I’m Free

The Who’s Tommy has to be one of the greatest rock movies. That doesn’t mean it’s exactly a good movie by regular movie standards, but it’s too gonzo not to love. Tommy the album was classic enough on its own, chock-full of great songs and half-baked ideas. It didn’t hold together as a narrative, because that’s very hard to achieve through pop songs, but it made sense on an emotional level. The child Tommy experiences a trauma which makes him deaf, dumb and blind but doesn’t stop him becoming a pinball champion. He’s used and abused by various family members until he has some kind of a breakthrough and achieves enlightenment. Loosely based on Pete Townshend’s own traumatic childhood and search for enlightenment, it’s basically a story about trying to become a whole person despite everything that’s shitty in the world, from WWII to molesty uncles to religious cults. It was obviously just begging to be made into a movie. Surely director Ken Russell was more than delighted to take the job, as it gave him a chance to get away from worrying about petty things like narrative continuity and spend more time filming Ann Margaret wallowing in beans. Russell brought his usual flamboyant style, and cranked it up to eleven. Though the concept was Townshend’s baby, Roger Daltrey was cast as Tommy, for reasons that are obvious. Daltrey was comely and could even act a little bit. There were also appearances by Elton John, Eric Clapton, Oliver Reed, Keith Moon and Tina Turner, among others. I can’t recommend this to anyone who is not a Who and/or psychedelic drug fan, but if you are, then you’re in for a treat. Don’t call it a movie, call it a feature length music video. You’ll enjoy it more that way.

I’m A Boy

Here’s a thought provoking song. The Who produced a lot of thought provoking songs, cleverly disguised as maximum r’n'b. Given their penchant for smashing things, it’s no wonder their intellectual aspects have been overlooked. The Who will always go down in history as the band that smashed their instruments, even though they only did it a few times. Between that and Keith Moon’s antics, there’s more than enough mythmaking to go around. But let’s stop and give them credit for some other things as well, such as songwriting. Pete Townshend is not only the guy who smashed up his guitar; he’s also a pretty damn astounding songwriter. The Who’s songs are impressive for working on many levels. Let’s have a look at this one. On the most obvious level, it’s breakneck rock’n'roll, almost punk in its simplicity and aggression, but with theatrical elements as well. Then there’s the lyrics to think about. Simply put, it’s about a little boy whose mother pretends that he is a girl. Townshend originally wrote it for a rock opera that never came together. The question is, what, deep down, does it mean? Is it a joke? It could be – like many Who songs, it’s really very funny. Or could it be dead serious? The child in the song could be the victim of a delusional, insane mother or the child could be transgender, suffering a schism of identity visible only to him/her self. Either way, it’s a terribly sad song when you think about it. Whether those were things Pete Townshend was thinking about when he wrote the song is unknown, but it’s possible. I have always seen it as a purely fantastic lyrical exercise, in which Townshend adopts the point of view of a farfetched character, but since Townshed has revealed his own history of child sexual abuse, many of his songs now have to be seen in a much darker light. It certainly explains his empathy for the helpless and marginalized, and also the anger that often drives his playing. It could be that the boy in the song, like the more famous Tommy, is an alter-ego, a figure who is controlled and humiliated, and also very angry and eager to escape. It’s still unclear if this character is really a boy or not. The child could be a boy who has been feminized, which could be seen as a metaphor for sexual abuse. Or the child could be a girl with a male identity, in which case she is not literally abused but victimized indirectly by oblivious adults bent on upstanding binary gender roles. In either case, the character is helpless, trapped in a false identity, frustrated and angry, and longing for the freedom express their true self. All which are the feelings of an abuse victim, and the fact that we now know that it was written by an actual abuse survivor makes it all the more unsettling. I doubt that when Pete Townshend spoke about his hard childhood he meant to make everyone feel icky about enjoying his old songs, nor do I think he wanted to be thought of henceforth as ‘the guy who smashed up his guitars because he was angry about having been molested’, but it has affected the way I understand his music, and it makes me think very deeply about the complicated relationship between trauma, identity, creativity and self-expression.

Going Mobile

Just another little album track that never got played in concert. Seriously? Only one of the best Who songs. Or so thinks I. The critical reaction, form what I gather on the great Wiki, is it’s a ‘lighter’ side of Who’s Next. Well, granted, it’s pretty stiff competition on Who’s Next. The song does also have a dodgy history, salvaged from a stillborn Pete Townshend solo project. I don’t have much use for Pete Townshend solo, but if everything he came up with was Going Mobile, maybe it’d be worthwhile. It’s a Who song Roger Daltrey didn’t even participate in, and though I’ll usually say that Daltrey was and is far and away the better singer, in this case, Pete rocked it as well as anyone. I don’t understand why this was never played or released as a single. Townshend said the song was about the joys of owning a mobile home, apparently unaware that most people who own mobile homes keep them on cinder blocks most of the time and never go anyplace:

“As the story unfolded, because of the vagaries of the modern world, because of pollution being caused mainly by people’s need to travel, to be somewhere else. (People) had been told, ‘You can’t do that anymore. You have to stay where you are.’ But people have got this lust for life, and adventure, and a bit of color.”