Tommy wasn’t the first rock opera, but it was the first to make a significant impact.

The story of a deaf, dumb and blind boy who takes on the world at the pinball machine, fulfilling that tragic modern-day arc from abused to abuser, it wasn’t without precedent. The Kinks had been releasing albums that felt like soap operas and The Pretty Things’ SF Sorrow most directly resembled Tommy, with its narrative arc following a post-WWI English child’s journey from birth to later life.

Yet Tommy was all together something more ambitious. A double album released in 1969, it drew threads Pete Townshend had been weaving into something more complex and complete.

As a cultural landmark, it would spawn a movie, a tour and orchestral interpretations. The Who’s album, however, remains the canonical version.

Disc One

The album opens with Overture, an instrumental that establishes the main musical themes and it’s not the first appearance of John Entwistle’s French horn in The Who’s music. It does, nonetheless, do some heavy lifting through the album, giving an orchestral dimension to the operatic pretensions.

The roots of rock music are unabashedly American. Blues and country amalgamated into a simplified form that was itching to stretch beyond any such constraints. The constraints weren’t just musical, they were cultural. Whether attributed to LSD or not, by the late Sixties British musicians were beginning to explore their own cultural identity in more detail. The Kinks were first to the party, yet similar developments could be seen in Sgt Pepper’s, SF Sorrow, the whimsy of Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd and the Small Face’s Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake, amongst many.

And of course, Tommy itself.

Some world building is required and It’s A Boy and 1921 fill the breach. The first challenge of the rock opera arrives. World building always stands in conflict with character development and action. Part of rock’s power is to get so much across within a three minute burst of energy. Do these songs stand on that premise alone? Perhaps not.

It’s not until the fourth song, Amazing Journey, that this niggling conundrum lifts. Opening with a backwards phased guitar, Keith Moon rides the toms like he could have been an orchestral percussionist. In fact, Moon’s kinetic drumming is spectacular, shifting the dynamics beautifully. And you don’t need to know who Tommy is to appreciate sickness taking the mind where the mind can’t usually go. My recent incapacity, despite its brevity, attesting to this fact.

Sparks, a bridging instrumental, serves its purpose without being spectacular.

For an album perceived as Townshend’s first grand vision, the inclusion of a cover version, Sonny Boy Williamson’s Eyesight to the Blind, might seem odd, but it fits perfectly. This is no slavish blues interpretation either, this is rock music, plain and simply with Moon once again working the toms with symphonic flare.

Side two of the first disc rounds out with four tracks, three of which, Christmas, Cousin Kevin and Underture, suffer a similar fate to the intial world-building tracks. However, in this context, Cousin Kevin is pivotal, detailing some of the abuse to which Tommy was subjected. Another conundrum emerges as both of the abuse tracks, the other being Fiddle About, are both written by John Entwistle. Many questions emerge and they don’t deserve hypothetical answers, and are best left the someone with insights that I don’t possess.

The Acid Queen is another matter. The promise and threat of acid in a single line. It will tear your world apart. Perhaps a worthwhile exercise if it facilitates a rebuilding anew. Not that far from sickness taking the mind somewhere new. Yet for some, Syd Barrett included, there was no return from the nothingness. It reminds of an anecdote from famous Australia TV personality, Bert Newton. Administered LSD as a “treatment” he described it as the most terrifying thing he had ever experienced. Fame might be hard work, but for such a person, the perception of one’s own nothingness may indeed be terrifying.

Gather your wits and hold on fast
Your mind must learn to roam

Indeed.

Disc Two

The second disc suffers more heavily under the weight of the concept, which isn’t to say that makes it entirely a failure. The idea of Tommy, the abused, making the journey to abuser, inflicting his own suffering of being deaf, dumb and blind onto his disciples is an important human tragedy that has only recently become the subject of significant discussion. In many way, it reflects a great deal of bravery on Townshend’s part, once again raising questions that don’t deserve merely hypothetical probing.

As the prolific child abuse crimes of the likes of Jimmy Savile come to light, the inevitability of the abused becoming the abuser without suitable intervention, is a deep malaise with which society remains reluctant to reckon. Still, Townshend offers We’re Not Gonna Take It as the first step in the restoration.

