All the Madmen

by Clinton Heylin

  Pete Townshend: Actually, the overall concept of the new album does come from two ideas that we originally had. The idea I had was of a deaf, dumb and blind boy and his path through life and the simplicity of his thoughts. They were interpreted musically, and all kinds of things happened . . . Then Kit Lambert came up with an equally unreal idea . . . He said he’d like to see us do a new stage show which would be . . . like, The Ages of Man . . . Each one of us would write a song about a certain period of our life . . . and then we would link them all together . . . Suddenly, I thought about combining the two ideas. [1969]

  Roger Daltrey has himself claimed in a 1994 interview, that ‘it was Kit Lambert’s idea to do the full rock opera; and basically the storyline of Tommy – the [whole] holiday camp [thing] – was more Kit Lambert than Pete Townshend’. If so, it was Lambert who imposed a lot of Tommy’s grandiosity. Reflecting on their early discussions, Townshend recalls how Kit’s ‘whole thing was, “This is opera, y’know?” I used to argue . . . but he’d be, “No, no, no! This is fucking OPERA!”’

  Lambert had actually been pushing Townshend in this direction for some time. As Townshend readily admitted, the original rock opera, ‘A Quick One’, had been Kit’s idea: ‘The whole concept came from the manager . . . He said . . . “Let’s have a whole track – say, six different numbers – run into each other, all turning on the same idea.”’ It was Townshend’s idea, though, to make Tommy the story of an abused, disabled kid. And initially that is all it was:

  Pete Townshend: My original conception was that there would be a boy, born deaf, dumb and blind, whose parents don’t really know what to do . . . He gets to the age of about seventeen before he’s actually cured, but during this period they have several operations on him . . . His father gets angry one night because the boy won’t respond to him, and he beats him up . . . Then you get a song written by me about what is happening inside the boy. [1969]

  ‘Sparks’ and ‘Underture’ – both musical ideas that predated the project, in the former’s case being demoed as far back as 1966 – were commandeered to the cause even before Townshend excitedly informed Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner in July 1968: ‘The deaf, dumb and blind boy is played by The Who, the musical entity. He’s represented musically . . . [first] by a theme which we play which starts off the opera itself and then [by] a song describing the deaf, dumb and blind boy.’ Representing the (still unnamed) boy musically was a key part of Townshend’s original concept. ‘Sparks’ seems to have been the song he intended to convey ‘what is happening inside the boy’ when his father beats him up, while a (lost) song from Entwistle was supposed to depict things from the father’s point of view:

  Pete Townshend: His father gets pretty upset that his kid is deaf, dumb and blind. He wants a kid that will play football and God knows what. One night he comes in and he’s drunk and he sits over the kid’s bed and he . . . starts to talk to him, and the kid just smiles up, and his father is trying to get through to him . . . and he starts to say, ‘Can you hear me?’ The kid, of course, can’t hear him. He’s groovin’ in this musical thing . . . out of his mind. Then there’s his father outside of his body, and this song is going to be written by John . . . this song about the father who is really uptight. The kid won’t respond, he just smiles. The father starts to hit him and at this moment the whole thing becomes incredibly realistic. On one side you have the dreamy music of the boy wasting through his nothing life. And on the other you have the reality of the father outside, uptight . . . The father is hitting the kid; musically then I want the thing to break out . . . And the kid doesn’t catch the violence. He just knows that some sensation is happening. He doesn’t feel the pain . . . He just accepts it. [1968]

  At this stage Townshend had yet to formulate an ending more cogent than the very Sixties idea of the boy figuring out a way to ‘get over his hangups’, thus achieving Laing’s ‘hypersanity’. But by the time Townshend talked to Beat Instrumental at the turn of the year he had integrated Lambert’s holiday-camp idea, elements of messianism and even that bizarre cipher for rock stardom, becoming a pinball champion7. For now, though, the protracted attempts at a cure would come after his success as a pinball champion:

