Fact #171452

Pete Townshend (guitarist, The Who) : It was supposed to be a series of singles and any departure from that was introduced by Kit Lambert's coaching – 'keep that, write another tune, then repeat that.' So I just wrote bits and stuck them into songs. It may appear to flow but, when I presented it to the band, it was simply a series of songs.

Roger Daltrey (vocals, The Who) : It was really Kit Lambert's dream to do an Important Work in rock music - if there were ever any such thing. Kit had come from a classical background - his father, Constant Lambert, was founder of the English National Opera - and having his kind of education, it frustrated him that there were all these grand tales being told in classical music, so why couldn't rock address itself to something more serious than the three-minute soundbite?

It was a long way from what we'd been doing, but we'd have a go at anything. Only someone like Kit could have pulled Tommy off, though - all the hype that went with it. I mean the narrative is not particularly good, is it? Then again it does have a narrative, which is more than Quadrophenia had!

John Entwistle (Bassist, The Who) : We started out doing what was basically a single album, but it didn't make sense. We realized the only way to make it coherent was to make it a double album, because a lot more things
happened to Tommy than could be put on one album.

Keith Moon (drummer, The Who) : We wrote most of Tommy in a pub opposite the recording studio.

John Entwistle : It took us eight months all together, six months recording, two months mixing. We had to do so many of the tracks again, because it took so long we had to keep going back and rejuvenating the numbers, that it just started to drive us mad, we were getting brainwashed by the whole thing, and I started to hate it.

Pete Townshend : (Tommy) was completely autobiographical. All I knew was that I spent time with a grandmother whom I didn't like very much. "See me, feel me, touch me." Where did that come from? It came from that little four-and-a-half-year-old boy in a fucking unlocked bedroom in a house with a madwoman. That's where it came from.

I was so earnestly trying to avoid writing something autobiographical. All of the Who's first work was about their early audience; we felt rock should be reflective of its audience. That was what was unique about rock 'n' roll as an art form. I tended to write, if not my own biography, certainly an encapsulated biography assembled from bits of the audience. Yet Tommy felt to me - when I was writing it - to be the exception to that.

Roger Daltrey : Pete used to literally write his best stuff when he was writing about a character that he could see very, very clearly from outside himself. When he gets introspective it turns into melodramatic dross. And some of it's really good and I admire his courage for doing that. So, I'm not putting him down for that but he writes his best stuff when he's writing for a figure beyond himself. And I was that figure. And of course I personified Tommy. I was the guy who used to play the part. I played the damn part for five years. I slogged my balls off around the world sweating it out. People thought I was Tommy. I used to get called Tommy in the street.

John Entwistle : When we did Tommy, we had moved up to eight track, but we only recorded five. The last three were for the orchestration, but we couldn't afford it.

Roger Daltrey : Pete used to come in some days with just half a demo. We used to talk for hours, literally. We probably did as much talking as we did recording. Sorting out arrangements and things on Tommy.

Pete Townshend : I didn't write Tommy in any kind of chronological order. I already had some of the material - Amazing Journey, Sensation, Welcome, Sparks and Underture. We're Not Gonna Take It was a kind of anti-Fascist statement. The first rundown of the idea I put on a graph. It was intended to show Tommy from the outside and his impressions going on inside him.

John Entwistle : Pete suggested that I write two songs he felt he couldn't write.

Roger Daltrey : The most important songs in Tommy, which give it the kind of edge, are Cousin Kevin and Uncle Ernie, which were written by John Entwistle, not by Pete.

John Entwistle : Basically, the brief I got was to write a song about a homosexual experience with a nasty uncle, and a bullying experience by ... I don't know whether 'cousin' was actually mentioned, but I figured it might well be the son of Uncle Ernie. I found it very easy. I'd written Fiddle About, for the character of Uncle Ernie, by the time I'd got back to the room. If I've got the idea for a song, then it comes almost immediately.

Pete Townshend : I don't consider the album to be sick at all. In fact, what I was out to show is that someone who suffers terribly at the hands of society has the ability to turn all these experiences into a tremendous musical awareness. Sickness is in the mind of the listener and I don't give a damn what people think.

Roger Daltrey : Tommy came along at a time in our lives when everyone was searching for answers in their life. The ambiguity of Tommy allowed it to answer many things for many different people. But in fact it didn't really answer anything. That's the beauty of it.

Pete Townshend : There is no ending. What I was doing at the time was attending to the fact that in rock'n'roll what you don't do is make people's decisions for them. You share their ideas, difficulties and frustrations.

John Entwistle : I only ever played the record twice - ever. I don't think Tommy was all about [what] was on the record - I think it's on the stage. The message is much stronger on stage than on record.

Pete Townshend : I suppose the mistake I made in Tommy was instead of having the guts to take what Meher Baba said - which was "Don't worry, be happy, leave the results to God" - and repeating that to people, I decided the people weren't capable of hearing that directly.  They've got to have it served in this entertainment package.  And I gave them Tommy instead, in which some of Meher Baba's wonderfully explicit truths were presented to them half-baked in lyric form and diluted as a result.  In fact, if there was any warning in Tommy, it was "Don't make any more records like that."
(Source : all quotes researched and compiled by Johnny Black from a wide variety of original sources)