Having said that, the hear me, see me, feel me motif remains sublime. The music remains interesting, yet only two songs manage to crawl out from beneath the weight of the concept:

Pinball Wizard. A classic Who single, it rocks hard and fast, just like all the best Who songs do. In many ways, it is a great hymn of hope. I sense a tangential echo of Dylan’s losers later being winners, but I expect that is mostly in my imagination. Despite his punishing incapacity, Tommy manages to free himself through the focusing of his intuition. A powerful message to any artist.

I’m Free. For the second time in a week, I find myself quoting WB Yeats.

in dreams begin responsibilities

The same could be said about freedom. In my essay on The Seeker I reflect on the idea of spiritual seeker offering as much danger as they offer enlightened. Once again, a devastating message for any artist, spiritualist, or leader. And, of course, Tommy blows it. He exits the temple only to build his own, thus perpetuating the cycle rather than transcending it. The same can not be said for Daltrey’s vocals, a different kind of power is beginning to emerge. A power that will come into full force on Who’s Next.

We’re not going to take it. Never have and never will.

I have a Who joke stored up for the end of this series. It goes something like this. The barman begins. Three Who fans walk into a bar. A fist fight breaks out. His friend asked. “So who wins? Tommy, Who’s Next or Quadrophenia?”

To my mind, it isn’t Tommy. It remains a flawed masterpiece, with Townshend yet to have acquired the muscle memory to hold the whole thing up. Having said that, Amazing Journey, Eye Sight to the Blind, The Acid Queen, Pinball Wizard and I’m Free remain some of my favourite Who songs.

This is Part Three of my Who Trilogy. You can read the first two parts here:

Who’s Next? Well Who’s Next, obviously.

Fire, fire. Fire, fire burn!
And when it’s your turn will you put out, the fire, for me?

Fire, fire. Fire, fire burn!
And when it’s your turn will you put out, the fire, for me?

I stood next to the burning flame
Heard it call out your name
Nearly lost my burning soul
I was left with nowhere to go

Fire, fire. Fire, fire burn!
And when it’s your turn will you put out, the fire, for me?

I dreamed of a brave new world
Just me and my girl
Heading out towards the trees
With all the people we set free

Fire, fire. Fire, fire burn!
And when it’s your turn will you put out, the fire, for me?

I pressed my ear onto your heart
To carry the sound when we’re apart
And now the fire’s mad its stand
The trees return to the land

Fire, fire. Fire, fire burn!
And when it’s your turn will you put out, the fire, for me?

Can I see the end is near?
Or is it just my fear?
The sun and moon are in repose
The night descend as the daylight goes

Fire, fire. Fire, fire spark!
And when it goes dark, will you light up, the fire, for me?

Author’s Note

It’s Wednesday morning in Tasmania and I’ve shot my Sunday deadline by three days. I have to remind myself that this is not about perfection, but practice and preparation.

If you’re new here, the project at hand is this. I’ve selected around fifty songs from my back catalogue, and the goal is to get them to this stage. Once that is done, I will select a dozen or so with the intentions of putting an album together. The dream, of course, is to release that album on vinyl.

My aim is to do one a week, so I’m still aiming to have the next one done by Sunday. Once done, I will reward myself with a trip up to the shack, so I can stop fussing over my singing and give the river a chance to have a go.

Thank’s for listening.

You can check out my previous song here:

What does a song mean?

From the outset, I’ve been on the wrong foot with this song, a song I’ve known for almost forty years. You see, the closing line of the opening verse is not:

I tried to find the key, to fifty million people

The word is fables, not people.

The Seeker was released by The Who in 1970 as a standalone single after the towering success of their album, Tommy. It was only a minor hit.

There are few rock bands as purely rock as The Who. Less bluesy than the Stones, less pop than the Beatles, not quite as heavy as Led Zeppelin. Just straight ahead rock music.

Yet Pete Townshend, The Who’s guitarist and chief songwriter, didn’t typify the rock and roll lifestyle. A follower of the teachings of Meher Baba, he shunned drug use. Still, there are enough anecdotes both within and without his songs to suggest that he liked a drink.