  Pete Townshend: The central character is a boy who is blind, deaf and dumb . . . People start to notice him when he becomes the first ever pinball champion of the world, and the kids gradually turn him into a sorta superhero. He doesn’t give a toss and keeps on playing his pinballs while a religion grows up around him. His family realizes that he’s big business and the nastiness moves in – his followers start wearing fascist uniforms and the organization develops. In the meantime they’ve done all manner of strange things to the boy – like giving him LSD and finding that it has no effect – in an effort to bring him out. The central moment comes when they force him to look in the mirror – the doctor breaks it. That’s the moment of revelation. The time-scale of the opera covers the life of the boy from his birth in 1914 . . . The point is that the breaking of the mirror is now. [1969]

  Townshend, unlike The Pretties, had no shortage of songs already stockpiled, some of which he commandeered to the narrative cause. The ever-changing story was necessarily modified by these songs, and vice-versa. Some of them slipped into the new narrative with relative ease. ‘It’s a Girl’, the reincarnation coda from ‘Glow Girl’, required only a sex-change. ‘Sensation’ didn’t even need that. However, it was not alone in needing some new words. ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’, another song ‘originally about fascism and phoney leaders’ (‘You lost us at Sunday school, and the Lord gained us today / We’re not gonna take it, nothing will be said’), slipped surprisingly easily into its preordained slot as album-closer once it focused on a false messiah, not a phoney leader:

  Pete Townshend: [‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’] was originally a song about something else entirely, with similar words. It didn’t have the ‘Listening [to You]’ chorus then and . . . was written before Tommy was started. The interesting thing is how a person’s mind, (my mind), becomes very one-track at certain times. When I decided to put Tommy together as an ‘opera’, I simply amassed all the songs I had, and remarkably about eighty per cent of them fit somewhere. I seemed to have been unconsciously writing on a theme for almost a year without realizing it. [1974]

  The songs took over in a way that Townshend soon grasped was more than mere happenstance. He told Zigzag in 1971, when writing songs solely to fit a preordained concept, ‘Tommy was long and in the end we were digging about a bit, and so we pulled from all sorts of sources . . . “Joker James” [was] a little thing I’d done years before and never got used. I had a little demo of it, redid the words and there it was, “Sally Simpson” . . . “I’m Free” was written long before Tommy was ever thought of . . . It definitely seemed to be something that was happening outside of me. Something was putting it together.’

  Townshend still hit a snag, however, in his depiction of child abuse, which remained a central part of the narrative. A paedophile uncle was one character he had discussed with Jann Wenner before he had even demoed the album, though he tried to make light of the intended episode: ‘The uncle is a bit of a perv, you know. He plays with the kid’s body . . . and the boy experiences sexual vibrations, you know, sexual experience, and again it’s just basic music, it’s interpreted as music and it is nothing more than music. It’s got no association with sleaziness.’ But then he let slip: ‘Most of those [kind of] things just come from me.’ It was quite a telling remark, though it would take him two more decades to realize just how telling:

  Pete Townshend: I think [using the child abuse] was unconscious . . . It’s quite possible that when I was with my grandmother, she had a boyfriend who came into my bedroom. I don’t know quite what happened, but I’ve got that far in my mind. I’ve tried to bring it out through therapy and I’ve failed. She used to make me call all her boyfriends – and there were several – ‘Uncle’. I think that’s where it came from. I actually said to John Entwistl
e, ‘I’ve got this song about a pederastic old uncle and I can’t write it. Can you?’ [1996]

  Entwistle remembered Townshend telling him he had this ‘kid called Tommy who was gonna go through all these traumatic experiences with some chick who slips him acid, a homosexual uncle and a bully. He then asked me if I could write songs for the last two because he felt that he couldn’t write nearly as nasty as me.’ Rather than wondering why the guitarist baulked at his own subject matter, Entwistle simply penned ‘Fiddle About’ and ‘Cousin Kevin’ to Townshend’s exacting specifications. Townshend was delighted with Entwistle’s ‘ruthlessly brilliant songs, because they are just as cruel as people can be. [And] I wanted to show that the boy was being dealt with very cruelly . . . he was being dismissed as a freak.’

