The Who: Sensation - The Story of Tommy Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		4.0

The Who: Sensation - The Story of Tommy Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman March 9, 2014

Well, it has been around four months, so those Who fans who opted to fork over their hard earned cash for the fairly pricey The Who: Tommy Deluxe may finally have enough liquidity again to consider buying what is by comparison a dirt cheap offering that will provide a rather healthy dose of information about the genesis of that now iconic deaf, dumb and blind boy. Tommy has of course risen to the level of legend in the years since its original release, but as The Who Sensation: The Story of Tommy makes clear, at the time of its conception, The Who were a band dangerously close to disbanding. While they had had inimitable chart success for several years and were kind of the pre-punk era’s punk answer to The Beatles, chief songwriter Pete Townshend was starting to feel the pressure of having to crank out radio ready songs at the drop of a hat, and he was spectacularly impressed that the song he considered his masterpiece, “I Can See For Miles”, had failed to capture the vaunted Number 1 position on the charts (it did get to Number 10 in the United Kingdom and Number 9 in the United States, which probably would have satisfied less ambitious rock stars). Townshend had already begun flirting with longer forms and as he and Roger Daltrey opine in this frequently very engaging documentary, they had felt that previous efforts like “Glow Girl” and “Rael” had already pointed the way toward what would ultimately become known as the first rock opera (even that label has evidently since been disputed, as the documentary also makes clear). This documentary may not divulge any overly surprising new material (at least for longtime Who fans), but it’s never less than interesting as it takes a tour through several of the best known songs from the world of the Pinball Wizard. Filled with excellent interviews with Who members and a number of tangentially related people, as well as some fantastic archival footage, The Who Sensation: The Story of Tommy ends up providing a history not just of its focal album but also in a way of an era in rock and a pivotal moment in the life of a rock band that could have either dissipated into oblivion or (as it turned out) gone on to even greater success than it had already experienced.

There’s a certain ironic disconnect at the heart of what at least helped to spur on Tommy. On the one hand we have Pete Townshend viscerally upset that one of his tunes didn’t take the top spot on the charts, while in the next moment The Who Sensation: The Story of Tommy is featuring a friend of the band who laments how “empty” a life is of simply sitting around checking to see if your latest single has made the Top 20. That cognitive dissonance may seem illogical, but it’s perhaps simply two sides of the same coin, offering an insight into an artist who felt hemmed in by this stage of his career. Perhaps if “I Can See For Miles” had become the band’s first Number 1 (a feat they never quite managed, incredibly enough, though several of their singles made it into the Top 5 in Britain if not the United States), Townshend may have felt a level of satisfaction that would have kept him from stretching his compositional boundaries. But that disappointment combined with a certain vacuum at the center of his life as a rock star did spur him on, with Tommy being the result.

There were other factors, of course. The band had, like other bands of the period, been experimenting with LSD, and Townshend had had one notoriously bad trip on an international flight where he felt himself leave his body. He swore off hallucinogens and became an enamored with the mystical writings of Meher Baba as The Beatles had (more or less simultaneously, interestingly enough) with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. At the same time Townshend was attempting to come to terms with half remembered instances of abuse he suffered as a child, and all of these seemingly disparate influences suddenly blossomed into his idea of an abused child who withdraws into his own inner sanctum, is able to divine music through divination, and becomes something of a unlikely prophet.

Townshend and Daltrey are amazingly up front about their various problems both before and during the Tommy era. Daltrey confides that he was having a harder and harder time delivering songs like “I’m a Boy” with a straight face, while Townshend reveals that he came rather late to the realization that Daltrey, not himself, should be voicing Tommy on the album. The documentary also isn’t shy about detailing some of the deficiencies of Tommy’s libretto, which even some of the commentators say isn’t exactly a model of clarity. There are even a few gripes about songs like “1921”, in that it’s never explicitly stated that Captain Walker has actually been found alive and has returned, only to find Mrs. Walker in flagrante delicto with a new lover. Where the documentary perhaps falls a bit short is in giving any really insightful documentation of the actual compositional process, with segments on songs basically dealing with them as already delivered wholes.

Townshend’s alleged history as an abused child of course informs quite a bit of Tommy, but there’s also the slightly uncomfortable subtext of the now somewhat forgotten issue the star had with child pornography some years ago, which Townshend always insisted was part of his “research” into his own past. (It's notable that Townshend had to enlist John Entwistle to write the most graphic songs about abuse that are in Tommy, something he discusses in some detail in the documentary.) That perhaps niggling issue aside, The Who Sensation: The Story of Tommy provides some excellent interviews with a variety of people as well as giving a surprisingly full overview of The Who’s career leading up to Tommy and the impact that album had on the band and the rock scene in general.

The Who: Sensation - The Story of Tommy Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Who Sensation: The Story of Tommy is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Eagle Rock Entertainment with an AVC encoded 1080i transfer (mostly) in 1.78:1 (some of the archival footage is in 1.33:1). As should be expected, there are some qualitative differences here since the archival footage comes from so many different sources (and formats). The contemporary interview segments are of course the sharpest and best defined (though Daltrey's sequences are not especially well lit—see screenshot 5). Both black and white and color archival footage is featured, and it varies from fairly good to pretty shoddy looking. Some of the television footage suffers from such bugaboos as ghosting. There are some whimsical interstitials of an animated pinball that introduce various segments or song profiles, and those look nicely sharp and well detailed.

The Who: Sensation - The Story of Tommy Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Who Sensation: The Story of Tommy features both a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track as well as an uncompressed LPCM 2.0 option, but truth be told, there really isn't that much difference between them, since the bulk of this outing is talking heads or voiceover, with only occasional snippets of music. The music is very nicely splayed through the surrounds on the DTS-HD Master Audio track, but since nothing lasts all that long, it's hard to get too excited about it. Fidelity is excellent on both of these tracks and neither presents any issues that need discussing.

The Who: Sensation - The Story of Tommy Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Beat Club 1969 (480i; 32:45) is a German television broadcast from September 27, 1969 where the band performed several songs from Tommy. There are also some brief interview segments.

The Who: Sensation - The Story of Tommy Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

If you couple The Who Sensation: The Story of Tommy with the hardback book included with The Who: Tommy Deluxe, you're going to have a fairly vast cornucopia of information about one of the most seminal albums in the history of rock. This documentary provides some unusually candid interviews with Townshend, Daltrey, and several others, and if it's a bit shallow on the compositional side of things, it makes up for that deficit at least partially by its more personal approach to the band. Fans will love some of the archival footage included here. Highly recommended.