Rock On

Even today, 27 years after its first release, Tommy remains an object of scorn - a byword for, as a recent Guardian review put it, 'that 60s turkey, the rock opera'. A whole world of assumptions is contained within that phrase, but the long and the short of it is that Tommy has become a victim of its own success. Celebrated in the über-kitsch Ken Russell film, the overblown Lou Reizner soundtrack score, and the several stage shows, its ultimate exploitation has become confused with the original intention. Now that the record has been remastered, repackaged, and annotated - the usual CD upgrade - it's possible to see Tommy as it really is: the major work by British pop's most perceptive chronicler of adolescence.

Heard afresh, Tommy reveals itself as a curiously spare, unassuming piece of music, whose much mocked story-line - the traumatised deaf dumb and blind boy who, finding spiritual transcendence, becomes a cult leader until finally deserted by his followers - is cogent and psychologically acute. It is also a work on the cusp: between pop and rock, between Pop and Conceptual Art, between materialism and spirituality, between 60s idealism and the excess, cynicism, and decadence that would follow in the wake of that idealism's collapse. It is, above all, about the fate of the elected shaman in the second half of this youth-dominated century: the pop star.

Far from being a predetermined success, Tommy began as a last, desperate gamble. From 1965 to 1967, The Who had had an astonishing run of eight top ten singles that defined the teenage map - all foppish violence, existential crises, aberrant sexuality, handicaps real and imagined - but by 1968 they had run out of steam: last year's hit makers flogging a dodgy tune about greyhound racing (Dogs: and yes, it cuts Parklife to shreds). Townshend rifled through his obsessions, cannibalising songs like Rael (the deserted cult leader) and Glow Girl (a pop-art plane crash: death and rebirth) - into a 75-minute life cycle with hero as a total outsider who transcends his fate: something with which any teenager can identify.

Tommy is the ur-shaman: born during a Zeppelin raid, traumatised to the loss of all his senses by parental threats (he has witnessed his father killing his mother's lover), he is abused physically and sexually. Expelled from the tribe ('There's a lot I can do with a freak'), he enters the underworld of visions and spirits ('sickness will surely take the mind where minds can't usually go') and undergoes several forms of initiation (drugs, sex, more trauma) before finding a skill that translates into the everyday world (Pinball Wizard). Thus empowered, he becomes a classic charismatic with a full-blown cult (a deliberate conflation of 20s phenomena like Aimee Semple McPherson and 60s pop stars - the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who themselves).

Born in 1918, Tommy is still in his early 20s by 1968 - an apparent contradiction rationalised thus by Kit Lambert's draft film script: '50 years of isolation from society have slowed down, for him, the ageing process. He is a latter day Dorian Gray.' Whether intentional or not, this slippage opens up two psychological possibilities. Freed from customary age constraints, Tommy has the perennial youth of such classic Teenage figures as Peter Pan, Michael Jackson, James Dean. Born in the midst of World War One, he is also exorcising not only his own trauma, but the trauma of those with parents who lived and suffered through war - which includes Townshend and his target audience, babyboomers like myself. (And in case you think that leaves you twentysomethings unscathed, trauma can be passed on through at least two generations.)

Tommy ends with a powerfully downbeat resolution: 'We forsake you! Gonna rape you! Let's forget you ... better still'. This could refer to many things: the Who's own position in 1968, not yet deserted by a fickle pop audience; the extreme difficulty of escaping abuse - Tommy begins and ends in violence; even that primal urge documented by Fred and Judy Vermorel in Starlust - the desire of the fan to literally dismember the star. Curiously downbeat after riffing explosions like Pinball Wizard and I'm Free, the final We're Not Gonna Take It is uncannily prescient, exposing the blocked nature of the pop/shamanic ritual as tainted by commerce and lack of discipline. These disastrous results continue to haunt charismatic rock performers today. Damage may set a performer on the shamanic path, but it is likely to be his or her undoing, unless extreme care is taken.

It also highlights what is for many the essential problem of Tommy itself: its religiosity. A child of psychedelic spirituality, the record occasionally trips into smugness, as Roger Daltrey takes on the Tommy role with perfect conviction. 'Hey, you gettin' drunk/So sorry, I got you sussed/Hey you smokin' mother nature/This is a bust' is not exactly what a stoner rock audience wants to hear, but within the terms of the story-line, it offers a good reason for Tommy's final ostracism. But then, the audience which Tommy helped to define isn't interested in the distancing effects of story-line and concepts. Rather, it demands authenticity, that you are what you sing. Just as, three years later, David Bowie became Ziggy, so did the Who become Tommy.

In doing so, they tapped into a prevailing mood of sanctimony (epitomised by George Harrison's Oh Sweet Lord); a crime against pop if there ever was one. Indeed, the record's story-line prefigures its own rejection, as early 70s cant (all that bible bashing, 'dues paying', and country rock) engendered the several reactions of postmodernism, materialism and cynicism. Within a media still dominated by those impulses, Tommy - like All You Need Is Love - continues to be crucified, ostensibly for its spirituality and its pretentiousness (a highly unconvincing criticism now that Techno releases are routinely praised for integrating 75 minutes of music into a complete whole), but more probably because it cuts too deep.

Think about it: if a major pop group released today a child abuse song as unequivocal as Fiddle About, they would be harried from pillar to post, through the tabloids and into Parliament: it's alright to talk about it in therapeutic interviews (like Axl Rose) but not to describe the act. Townshend dared to, and that gives Tommy an accuracy which endures. For the first time in popular culture, he gave an emotional structure to the great unmentionable - the fact that, behind the ideal of sex and vitality, youth is as likely to be alienated and severely damaged as anything else. Tommy also poses the question that western materialism and its attendant media still does not want to hear: how do you grow (up, out, older) within an economy that valorises youth above everything? Do you just, like, die?