The soundtrack album was also released by Polydor Records as a double album and went gold in the U.S., U.K., and Canada, proving popular enough to get reissued on CD several times. Lighter and Softer than the album, with gratuitous quantities of synthesized instrumentals and lots of Large Ham moments. Like the LSO recording, a number of guest musicians were featured, including Elton John (whose recording of "Pinball Wizard" became a radio hit), Ann-Margret as Tommy's mother Nora, Eric Clapton and Arthur Brown as the high priests of the church of Marilyn Monroe, Oliver Reed as Tommy's "Uncle Frank" Hobbs (who in this version kills Tommy's father rather than the other way around), and Jack Nicholson, in his only singing role (barring his performance of "La Vie en Rose" in As Good as It Gets), as Tommy's doctor. A 1975 film directed by Ken Russell, which manages to be even more trippy than the original album.The story follows the same as the original, but instead of becoming a pinball player, Hommy became a conga drum master. In 1972, the salsa record company Fania made this a Salsa Opera called Hommy (pronounced Ome).A 1972 recording by the London Symphony Orchestra, with members of the Who singing various parts along with other vocalists including Ringo Starr, Rod Stewart, and Sir Richard Harris.In addition to the original LP and several live recordings by the Who, a number of adaptations have been produced, including: The story is heavily inspired by Pete Townshend's then-recent conversion to the teachings of Meher Baba and his subsequent rejection of psychedelic drugs, a theme he would continue to explore in later albums. That said, it has much more continuity than many examples of Rock Opera and has a very definite plot arc embedded in the catchy tunes. In the end, the masses rebuke and abandon him - and it is then that Tommy, broken, alone, and possibly dying, finds God.īeing something that delivers plot through music, you have to make some allowances and read into it in some places. Tommy gradually discovers that his disciples are more interested in a quick fix than spiritual enlightenment he warns them that they can't follow him through drinking, getting high, or dropping acid, and when they beg him to give them some kind of easy spiritual key he forces them to play pinball while wearing blindfolds and earplugs.
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Free to speak for himself, Tommy becomes a spiritual leader to the fans he's gained through his playing and seeks to create a new religion to teach the world about the revelations he acquired during his blindness. mute), and blind.Įventually, he gains, or regains, his senses after a cathartic moment wherein the mirror in which he glimpsed the original murder is smashed. Traumatized by the experience, and his parents' exhortation that "You didn't hear it, you didn't see it, you won't say nothing to no one ever in your life", Tommy is struck deaf, dumb (i.e.
Tommy the pinball wizard movie movie#
Their best-known and most influential album, its release introduced the world to the concept of Rock Opera, made the Who into a household name in Britain and the US and propelled what had previously been a typical '60s mod band into the annals of rock history.īorn at the end of World War I ( World War II in the movie and Broadway versions) to a war widow, Tommy Walker is an ordinary child growing up in postwar Britain until his father, presumed dead but actually missing behind enemy lines for several years, comes home, finds his wife with her new lover, and kills him in self-defense (in the Broadway version, anyway the movie version has the new lover kill the husband in self-defense, and the album itself leaves the nature of the event deliberately ambiguous) while Tommy witnesses it all in a mirror. Tommy is the fourth studio album by The Who, released in 1969.