  However, when it came to a song about ‘some chick who slips him acid’, Townshend didn’t need any of the Ox’s help. The resultant track, ‘The Acid Queen’, a highlight of Tommy, finally allowed him to address ‘the whole drug thing, the drink thing, the sex thing wrapped into one big ball. It’s about how you get it laid on you that you haven’t lived if you haven’t fucked forty birds, taken sixty trips, drunk fourteen pints of beer’ – a clear rejection of the mantra that the road of excess ultimately leads to the palace of wisdom even if it involves a protracted truck-stop at a town called Dissipation. For now, Townshend refused to over-analyse where such stuff was coming from. It would be 1991 before he felt compelled to draw some requisite dots:

  Pete Townshend: When I wrote it, I saw all this weird shit in there, and I couldn’t really explain it. Every time I go back to it I find much more unconscious cohesion in it than I’d imagined . . . when I wrote it . . . I was a very, very clear-cut postwar victim of two people who were married in the war too young, had problems because of the war, so I went to stay with my grandmother, who happened to be off her fucking head . . . [It was only] when I sat down . . . to work on the Broadway [production of] Tommy, [that] I finally knew that there was a strong literal autobiographical component. Particularly in the opening scenes, which I hadn’t really quite gotten before. Y’know, my father coming back and saying to my mother, ‘We have to get back together for the sake of the boy.’ So there was this almost metaphorical killing of the lover. It was the first time I’d realized where all this weird shit comes from. Sexual abuse, forcing drugs down children’s throats, bullying, power struggles, family lies, family denials, secrets . . . Tommy was where I started to see evidence of a troubled childhood. [2004]

  Back in 1969, the critics were not in denial, some targeting this very subtext at the time of the album’s release. The banner headline to Richard Green’s NME review condemned The ‘Who’s Sick Opera’, while his actual review suggested that the word ‘sick’ ‘certainly applies’ to the material. Not surprisingly, Townshend leapt immediately to his songs’ defence, insisting, ‘I’m very pleased with the way the album has turned out . . . Sure, the boy is raped and suffers, but we show that instead of being repulsed and sickened, he has the means to turn all these experiences to his own good.’ Only with time did he come to accept that a premise in which ‘suffering, whether it’s self-inflicted or it comes from outside, leads to spiritual growth . . . is actually quite dangerous, because what you’re actually . . . saying [is], “Oh, it’s okay to abuse children, ’cause they spiritually grow”.’

  But if Townshend feared that this critical flak might put the kibbosh on the album’s commercial chances, he need not have worried. Tommy was a smash, especially in America, where the deluxe packaging, complete with twelve-page libretto, seemed to vindicate everything Lambert had argued for so vehemently. Townshend had his ‘fucking OPERA’ – even if the songwriter still insisted: ‘It certainly isn’t the same as an accepted opera. It was just a name I used to give some indication of the scope and continuity of Tommy. When we perform it, we like to keep the sort of end-of-the-pier feeling.’

  Whatever its category, the band now had the very vehicle needed to ignite their powerhouse performances and set America alight. Trekking across the continent with this rather English tale of redemption, they stopped off at the Woodstock mud-fest, before heading back to Blighty where, during 1969’s August Bank Holiday, they performed the entire work to 200,000 hardy Brits who had trekked to the Isle of Wight to see, mostly, Bob Dylan’s first full post-accident performance. It had been a long, hard climb but, for now at least, The Who were top of the heap:

  Pete Townshend: By the time we got round to that Isle of Wight [Festival] we knew what worked and what you skipped over quickly. It was a great concert for us because we felt so in control of the situation. We were able to just come in, do it and not need to know anything about what was going on . . . We knew we were on to a good thing. [1982]

  *

  The combination of high-falutin’ ideas, cod-mysticism, psychological scars, rasping riffs and maximum r&b may have broken The Who’s commercial dam but, as the 1960s wound down, Ray Davies continued swimming against the tide of commercial conformity. Taking precious little heed of any lesson he might have learnt from the muted reception that greeted the generally well-conceived VGPS, he was bent on another thematic album, and this one would directly address past hurts.

