The most excruciating thing known to man isn’t blazing light – it’s pain.
But if you can’t see or hear, touch must come totally alive. For someone that can see, sight has an absurdly high percentage over the other senses in terms of mental concentration. McLuhan says that touch is a combination of all the senses at once: “Yea, I read that. Touch is the one sense that Tommy still has in the early part of the album. All these things had to be tied up in advance and then referred back to. “You see, each song has to capsule an event in the boy’s life, and also the feeling, what has ensued, and cover and knit-up all the possibilities in all the other fields of action that are suggested. Hear Ann-Margret and Pete Townshend's New Take on the Everly Brothers' 'Bye Bye Love' But on the simplest level, the songs are magnificent, simply as rock. There’s too much, on too many levels, for a casual listener. It’s possible that all that’s in Townshend’s mind won’t come across by simply sitting down and listening to the album.
The songs in the opera, then, have to convey an amazing amount. “In Tommy’s mind, everything is incredible, meaningless beauty.” He gets an incredible spiritual push from it where most people would get a spiritual retardment, constantly thinking about this terrible thing that’s happened to them. Lust is a lower form of love, like atomic attraction is a lower form of love. He takes it as a move of total affection, not feeling the reasons why. Like when his uncle rapes him – he is incredibly elated, not disgusted, at being homosexually raped.
“He gets everything in a very pure, filtered, unadulterated, unfucked-up manner. Having lost most of his senses, Tommy feels everything simply as rhythms and vibration. “I’m more concerned about what actually happens in his life.” “The boy’s life starts to represent the whole nature of humanity – we all have this self-imposed deaf, dumb and blindness – but this isn’t something I’m over heavy on,” says Pete. They make him see and hear and speak so he becomes a saint who everybody flocks to. The coming together of these are what make him aware. “Tommy’s real self represents the aim – God – and the illusory self is the teacher life, the way, the path and all this. It’s the realisation of what we all intellectually know – universal consciousness – but it’s no good to know until you can actually realise it. You don’t incarnate again you don’t do anything again – you just blend.
When you lose all contact with your illusory state, you become totally dead – but totally aware. You need the illusions until you reach very pure saintly states. He’s feeling his way by evolution back to God – realisation and the illusion is broken away, bit by bit. “In general terms, man is regarded as living in an unreal world of illusory values that he’s imposed on himself. The germ of the opera in fact came from a single, “Glow Girl,” which was never released. Pieces from a projected bigger work appeared on A Quick One and The Who Sell Out, but Tommy, which took two years to complete, owes little to these. Pete has often spoken of his opera in the past. The opera is, apart from being some of the best rock yet, a statement of Townshend’s philosophy. Born during the First World War, he becomes blind, deaf and dumb after seeing a murder by his parents in a mirror, becomes a pinball champion, reaches a state of grace, regains his senses and starts his own religion, is eventually discarded by his disciples somewhere in the far distant future, finds himself as isolated as he was in the beginning. For the first time, a rock group has come up with a full-length cohesive work that could be compared to the classics. And now we have a double album set that’s probably the most important milestone in pop since Beatlemania. Pete Townshend‘s been talking about doing his opera for years.
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