Welcome to MusicDayz

The world's largest online archive of date-sorted music facts, bringing day-by-day facts instantly to your fingertips.
Find out what happened on your or your friends' Birthday, Wedding Day, Anniversary or just discover fun facts in musical areas that particularly interest you.
Please take a look around.

Fact #111744

When:

Short story:

Ken Russell's film Tommy, based on The Who's concept LP of the same name, opens at cinemas in the USA.

Full article:

THE MAKING OF THE FILM OF TOMMY
(An Oral History - researched and compiled by Johnny Black)

Pete Townshend : Kit Lambert was the most important part of our creative team at the time. He actually produced the record of Tommy. He was, if you like, the svengali to my Trilby, to put it pompously. He used to listen to my work, pull it apart and nurture my writing. Chris Stamp, my partner, reminded me that I resisted making a film of Tommy then. They were film makers, these two guys. I think they only ended up managing the Who because they were looking to make a Quadrophenia-type film about the swinging sixties and wound up managing a rock band. They desperately wanted to make a movie of Tommy and I fought it, fought it, fought it! I remember I said, 'Cinema isn't big enough to contain rock 'n' roll!' That's how I used to think. I used to feel that rock was a huge spiritual thing that only happened in concert and occasionally on records when you were in an internal world. [It was] part of that very intimate engagement between writer and listener where I would sit writing songs in my little bedroom and you, the teenybopper, would hopefully be at home in your bedroom with earphones [which] would be a very, very pure line.

Richard Barnes : Pete Townshend is an old friend of mine, and before filming started, he asked me to write a book about the making of the film, so I was there taking photographs and making notes the whole time. It took ages to get the film moving. Kit Lambert, the Who