Reflecting on the movie Quadrophenia, Townshend’s portrayal of the Sixties mod scene from which The Who emerged, I could see the music as not just something you listened to, but a way of life. In many ways, this is reflected in Townshend’s songs, embodying a more personal perspective than many of this contemporaries.

With The Seeker, is Townshend considering his own spiritual journey or admonishing the false spirituality of the drop-out generation?

In an interview, Townshend touched on the idea of Divine Desperation.

He name checks Bob Dylan, the Beatles and Timothy Leary as being of no help. Leary, with his “tune in, turn on, drop out” mantra is likely to have done more damage than he did good.

The concept of Divine Desperation feels just as relevant in the age of the online guru. With their “brutal truth” mantras rarely offering transcendence to their acolytes, the sense that what they offer is just another selfish attack on the soul pervades.

Perhaps it’s an extension of the souring of Tommy’s journey, from victim to victimiser, with a mantra demanding opacity over clarity?

For Townshend, next came another grand concept, the Lifehouse project. It ultimately fizzled, the remains emerging on Who’s Next, a straightforward album of great rock songs. There is a prosaic spirituality there, stripped of pretence, and all the more powerful for it.

Returning to my misheard lyric, I suspect that this only shifts the seeker from narcissistic to sociopath. While this might touch on Townshend’s inner demons, he has now mostly retired from public life while the falsest of prophets, a man not far from him in age, sits in the White House.

Finally, the song posits that the seeker won’t find the answer until the day he dies. The kingdom of heaven or nothingness? The former is always the easier promise to sell. Like the online gurus, the only ones enriched by their false promises are themselves.

This is Part Two of my Trilogy on The Who. I’ll be covering three classic Who albums: Tommy, Who’s Next and Quadrophenia. Up next, the first album for review: Tommy.

You can read Part One here:

It’s a cold winter’s night on Victoria Street in Richmond, an inner city suburb of Melbourne. Why is there a semi-naked man dressed in only a white bath towel and some gold chains?

I’m standing in front of The Valhalla Cinema, one of Melbourne’s best underground venues. We’re waiting in line for their legendary Friday Night double feature: The Blues Brothers and Quadrophenia. Most people aren’t here just to watch the movies. They’re here to watch the audience.

It will be the first time I’ve seen either movie, and I too will soon understand why the semi-naked man looks completely normal.

The Blues Brothers movie poster explains the plethora of black-suited, fedora-wearing individuals gathered, but towel man? Well, I’d have to wait for the sauna scene to get a handle on that one:

The audience is split roughly half and half between apostates like myself, dressed in the post-punk garb of Melbourne’s alternative scene, and the true believers, who have dressed the part.

Of the true believers, they also split into two groups. The Blues Brothers clan, mostly in black suits, with the occasional deviant like towel man, many holding bags of … toast?

Team Quadrophenia is predominantly mods, although I recall a few beleaguered rockers huddling in the corner.

Once the films get under way, so does the chaos. The Blues Brothers is up first. At one point, Elwood Blues mentions toast and the screen is filled with pieces of toast flying across the cinema. When the sauna scene arrives, towel man jumps up on the stage to shake his thing as the audience explodes in riotous applause. It’s the emotional equivalent of playing air guitar.

It’s the Blues Brothers group that approaches the whole performance with more abandon. We didn’t have the word then, but now we’d call it cosplay. Like karaoke, they didn’t want to be Blues Brothers, they just wanted to feel what it would be like to be in the movie.

The mods, by comparison, were more serious. They weren’t dressing up as mods, they were mods. Sharp suits, Vespa motor scooters and surplus parkas with a red, white and blue target stitched on the back.

During the ballroom scene some of the mods fill the aisles to dance along with the Ace Face, played by Sting, to the groovy grooves of Booker T and the MGs’ Green Onions.

Bloody hell, is that Toyah Wilcox at the beginning? It is.

The Blues Brothers is intended as a tribute to the great American soundtrack, celebrating legends such as John Lee Hooker, Cab Calloway, Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles. Still, it’s hard not to read the brothers themselves as being, if not a parody, at least a spoof. The film is largely a comedy, after all.

