A stage adaption of The Who‘s groundbreaking 1969 rock opera Tommy is on Broadway, and on Tuesday the album’s architect Pete Townshend stopped by The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon to drum up some press. Following an extended interview, the Who guitarist performed a medley of hits from the double album alongside the cast of the musical which opens today, March 27th, at the Niederlander Theatre.
Host Jimmy Fallon is paid around $16 million a year to heap fawning praise on his guests, but it always adds a hint of authenticity when he has evidence to back up his adulation. Fallon first met the guitar hero at the Concert for New York shortly after the September 11th terrorist attacks, where both of them performed. As the host recollected, it was the end of the night and all of the performers were walking back out onstage together in pairs. A “cool” actor whom Jimmy elected not to name snubbed him, and just at that moment who should have turned the corner but Pete Townshend, who told Fallon, “Let’s go kid,” and walked out onstage with him.
“And I think you still need help,” Townshend quipped.
Fallon asked Townshend about his iconic habit of smashing guitars in his younger days. In The Who’s nascent era, the band’s penchant for destruction caught on a little quicker than their popularity. Townshend recalled times when the band had to play four shows in a single day and he had only one guitar, so between each performance he had to glue the battered instrument back together again. At one point in the interview, Townshend even jokingly pretended to smash a guitar over Fallon’s head.
“Young kids that buy their first really good guitar end up in a love relationship with it. I’ve never had that,” Townshend said. Recalling his first guitar, which his grandmother bought off the wall at a Greek restaurant, he said, “No one is going to tell me that that hunk of wood with some strings stretched across it is sacred.”
In a rare moment of insight, Fallon connected the dots between Townshend never getting attached to a particular instrument and The Who never becoming attached to one style. It was the band’s consistent evolution of its sound and songwriting that brought about Tommy in the first place.
The band had help along the way, as Townshend admitted, including from The Observor pop critic Nik Cohn, who heard an early draft of Pete’s rock opera. After calling it “pretentious” to Townshend’s face, he inspired the songwriter to change the central character’s background, making him a pinball champion. Cohn pondered it and uttered the line, “Deaf, dumb, and blind kid sure plays a mean pinball,” which Townshend used for the album’s big single “Pinball Wizard”, and the rest is rock n’ roll history.
To close out the show, Townshend performed selections from Tommy alongside the cast of the musical. The frenetic opening strums of “Pinball Wizard” kicked off the medley as the spotlight shined on Ali Louis Bourzgui, who plays the titular role of Tommy. He gave an evocative performance, though of course no one compares to Townshend’s other curly-haired singing companion, Roger Daltrey. After transitioning into the “See Me, Feel Me” movement, the whole cast came out for the curtain-closing chorus of “Listening To You”.
Watch Pete Townshend chat with Jimmy Fallon and perform Tommy songs on The Tonight Show. Tickets to the Tommy musical at the Niederlander Theatre are on sale here.
Pete Townshend on The Who, Smashing Guitars and Creating Rock Opera in The Who’s TOMMY (Extended)
A Performance from The Who’s TOMMY: “Pinball Wizard/See Me, Feel Me/Listening To You” | Tonight Show
For those hoping to see The Who perform Tommy songs again, there is hope. In an interview last week with The New York Times, Townshend said, “It feels to me like there’s one thing the Who can do, and that’s a final tour where we play every territory in the world and then crawl off to die.” Though he added, “I don’t get much of a buzz from performing with the Who. If I’m really honest, I’ve been touring for the money. My idea of an ordinary lifestyle is pretty elevated.”
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