#Pinball wizard guitar movie#

Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Clubs Band and Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced. Nonetheless, he believed strongly in The Who’s music as a unifying force and wanted to be sure that all of those ideas and contradictions were carefully threaded into the album’s storyline.Īnother defining factor was the Beatles’ Sgt. As if to embody those notions, Townshend, for the most part, created the songs for Tommy in a vacuum. Beneath its sonic mesh of electric and acoustic guitars and the superb song-to-song integration of its lyrics lays a hotbed of turmoil that pushed Pete Townshend to the brink and left his bandmates feeling, at times, disenfranchised.įor Townshend, Tommy was an attempt to unite the spiritual teachings of his guru Meher Baba with a message about the increasing detachment he saw within the late 1960s counterculture as its creative endeavors continued to become more handily exploited by the mainstream. Townshend played a 1968 Gibson SG Special guitar on this song.The effortless flow of The Who’s genre defining rock opera Tommy – which was completed on March 7, 1969, the very day “Pinball Wizard” was released as a single – is deceptive. The Dutch group The Shocking Blue used the guitar riff from this song for their 1969 hit 'Venus.' 'I don't think Rod's quite forgiven me for that,' he commented years later. Elton grabbed his barge pole and took the offer. Elton told him no way, 'Don't touch it with a barge pole.' A year later, The Who asked Elton John to sing the same song. (Thanks, Jason Lee - New York, NY)Īccording to the book The Duh Awards by Bob Fenster, Rod Stewart asked Elton John if he should accept an offer to sing in Tommy.

Meanwhile, he thought it was a mindless, badly written song. They told him to play it and told him he had written a hit. After a legal battle with their manager, Shel Talmy, and some bad business deals in England, they were facing bankruptcy if it didn't sell.Īfter writing this song for Nik Cohn, Townshend almost didn't even mention it to the band because he hated it so much. The album got The Who out of a financial mess. The famous guitar riff was sampled by The Shocking Blue on their 1969 hit 'Venus,' which was covered by Bananarama in 1986. Two of the dates were in the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. The Who performed the entire album from start to finish on their subsequent tour. The Who were given the early morning slot, so they ended up playing this as the sun came up. The song was still fairly new, so many in the crowd did not recognize it. The Who performed this at Woodstock in 1969. Along with 'See Me, Feel Me,' it is one of 2 songs from the album that The Who played throughout their career. This was the most famous and enduring song from the Tommy project. The single version was sped up to make it more radio friendly. Townshend liked how that related to listeners picking up the vibrations of the music to feel the story. The character Tommy played pinball by feeling the vibrations of the machine. Cohn gave it a great review, and pinball became a main theme of the Rock Opera. Townshend knew Cohn was a pinball fanatic, so he put this together to ensure a good review. Townshend wrote it when he found out influential UK rock critic Nik Cohn was coming to review the project.

This was the last song written for Tommy. Townshend was not credited as the only songwriter on the project - John Entwistle wrote 'Cousin Kevin' and 'Fiddle About,' and Keith Moon got credit for 'Tommy's Holiday Camp.' It existed mostly in his head while they were recording it, and the other members of The Who had no idea how most of the story would end until they finished it. Elton John made an appearance as The Pinball Wizard and performed this.

#Pinball wizard guitar movie#

Tommy was made into a movie in 1975 starring Jack Nicholson, Ann Margaret, Tina Turner, and Roger Daltrey (who played Tommy). It was made into a play and continues to run as an off-Broadway production. Pinball Wizard is a song by The Who which is part of Tommy, the first ' Rock Opera.' Tommy is about a young man who is deaf, dumb, and blind, but becomes a pinball champion and gains hordes of adoring fans.