Quadrophenia is something different entirely, more serious in every respect. Not music as a soundtrack to our lives, but music as a way of life. Sex, drugs and rock and roll of a particularly English flavour. The clothes, the haircuts, the suits and the amphetamines. Opportunistic back alley sex. Rolling waves of violence between the mods and the rockers. And for the star of the show, Jimmy, played by Phil Daniels, the cockney voice on Blur’s Parklife, the inevitable descent into psychosis.

The movie Quadrophenia is based on The Who’s epic concept double album of the same name. The Who, alongs with The Small Faces, were the preeminent mod bands in swinging Sixties London. The title is a reference to the personality being split in four directions.

In the Sixties it was common for conservative elements to characterise rock music as some sort of mental illness, satanic even. With the likes of Mick Jagger and Pete Townshend happy to just shrug at such suggestions, there was little push back. Why would there be? It served their image perfectly.

Which reminds me of Mick Jagger’s classic comeback in the early days, when an audience member yelled out he should get a haircut. He responded:

Why? And look like you?

It’s been about more than music, right from the start.

Rock music wasn’t a malformation of the old order, it was a rejection of it. It wasn’t creating a mental malady, it was solving it. Yet most cures have their side effects and Pete Townshend, The Who’s chief songwriter, with songs like My Generation and Substitute, and albums including Tommy and Quadrophenia mined this question more deeply then any of his contemporaries.

I look back on those days and see more clearly that those Melbourne mods were searching for something. Did they find it? Perhaps not within their mod personas, but in the journey that began by being a mod.

Pete Townshend knew what the questions were. He even wrote a song about it.

Welcome to my latest trilogy featuring The Who. Three classic albums, Tommy, Who’s Next and Quadrophenia. But first, The Who’s The Seeker is Stuck on the Inner Turntable.

The best music doesn’t leave us when the record stops playing.

It’s found a home, locked inside our memory, ready for a spin on that record player we take with us everywhere: The Inner Turntable.

It’s a strange record player. Sometimes it knows what we need to hear better than we do. But this isn’t surrendering to the music, this is assimilation; our mind knows what it has in its hands. It holds a truth that bears repeating and with each repetition, our understanding is not only deepened, our desire to create is awakened.

What is music?

At its most basic, it’s sounds arranged in time. Yet this doesn’t come close to capturing either the physical or metaphysical way in which music fills our lives.

It’s said that the first song we ever hear is our mother’s heart beat and perhaps that is one of our soul’s favourite tunes. It harmonises with our own heart in a way that is no longer separate. When my cat crawls onto me and I can hear her purrs and heartbeat, it is its own kind of music.

As I sit in the garden and listen to the birds, it’s easy to imagine that music is older than humanity itself. Without the knowledge of a complex vocabulary, they use melody, harmony and rhythm to communicate.

Yet in a 19th century workshop, Thomas Edison was about to irrevocably change our relationship with music; by making a recording of it.

It changes how we listen to music. It changes how we think about music. It changes how we make music.

We know what music is, like we know what water is. Without it, a thirst rises within us. Yet, when is it fit to drink and at what point do we drown?

There are no absolutes, there are only changes. Forever changes. This is what I write about. Not music for music’s sake, but how life is shaped by it.

What and why do I write?

The why bit is easy enough. Thinking never stops and writing is organising those thoughts. Creation, of music in particular, regardless of how free spirited and improvised it might be, requires a minimum of organisation. I forever will be the guaranteed audience of one.

The what lives within the changes. Every song is separate. Every song is connected. Yet none of this would make sense without recorded music. Music can’t be fully evoked by description, only by listening.

I spend much of my time in a small timber shack on a mountain in remote Tasmania. There a no cool clubs. No giant arenas. Just a guitar in the corner, a turntable and a shelf crammed with records. And just like the weather, every day brings change.

It changes how I listen to music.

I’m not the most organised person, but when it comes to writing, that’s no excuse. So The Inner Turntable will collect my trains of thought into a series of Series:

LISTENING:

Some of my writing comes for the experience of listening to music, even if it’s inside my head.