  When VGPS’s successor, Arthur, or The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, sent The Kinks down what, in commercial terms, was another dead-end street, Davies asserted it was not really his idea. In a 1977 NME career overview, he said it came about because ‘Granada Television took me out to lunch and said, “We want you to write an opera.” I said I would write a musical. They said, “We want it to be The Decline and Fall of the British Empire.” I said “I can’t do it, but I’ll write an album about somebody who lives in a place where everything is crumbling around him.” ’ And in his own ‘unauthorized autobiography.’ Davies went to some pains to proclaim that Arthur originally met with near universal acceptance in The Kinks, camp: ‘I knew that The Village Green was about the decline of a certain innocence in England, and when I suggested that I go the whole way and write about the decline and fall of the British empire everyone . . . thought that it was the perfect subject matter.’ Of course, it had really been him pitching the idea to the TV execs. And although they initially gave him the green light, they were never fully convinced – as events were to show.

  Perhaps he thought social realism set atop the fin de siècle feel of VGPS made for a winning formula – S.F. Sorrow notwithstanding – and that he could finally get the band back to the position they enjoyed at the time of ‘Waterloo Sunset’, a perfect storm of critical and commercial acclaim. In fact, he had started thinking again about that song, and ‘how the imaginary Julie, who suddenly symbolized England, met my nephew, Terry, on Waterloo Bridge. A reunion of past and future . . . [Then] I thought about Terry’s father Arthur, and how his bitterness and sense of betrayal by Britain had forced him to emigrate to Australia to a new life.’

  The resultant album would pit family against country, a suburban ‘Shangri-La’ contrasted with the promise of an Antipodean paradise. Like Sebastian F. Sorrow, Arthur’s working life was spent at the Misery Factory, looking for a way out (or, as it says in the album notes, ‘Arthur has spent most of his life on his knees, laying carpets’). But it was not Arthur’s frustrations that would suffuse The Kinks’ next album, it was Ray’s. As he told biographer Jon Savage, when questioned as to the reasoning behind another ‘concept album’, ‘Arthur was a labour of love. I was angry with a society that had built me to be factory fodder; I wasn’t angry about older people because I could see that they’d been victims of it.’

  The new songs certainly teemed with caustic comments on a class system that demanded the compliant attitude of ‘Yes Sir, No Sir’. Questioning for the first time why any mother’s son needed to fight and die just because ‘Mr Churchill Says’, Davies poured scorn on that national aspiration for some mock-tudor suburban idyll (and anyone who doubts the sincerity of this Arthurian point of view should remember this man also once said, ‘I�
�ve got nothing against suburbia other than it destroys people’). In Davies’ mind’s eye, Arthur’s generation had been ‘Brainwashed’ into believing English society constituted ‘one big happy family’. Having previously avoided the ‘My Generation’ school of social commentary, Davies had become an angry older man. The burning question was, how to address all these issues and still retain a narrative thread strong enough to keep Granada TV firmly engaged?

  At least he had a name for the new genre, telling Record Mirror, ‘I’m writing a pop opera at the moment – I suppose that’s the best way of describing it – we’re doing it for television, and . . . as our next album.’ He was more expansive to Beat Instrumental, informing them that the next album would be about ‘this chap Arthur [who] hasn’t done anything in his life. He’s not really lived at all. And the opera concerns a weekend in his life when his son and daughter-in-law stay at his home and the total worthlessness of his life is exposed.’ The problem, as Julian Mitchell’s perceptive sleevenotes noted, was that ‘nothing happens very much – everyone has Sunday dinner together, then Ronnie turns up and the men go to the pub where Ronnie gets all worked up about The System, while Liz and Rose talk about the past’.

  Amazingly, Ray was left to get on with the project by the Quaife-less Kinks, the band’s management and their increasingly bemused record label. At least his brother was wholly supportive, later calling Arthur his ‘favourite Kinks album . . . Ray was writing fantastic, sensitive words that were so relevant to what was going on . . . I was really surprised at the response we got to [the] ‘Shangri-La’ [single]. I thought it was going to be a massive hit.’