I hate to sound thick or anything, but I’ve been listening to this work for years and years and it just dawned on me: I don’t know how it ends!
I know Tommy has the “Holiday Camp” where he tries to get his followers to simulate blindness, etc., similar to what he himself went through. Then the followers “rebel” for lack of a better term. Then we get the “Listening to you” chorus, and that’s where I’m kind of left scratching my head going, “What just happened?” The movie made it same as if he were following in the footsteps of his dead father with the whole bookending “Worship the sun” sequences, but I still feel like I don’t quite get what happened.
I’ve actually never been sure what happens at that point either, but it seems plausible that, since the holiday camp was really his avaricious stepfather’s attempt to capitalize on Tommy’s fame, that he felt freed from his obligation to be everyone’s savior.
I’m not sure how that plays in to the “Listening to you” part; I don’t know who “you” is. It seems like it might refer to Tommy, except that it’s Tommy singing it. Perhaps at that point Roger Daltry ceases to be Tommy, and simply takes on the role of narrator who who is now glorifying Tommy’s legacy from a 3rd person omnipotent POV.
But that really isn’t consistent with the rest of the story which is in part a satire of that very idea; i.e. elevating someone to such glorified heights and blindly conforming to their teachings to reach enlightenment.
I always felt it indicated that Tommy failed as a messiah. His idea was to have people go through the experiences he did in order to gain enlightenment, so they were made deaf, dumb, and blind and sent to a pinball machine with Uncle Ernie. They refuse (“We’re not Gonna Take It”) and leave him (note the last line “Let’s forget you, better still.”)
Tommy, however, is left alone. He sings “Listening to you,” to try to explain what he sees. But, of course, no one is listening.
But, remember, Tommy is not to be taken 100% seriously. It could simply be that Townsend like the tune and thought it made a good ending.
I do not have a decisive answer to the OP, but would like to contribute that:
1) Townsend swore alligence, or whatever, to Mehir Baba, a preacher-guru wearing a tablecloth (and I assume, the derivation of the Who’s Next song title ‘Baba O Riley’). I remember reading in a biography that Townsend visited Baba’s gravesite and ‘felt like a speck of dust’.
2) When the movie was in theaters, I got into numerous religious arguments with high school classmates who had seen Tommy and were certain that the references were coded references to Jesus.
3) Townsend was a rock star, with enough self-awareness to muse that people were assigning messiah status to rock stars, and lacking the ego to believe it (ala Lennon).
If it makes you feel any better, Pete Townshend doesn’t know how it ends either.
Townshend intentionally left the ending open to interpretation, and has admitted that this decision was in part because he wasn’t really sure how to end the story in a satisfying way within the structure of a rock album. So it’s up to you what you want to make of it.
The film’s ending was Ken Russell’s decision. The much later Broadway version ends with Tommy reconciling with his family, but although this was Townshend’s idea it was his idea as an older man revisiting the work. He has said it was not something he had in mind back in 1969.
Just to elaborate on this a bit, Pete Townsend programmed a synthesizer to create electronic music based on anyone’s “biorhythm”–you enter the person’s birthdate, and the synthesizer spits out a piece of electronic music based on it.
The intro to “Baba O’Riley” is this electronic music based on Meher Baba’s birthdate. The style of this electronic music is heavily inspired by Terry Riley’s A Rainbow in Curved Air. So the title essentially means “Meher Baba’s biorhythm in the style of Terry Riley”.
From musicals.net:
…Tommy is lionized by the public and the press (Pinball Wizard (Reprise)) and begins appearing in stadiums, where Uncle Ernie tries to capitalize on his stardom (Tommy’s Holiday Camp). Teenage Sally Simpson manages to get on stage and touch Tommy but, when he pushes her aside, she falls and is pummeled by the guards (Sally Simpson). Aghast, Tommy realizes how caught up in the celebrity machine he has become. He tends to her and invites everyone back to his house (Welcome). Once there, Sally asks Tommy how she can be more like him (Sally Simpson’s Question). He insists there is no reason to be like him; who she is, is enough. Disenchanted with their hero for failing to provide instant salvation, the crowd turns on him and leaves (We’re Not Going to Take It). Tommy hears the voice of his ten-year-old self (See Me, Feel Me) and for a moment seems to be reverting to his old state, but instead he turns to his family and embraces them in acceptance and reunion with his younger selves (Listening to You).
I’m not sure if coded. There’s a lot of allusions to the J man in there(Didn’t the table in “Come to this House” look at bit like the last supper?). And what about the stuff in Sally Simpson’s room?
OK, here’s my take- Tommy succumbs to his family’s profiteering plans & takes on the Messiah role, working with them to open the Holiday Camp, which promotes enlightenment through conforming to the Tommy experience (being artificially made “deaf, dumb & blind”). When the crowds see through the sham, they react violently, tear the whole damn thing down, leaving Tommy to re-assess himself & perhaps growing to become a true teacher of enlightenment through compassion, attunement to one’s senses & all that good stuff.
In the movie, it was the stepfather (Oliver Reed) that was the mastermind.
My take on it is that once Tommy was no longer seen as a Messiah, he was free. Once he was not seen as a god, he was free to get in touch with God (as he understood him).
Agreed – it is pretty clear that Townsend was referring to Jesus.
My description was poor: the people I argued with were claiming that the allusions to Jesus were Townsend’s coded way of expressing his Christianity. As if.
My hunch is that those lines are leftover from an earlier draft of his rock opera (to be called “Amazing Journey”) and are a more blatant pean to his aformentioned guru.
I’ve got a different question/theory about Tommy:
Tommy is blind but he can see…something (his soul?) in a mirror, right? Now, because a pinball is reflective, perhaps he can see it as a soul-reflecting orb and maybe even manipulate it.
A guy I used to work with had an interesting explanation. And the way he talked about it made me think it came from something Pete Townshend himself said.
Listening to you I get the music.
Gazing at you I get the heat.
etc.
He said that this was Townshend’s ode to his fans. That without them he wouldn’t have the reason, the inspiration, the need to write songs in the first place.
