their own parts was mystifying. And whilst
Ann-Margaret (as Tommy's mother) managed to hold her own in the vocal
department, the result was an almost unlistenable din. Furthermore, the
existing music was adapted, extended and repeated to such an extent as to
totally extinguish the fire of the original work.

There are the saving graces of Tina Turner's soulful "Acid Queen" and Elton
John's impish "Pinball Wizard" to brighten the corners slightly but by and
large, this is an abysmal failure. The Tommy movie soundtrack was a travesty
26 years ago and this re-mastered re-issue has not changed this state of
affairs one bit.

Even worse, who would have imagined that 20 years later, Tommy would be
reincarnated as a Broadway musical?

My final words on the subject -- go and get the real Tommy album instead.