‘Tommy’ Was a Bigger Sensation in My Mind

Poor abused, mistreated Tommy.

I’m not thinking of the drugged, raped, beaten, sensory-deprived title character of Pete Townshend’s “Tommy,” but of the whole dang rock opera itself. I saw it recently in its spangly, new incarnation at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, and, boy, was it loathsome.

Townshend’s most famous creation is certainly deserving of a new airing, especially since it hardly ever got its due. The original 1969 recording by the Who has always struck me as a rush job, with many of the tracks sounding more like demos than on a par with the full-blooded, creative productions that graced Who albums before and after it. When I interviewed singer Roger Daltrey a few years ago, he confirmed as much, saying that they hadn’t the time or budget to record it as they’d wished.

If that first “Tommy” was too austere, all subsequent recorded versions went to the opposite extreme, overproduced with flatulent orchestras, synthesizers and guest stars. The ultimate bloat was Ken Russell’s 1975 vomit-of-consciousness film version, where sensory overload and shock value spewed from every scene.

Underproduced though the original album was, it was certainly enough . When I was 14, I got my copy by subscribing to Rolling Stone: The album hadn’t yet come out, and they offered to send it free if you’d sign up for two years.

I’d been a Who fan since I was 10, when the unprecedented vitriol and guitar violence of “My Generation” came barking out of the AM radio like a rabid dog. A couple of years later, I thought “I Can See for Miles” was the most exciting thing I’d ever heard, and I’d wait for it to come on the radio so I could pound along with Keith Moon, using chopsticks on the silverware tray to approximate a snare drum.

By then Hit Parader magazine seemed to have a new Townshend interview every month. What a cool guy! Not only was he smashing guitars and exploding amps like a rock Godzilla, but he could cite articulate art-school reasons for doing so. He had ideas and opinions on everything, but what he talked about the most was this “rock opera” thing he was working on. And here it finally was. As I did with other “significant” albums of the time, I put it on my $39 G.E. Trimline stereo, placed the speakers one foot apart on the floor, stuck my head between them and was transported.

In the spirit of the best mumbled rock songs, the ambitious story line left a lot open to interpretation. The song-crafting was miraculous, showing Townshend’s respect for the power of rock and wondrous disregard for whatever conventions he broke to achieve it. “Tommy” sounded like nothing that had come before it, yet there was no doubting it deserved to be blaring out of every radio. (A friend of mine spent a summer in Spain back then and swears that in the convent next door to his dorm the nuns would gather around the piano to sing “Pinball Wizard” phonetically.)

But the true wonder was the way the music could take you inside. Tommy, driven blind, deaf and dumb by witnessing his father murder his mother’s lover, enters a “quiet vibration land” of “musical dreams,” and rather than just sing of them, Townshend’s music took you there. That was as mind-opening as any trip, physical or psychedelic.

I thought a lot about that tiny stage, the space between those two speakers, as I watched the latest version of “Tommy” lumber across the Performing Arts Center stage with the grace of an animated corpse.

I’m predisposed to like any show in that stuffed-shirt building that necessitates signs in the lobby warning “Strobe lights and firearms will be used in this performance.” Firearms and speedboats would be mandatory at all performances there if I had my way, that and wine-drunk German shepherds roaming the aisles. Anything to get the joint to loosen up a bit.

But “Tommy” didn’t do the trick. “I’m a sensation,” sang Tommy, and the production was indeed a sensation, bearing in mind that so also is nausea.

The stiff, tarted-up music was a caricature of the Who’s passionate version. (The volume was certainly toned down, though one couldn’t tell that to the center regulars enduring the show with their fingers in their ears.) The production was awash in Cracker Jack special effects, with stuff spinning and whirling, flashing and glittering all over the place. It was like “Tommy, the theme park ride.”

New York critics had raved about this show. The center audience gave it a rousing ovation, even those who’d blocked their ears and one lady seated near me who’d been soundly asleep since the intermission. They had survived their first rock opera, and were glad. Good for them. Happy people are productive people.

The show depressed me for days, truly, because it had no soul. Nowhere was there any attempt to represent Tommy’s interior journeys, or even to allow an opportunity for the audience to imagine them. Maybe they should have attempted a light show, or, far better, just left the stage in respectful darkness for a few moments as the music--not this music, but the music it should have been--had a chance to spark the synapses. Instead there was only an onslaught of special effects and soap opera dramatics.

Some West Coast critics who lack the discernment of their New York brethren--”Hey, these rats are stupendous!” the latter often get to discern in their chosen city--have taken this “Tommy” to task for that soulless-ness. I almost feel a little sorry for the Performing Arts Center folks. Here we needle them for years for lacking the vision--which officials at other such venues possess--to recognize the validity of rock and other non-classical forms. Then they finally bring in a big noisy rock show, and we slag it.

But I don’t feel that sorry for them, because the center is still a million miles from ever touching the real thing.

The instances in the past when “Tommy” did get its due were the tours when the Who took hold of it onstage. No props, no cast, no special effects, just four guys with drums, guitars and a whirling microphone thoroughly inhabiting the music. It was regal, anarchic, spiritual and most certainly visceral, crackling with energy that propelled it relentlessly to its conclusion.

And though it was a quarter-century ago that the Who set precedent by performing its “Tommy” in Europe’s finest opera houses and New York’s Metropolitan Opera House, it is almost beyond imagining that the Performing Arts Center would ever book anything so chancy, vital and alive. Getting the diluted stuff in predigested, secondhand packages doesn’t count.