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Walking along Waldour Street in London’s Soho district with a tape recorder, hoping to capture the sounds of drug deals and rent boys to be used on The Who’s 1973 album, Quadrophenia, Townshend overheard his co-manager, Chris Stamp (brother of actor Terence Stamp), who had left a meeting with Hammer Films, the studio behind Dracula and Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb, talking about Tommy being made into a movie. The Who’s dazzling performance of “See Me, Feel Me” at Woodstock in 1969: He had planned to adapt these songs into a film for Universal Pictures but they, ultimately, became the Who’s Next album. Like two star-crossed lovers of Shakespearian prose, The Who and Ken Russell consummated their creative marriage with the 1975 film, Tommy.Īfter Tommy’s songs became staples for The Who’s sets at Woodstock, the Isle of Wight Festival, and a series of legendary shows at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House, Townshend raised the musical watermark with songs stockpiled from his aborted Lifehouse project. However, by 1970, Tommy had already been adapted for a Canadian ballet, prompting bassist John Entwistle to sarcastically ask, “What’s next? A marionette puppet show called ‘Dummy’?!” The idea of adapting The Who’s 1969 album about Tommy Walker, a boy traumatized by the death of his father and becoming a deaf, dumb and blind pinball champion of messianic proportions was the last thing on Pete Townshend’s mind-and, arguably, on the minds of anyone who loved Tommy, the album. Like two star-crossed lovers of Shakespearian prose, The Who and Ken Russell consummated their creative marriage with the 1975 film, Tommy. Rising from this (teenage) wasteland were the bombastic, Wagnerian sounds of The Who along with the surrealist, sacred and profane visions of Ken Russell’s films. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the cringey, cocaine-fueled musical of the Beatles’ album starring the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton.

Audiences flocked to see a stoned Mick Jagger share a bathtub with Keith Richards’ girlfriend in Nic Roeg’s Performance while Universal Pictures flushed $13 million down the toilet with Sgt. It was only a matter of time before Hollywood would slouch its way toward the rubble of the post-hippie pipedream to merge with rock & roll. The Seventies, as a decade, were a haze of confusion, paranoia and decadence. Here’s the inside dope on the making of Tommy, the movie. The result, upon reconsideration 45 years later, is far better than you may have thought.

turned to the maverick director Ken Russell.

When the time came to conduct this bit of cinematic alchemy, Pete Townshend & Co. The story of a deaf, dumb and blind messianic pinball wizard was ripe for the cinematic picking. Sorrow by the Pretty Things or Village Green Preservation Society by the Kinks). The Who’s 1969 double-album Tommy is generally considered the first ‘rock opera’ (cases could, of course, be made for S.F.