It’s
common to craft a song to be a hit, but it’s rare that one is written
specifically to get good reviews from one critic. Still, that’s exactly what
Pete Townshend did with ‘Pinball Wizard,’ which was recorded in February, 1969.
The Who
were deep into their sessions for ‘Tommy’ when Townshend played a rough mix of
the concept album for Nik Cohn, an influential rock journalist with whom he
often played pinball in Soho. Cohn expressed his dissatisfaction, particularly
with the heaviness and the spiritual aspects of the story and felt that it
could use something upbeat.
As
Townshend told Uncut in 2004, “I just remember saying to him, with maybe an
element of sarcasm, ’So if it had pinball in it, would you give it a decent
review?’ He went, ‘Of course I would. Anything with pinball in it’s fantastic.’
And so I wrote ‘Pinball Wizard,’ purely as a scam.”
But
Townshend wasn’t too thrilled with the result. “This is awful, the most clumsy
piece of writing I’ve ever done,” he said in 1996. “This sounds like a music
hall song…It was going to be a complete dud, but I carried on. I attempted the
same mock baroque guitar beginning that’s on ‘I’m a Boy’ and then a bit of
vigorous kind of flamenco guitar. I was just grabbing at ideas. I knocked a
demo together and took it to the studio and everyone loved it.”
As a side
note, ’Pinball Wizard’ wasn’t Nik Cohn’s sole contribution to music history.
His 1976 essay for New York magazine about the disco scene in Brooklyn called
‘Tribal Rights of the New Saturday Night’ was used as the basis for ’Saturday
Night Fever.’ He would later admit to making up the story, basing it on a
Shepherd’s Bush mod — the group that were the Who’s original fan base — that he
knew in the ‘60s.
Cohn
proved to be an effective sounding board. Even though it was tacked on, the
song turned out to be important to the story. Tommy’s skill at pinball, despite
being a “deaf, dumb and blind boy,” provided a way for him to become famous.
Perhaps more importantly for the band, whose penchant for smashing instruments
and flashy clothes had, by 1969, put them in considerable debt, ‘Pinball
Wizard’ gave them a song that could stand outside of the story for radio
airplay. Released a month later, it reached No. 19 on the Billboard Hot 100,
the Who’s second-highest charting single in the U.S. to date, paving the way
for ‘Tommy’’s runaway success.
‘Pinball
Wizard’ gained infamy at Woodstock when, after the performance of the song,
famed radical Abbie Hoffman, ran onstage and shouted, “I think this is a pile
of s— while John Sinclair rots in prison!” a reference to the 10-year sentence
given to his friend for possession of two joints. Townshend yelled back, ‘F—
off my f—ing stage’” and whacked him with his guitar. Sinclair was released in
1971.
In 1994,
Data East created a pinball machine inspired by the Broadway adaptation of the
rock opera. And if you’re able to find one these days, we don’t recommend
trying to play “by sense of smell.” You’ll lose a lot of money. We learned that
the hard way.
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