Who – "We're Not Gonna Take It" (1969)

Right behind you, I see the millions

On you, I see the glory

From you, I get opinions

From you, I get the story

(Those lines fit 2 or 3 lines to a T, wouldn’t you say?)

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In  the 1947 movie, Kiss of Death, Richard Widmark portrayed a psychopathic killer named Tommy Udo:

The late movie, music, and book critic Allan McLachlan – who died in 2019 – used Tommy Udo as his nom de plume.  A hitman like Widmark’s Udo would seem to be an unlikely inspiration for someone who wrote magazine articles for a living, but McLachlan’s NME piece on the Who’s Tommy reads like something that the Kiss of Death character – who has been described as a “cackling, vindictive psychopath” – might have produced if he had spent his spare time between murder-for-hire gigs writing record reviews:

[I]n his quest to push pop music to the limit, [Pete Townshend] ended up producing this seething, rancid turd of an album, fit only for fly-food and scaring the neighbors.  In all fairness, this remastered version by The Who is nowhere near as bad as the “all-star” production that came out a few years later and that in turn was not fit to lick the arse of arseness that was the movie soundtrack that had Oliver Reed and Ann-Margret singing.

Tommy is a fucking woeful album; individual tracks like “I’m Free,” “Eyesight To The Blind,” and “Pinball Wizard” are classic Who . . . but the padding around them is like drinking vomit.  How a man capable of writing “Substitute” or “I Can See For Miles” could also be responsible for “1921” or “Go To The Mirror” is a major mystery.  This was the absolute nadir for Townshend and the Who; and the heavily-flawed Quadrophenia seems like a masterpiece in comparison.  Tommy stands as an object lesson for any of today’s young turks; as soon as you think, “Rock opera: good idea,” then it’s time to think, “Give up drugs!”

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My grandmother told me to never speak ill of the dead, which Allan McLachlan most certainly is.  But I think McLachlan’s review of Tommy is so full of you-know-what that his eyes must have been brown when he wrote it.

“Seething, rancid turd of an album”?  A “f*cking woeful album”?  Listening to it is “like drinking vomit”?

I’ve written a lot of over-the-top sh*t in my life, so I know over-the-top sh*t when I see it.  And that review is some seriously over-the-top sh*t.

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Other reviewers had a very different view of the Who’s rock opera.

Rolling Stone went ga-ga over Tommy.  “For the first time,” its 1969 review of the album opined, “a rock group has come up with a full-length cohesive work that could be compared to the classics.”

“For sheer power, invention and brilliance of performance,” Albert Goldman wrote in Life magazine, Tommy “outstrips anything that ever come out of a rock recording studio.”

The Village Voice’s rock critic, Robert Christgau, called Tommy the most successful “extended work” in rock music to date, and said it was the best album of 1969.

The most prominent American classical music figure of his era, Leonard Bernstein, said that the album’s “sheer power, invention and brilliance of performance outstrips anything which has ever come out of a recording studio.”  (When you remember that Bernstein is the man behind West Side Story – which probably deserves a spot on the Mount Rushmore of Broadway musicals – his opinion deserves to be taken very seriously.)

Finally, in an appreciation of the album published 50 years after its release in 1969, the National Review said that Tommy was the “ultimate expression of the upwardly surging creative arc” that produced extraordinary albums like the first Led Zeppelin album, the Rolling Stones’ Let It Bleed, and the Beatles’ Abbey Road – all of which appeared in stores that same year.

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I’m in the camp that considers Tommy to be an uncanny work of genius.  (I say “uncanny” because Pete Townshend – the rock deity who almost single-handedly created Tommy – was only 23 when he started work on what is indisputable the greatest “rock opera” ever composed.)

And while Tommy is chockfull of interesting songs, the one I’ve chosen for induction into the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” ALBUM TRACKS HALL OF FAME is its tour de force finale, “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” the second half of which is you may know as “See Me, Feel Me.”  

The Who at Woodstock

Click here to watch the Who performing the “See Me, Feel Me” part of today’s featured song at Woodstock.  (I have never seen rock musicians working harder than Pete Townshend and especially Keith Moon work in this performance.)

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Click here to listen to today’s featured song.

And click on the link below to buy the track from Amazon: