The Who talk about ROCK OPERAS

JOHN: If something doesn’t particularly work then it’s scrapped but the majority of them usually sort of get through. While listening to the demo we work out the chord structures and Roger does an awful lot as far as the arranging, like verses, middle eights, choruses etc. Then I compose the bass part in my head or as we go along, and we just keep playing the backing track until we get the right feel. In a thing where it’s a concept thing then obviously we can’t pick and choose and throw things out. In something like Quadrophenia which has got an actual shape, you either change the shape or rewrite the entire number.

JOHN: When we recorded the original Tommy it was going to be a single album and we got to the stage where we were nearly finished and it didn’t make sense. So extra material was written and little joint pieces to join numbers together, and we re-recorded about a third of it again to make the themes fit together better. And by the time we’d finished re-recording everything I was completely sick and I never wanted to hear it again ever. I always hated the actual album. I hated the bass sound, the sound was very thin. There was a lot of things I didn’t like about the original album, in fact I think I’ve only ever played it once after those original rehearsals. I looked on ah, the Lou Reisner version of Tommy from a very great height, a very great distance. I sang the one song on it.

JOHN: When we released Tommy there was no need to smash guitars because the actual sage act had a much better shape and it didn’t need a smashed guitar at the end.

PETE: As the band gets involved in grandiose projects like Tommy films and you know, god knows what. I mean, it does tend to make one aloof from the public.

PETE: The Lou Reisner Tommy introduced us to other areas of work. Roger for the first time singing with somebody other than The Who, and me for the first time hearing someone other than Roger Daltrey singing my songs, or a good lump of them. And it emerged into a film involvement with Ken Russel for me, and solo albums for Roger and a part in the film for Roger. You know the whole clay filling that held the group down has now been sort of washed away. It was a drag in a lot of ways because it put more coal on the Tommy fire. But in another sense it was a great thing, the Reisner Tommy, because of the fact that I suppose had it not been for that, the revitalised interest in Tommy wouldn’t have come along which allowed this picture to be made… The first time I ever saw Roger from the front of a stage, you know in other words from the audience, was when he sang See Me Feel Me in the second production of Lou Reisner’s Tommy at The Rainbow.

PETE: I think the most calculating piece of work I’ve ever done is Quadrophenia. And I think it shows, I think it’s very obvious what it was trying to do, and what it was trying to say. And in some senses it lacks a lot of ah, I’ll be first to admit it, it lacks a lot of the obvious discovery, the excitement of discovery that comes about from all directions, converging on say a song like Substitute.

PETE: Quadrophenia as a piece of self-conscious, y’know work, actually does a better job of chronicling what happened, than say taking ten Who singles of the period. Because they’re not about anything in particular a lot of them.