Haunted by the Inner Turntable

There is a connection between music and place. A song can transport us back to a place and time. Being in a place, or the time day, can get a song loaded onto the inner turntable. I’ve also stopped taking my headphones with me wherever I go, letting the inner turntable do the work. Less listening, more hearing. Some of my writing is born out of my frustration with the current digital landscape of music, in particular, streaming services.

Stuck on the Inner Turntable

There is a connection between music and our emotional state. Sometimes, that one song stuck in our head is enough to express that.

Trilogies

Sometimes a group of albums come together to tell a bigger story. About the artist. About the world. About ourselves. Each trilogy chooses three albums that belong together. They may or may not be by the same artist, yet they have a thematic connection that makes them worth considering collectively. David Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy is perhaps the most obvious. It could be Nick Drake, who only recorded three albums during his lifetime.

Each trilogy is usually accompanied by a Stuck on the Inner Turntable essay which touches on a track that’s connected to the trilogy. There’s also a personal essay that reflects more directly on my personal experiences. For example, when Mull of Kintyre was stuck on the inner turntable I wrote about where bagpipes fitted into my musical life.

WRITING:

What is music? I write directly about music itself. While I touch on what I listen too, I also consider the part music plays in society from both a cultural and a commercial point of view. Music can change society and society returns the favour, shaping music through its own wants and needs.

Thoughts on Recorded Music.

The impact of recorded music on how we experience music is deep and complex. From the part it plays in shaping our emotional and intellectual landscape, to its role as one of the most consumed art forms on the planet. Even within the last fifty years we’ve seen massive changes in how music is consumed. This effects the music itself in both visible and invisible ways.

PLAYING:

I play music myself and this manifests itself in two ways:

Songs.

I write them. I play them. I record them. I then release them in exactly the same way that I would an essay, with images, lyrics, recording and where possible, videos.

Hybrid Arts.

Recently I’ve begun making spoken word recording of my short stories and poems. Often these are backed with music, atmospherics and sound effects. I also create videos that incorporate my artworks to accompany them. The aim is to create a hybrid art form that includes many different elements.

A Brief Note on Genre

My first music is rock music. Beatles. Stones. Dylan and Hendrix. Classic, prog, punk and new wave from the sixties through to more recent times.

Next, electronic music. Ambient, electro and techno. Aphex Twin, Orbital, FSOL, The Orb and more.

After that, it’s an open field. Folk, jazz, blues, R&B, classical, pop, trad pop as well as plenty from the non-English speaking world.

The Inner Turntable: The Genesis of this (Sub) Publication

Now that I’m on two writing platforms, Substack and Medium, I would like the content to be the same on both. I’ve tried a few strategies so far. None of them have really worked. Substack is a newish enterprise for me, so the other thing I want to do is to introduce my music writing to the people here. This is what to expect.

I also understand that many people who are interested in my music writing are not interested in my more surreal writing adventures. I want those people to be able to interact with my music writing without concerning themselves with talking cardboard boxes or the satirical misadventures of Cucumber Man.

The Inner Turntable thus becomes a new publication on Medium, a new sub-publication in my End of the World Arts publication on Substack and a column in my monthly newsletter, The Red Telephone. I’ll shortly be creating index pages for all of these Series.

Why the Change?

I’ve already touched on one, but there are others:

1. Organisation. One creative process, two locations. Trying to do anything else has been unwieldy and inefficient.

2. Branding & Marketing. The Inner Turntable becomes the masthead of my music writing. Whether I’m promoting my work via email, social media or IRL, there should be a single message that leads to the same content at the two locations. Which leads to the next point.

3. Time Management. Online writing is hard and I am getting old. We need to get the most out of the time we put in. Repeating effort that has nothing new to say is a waste of time.

4. Ease of Navigation. Things are hard enough to find online as it is. With over 400 articles published on Medium, it can feel like some of my work has vanished into the abyss. Sometimes I find it hard enough to find it myself. This is not a good reader experience and needs to be addressed.

5. Music Only Focus. Many of my readers are only interested in the music. My other writing, the fiction is particular, is a distraction. This new publication will allow people to just follow my music writing.

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   My music writing on Medium has been many years in the making, but this is the beginning of my musical journey on Substack. If you want to find all my Inner Turntable writings, there is now a link at the top of The End of the World Arts homepage.

   Thanks for reading.