This is the last song on the album Tommy, it was one of the first albums I remember listening to in my best friend Jimmy’s basement hideaway (it was the old coal storage room from the days when the house was heated by a coal furnace, the walls were painted black and there was crinkled aluminum foil on them as well. It was suffused with what I took to be the smell of pot. Or perhaps it was “…incense and patchouli” (foreshadowing another song coming up on Kaffred’s Zune!). At the time, 1969, I had not even had a beer, I was 14 years old). On a wall hung a painting depicting the Jefferson Airplane (a painting of an actual bi-plane, not the members of the group).
The Who were one of the first bands I sampled as I slowly dipped my toe into the rock genre, breaking away slightly from Paul Mauriat (‘Love is Blue”), Mason Williams, Gary Lewis and the Playboys, and the Beatles. In my senior year at Irving Crown High School (now Dundee-Crown), 1971-72, I listened to Who’s Next in the school library. It had a system whereby you handed your cassette of music to the librarian, who placed it into a bank of playback decks and you were given a set of headphones connected to a wireless box that you tuned to your tape. It was monaural, but kind of neat.
A few years later, on a Sunday in 1975, my good friend Bob W. and I went to Chicago to see the Ken Russell extravaganza of Tommy, in Quintaphonic sound (“It’s one more” than the quadraphonic home systems of the day). We took the train down to the Northwestern station and walked the 8-9 blocks to the Loop in a cold rain to get to the run-down Chicago Theater (this was before the 1980s rehab). And the almost empty theater throbbed with a soundtrack turned all the way to 11 (Wow! Two Spinal Tap references, from the same scene, in the same paragraph!).
When I had first listened to the album, Tommy’s followers rejected his new religion in the end, but it kind of left his parents in limbo. In the movie, it was spelled out; the rampaging followers killed them. In fact, in the movie, Tommy’s dad was killed by his mom’s lover (she believing her husband MIA and dead), not the other way around as on the album. I actually preferred several of the versions on the soundtrack album, especially Jack Nicholson’s “Go to the Mirror” and Roger Daltry’s final reprise of “See me...Feel me”, sung as he climbs up a waterfall to the hilltop he was conceived (by Ann-Margaret, no less, and Robert Powell).
Another thing I recall about that trip was on the way home I picked up a Chicago magazine, because it had an article about Monty Python’s Flying Circus, at the beginning of their wildly successful run on Channel 11. It contained a photo of the group, with their names underneath. Up ‘til then I had always confused John Cleese and Graham Chapman (since they played the same sorts of officious characters and previous articles described them in general terms, not as specific ones, i.e. the pet shop customer in the “Dead Parrot” sketch (the Cleese classic).
In 1975, the Chicago and Northwestern train station, with it’s huge, barrel- vaulted ceiling in the sitting room, was still in existence. Somewhere in our garage, I have a 2’ x 4’ slab of marble that came out of that wonderful edifice when it was torn down several years later in 1984. I used it for years (in my bachelor days) as a rather substantial coffee table, with cinder blocks at the corners holding it up.
Man! There’s a lot of parentheticals in this posting, even one parenthetical within another. I’ll try to limit them next time.
