Review Summary: An expansive and ambitious album that collapses under its own weight.
Some of the most successful works of art are successful largely because of their ambiguity. Authors such as Mark Twain and Herman Melville specialized in setting up a conflict for the reader only to never fully resolve it, allowing for the ambiguity to challenge the reader to draw their own conclusions. A work’s ambiguity is only as strong as its implementation, however, and there’s a fine line between the moral uncertainty that challenges a listener and a mere lack of substance masquerading as inconclusiveness. Although an instrumentally strong album and holding the historic distinction as the first successful “rock opera,” The Who’s overly ambitious
Tommy buckles under the weight of its own concept, asking the listener to draw a conclusion without providing any real substance to go off of.
Instrumentally,
Tommy fails to reveal any significant faults. The Who had evolved from the loud and raucous band that brought “My Generation” to the radio back in 1965 and were developing a more progressive-minded type of storytelling rock that had already been hinted at in “A Quick One, While He’s Away." Trading in his electric guitars (perhaps after smashing too many) for a mostly acoustic-minded approach, Pete Townshend brings us some of the most impressive acoustic work of his career, using complex strumming patterns and acoustic finger work to create complicated and memorable musical themes throughout the album, many of which are highlighted in the opening “Overture." Many of the songs focus on these acoustic backings with beautiful and memorable harmonies between Townshend and Roger Daltrey, who avoid the energetic and hyper-masculine vocals of their earlier works and settle for a more restrained and thoughtful approach. These layers of melodies are accompanied by John Entwistle’s smattering of horn sections pervading the album, and, like any self-respecting band with a bloated concept album, Keith Moon gets to hit a gong at some point. Moon’s drumming deserves praise here too. Following suit with the rest of the band, he’s more constrained in
Tommy when compared to the rest of The Who’s discography, but he still lets loose a variety of frenzied drum fills and patterns to spice up the rest of the record. The music rarely drags (with the exception of “Underture” who repeats the same musical theme for 10 minutes), and the vocal melodies are pleasant enough to enrich the entire listening experience.
Historically, however,
Tommy isn’t an album remembered for its instrumental prowess but rather for introducing the “rock opera” format to the masses, providing a concept album telling a story that would inspire future works such as Pink Floyd’s
The Wall and Genesis’s
The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. The album tells the tale of the titular protagonist as he goes “deaf, dumb, and blind” after seeing his father kill his mother’s new lover upon returning from the war. Without his senses, Tommy comes to terms with his spirituality from within and eventually becomes a messiah-like figure to the rest of the world when he finally regains his hearing, speech, and sight. The album ends with Tommy’s followers rejecting him and rebelling against him, leaving Tommy (and the listener) unsure of what to make of everything that’s happened.
At many points in the album, individual songs are strengthened by the story of the album, especially when the instrumentation works in tandem with the concept. “Cousin Kevin” is an early highlight, depicting the senseless Tommy left home alone with his cousin to be tormented. The instrumentation is as cold and indifferent as John Entwistle’s vocals, sadistically toying with the idea of “Maybe a cigarette burn on your arm/Would change your expression to one of alarm." There are many instances where the music is directly at odds with the lyrical content with great effect, such as the mocking “HA HA HA HA” in the background of “Christmas” as Tommy’s father contemplates his son’s fate in the afterlife or the goofy chorus of “Fiddle About” as Uncle Ernie plans to molest the boy. This dissonance between the music and the lyrical content works to increase the discomfort one feels when considering Tommy’s loss of innocence throughout these events.
Lyrical themes such as religion, bullying, and molestation have cropped up in this review, but where
Tommy ultimately falls is its inability to tie these themes together to say anything of note or to demand any answers from the listener. Ambiguity plagues the album from the onset, with the lyrics of “1921” failing to even hint that it was a murder that set off Tommy’s disabilities. We don’t learn much of what Tommy discovered in his inward meditations in “Amazing Journey” outside of a general focus on simplicity. What exactly it is that he’s trying to teach his followers is unclear and thus fails to give the listener anything to contemplate, and as the album ends with a repeated sequence of lines referring to a mysterious “you,” we’re completely removed from the story as Townshend just pays his respects to his spiritual mentor Meher Baba. This isn’t some Socratic dialogue where thought-provoking statements lead to aporia, or a state of confusion; this is a bloated concept that fails to have anything to say to or ask of the listener, neither up to nor including its conclusion.
It’s a shame that despite its massive influence on future rock records,
Tommy fails to actualize what the rock opera is meant to do. Despite the growth the album demonstrates The Who had undergone since their debut, they were still very much a band in musical puberty, exploring new ideas but not fully up to the task of understanding what they were doing. It’s telling that for the next album Townshend would drop concepts altogether for the highlight of their career, and it wouldn’t be until 1973 that they would return to the format with the much more successful
Quadrophenia.
