The Who had a run of 45s in the 60s to match anyone, but as far as the band’s guitarist and songwriter Pete Townshend saw it, the quartet still had a big point to prove as the decade was coming to a close. Enter Townshend’s conceptual masterpiece Tommy. Released in 1969, Tommy was a rock opera that dramatically recalibrated what people thought they knew about The Who, a record that drew a line under one era of the band and ushered in another, upping both expectation and ambition in the process.
In Townshend’s mind, it was an absolutely necessary transformation that altered the course of their career, and not just because it sold by the bucketload. “Tommy had been more successful than we expected,” Townshend told Classic Rock, looking back on his magnum opus. “All of us in the band quickly forgot the reality of our situation, what might have happened. If Tommy had failed, we would have slid into ignominy.” Townshend, you see, was (probably rightly) of the opinion that a collection of ace seven-inch’s did not make for a long-lasting band. You needed something that dug a little deeper, something like Tommy.
