With an SG Special slung just below his waist, Pete Townshend led the Who on a thundering, power-chord driven trip into history in 1969 with the genre-defining rock opera Tommy.
Over the decades the ambitious tale of a young man’s twisted road to self-discovery has seen plenty of incarnations. In 1971 the Seattle Opera produced the first stage version, featuring Bette Midler as the Acid Queen. Madcap director Ken Russell’s 1975 film included Eric Clapton, Elton John, Tina Turner and the Who themselves.
To mark the album’s 20th anniversary, the Who performed Tommy at Los Angeles’ Universal Amphitheater with Phil Collins, Billy Idol, Patti LaBelle, Steve Winwood and Elton John once again playing the Pinball Wizard. And in 1993 Townshend and La Jolla Playhouse director Des McAnuff took a slightly rewritten version of the musical to Broadway, where The Who’s Tommy won five Tony Awards.
The latest entrants in the annals of Tommy are New Jersey pop heroes the Smithereens, who are celebrating the original’s fortieth anniversary with their own The Smithereens Play Tommy. The just-released album is a song-by-song recreation of Townshend’s opus. It follows two Beatles tributes by the band, including 2007’s Meet the Smithereens, which covered the entire Meet the Beatles album.
After 29 years of performing, the Smithereens are also an institution, and for good reason. Balancing biting guitars with graceful melodies has been their stock-in-trade since the group’s 1980 debut EP Girls About Town. And their all-or-nothing performing style fits Townshend’s song cycle superbly, making The Smithereens Play Tommy a buzz for fans of both groups.
Of course, the Who’s original Tommy still sets the bar. For Townshend and his bandmates it was a perfect intersection of youth, ambition, energy, creativity and even innocence, made at a time when rock and roll still seemed full of possibilities.
Including sonic possibilities. The tooth-and-nail array of guitars Townshend commanded when Tommy was being recorded would see him through the band’s next historic phase, which included epochal concerts at Woodstock and Leeds, and the albums Who’s Next and Quadrophenia.
His primary Tommy electric guitar was a 1968 SG Special, tagged by an ES-355, a Jazzmaster, an electric 12-string and a sunburst J-200. His main amps were Sound City L100 heads modified by Dave Reeves of Hiwatt — tweaked up to the specs of the CP-103 Hiwatt amps Townshend would make famous starting in 1970. And altogether they roared.
The Smithereens conjure their own eloquent growl on Play Tommy, with JCM-800 Marshall heads driving Marshall 4x12 cabs. Lead guitarist Jim Babjak favors a Telecaster these days, and singer/guitarist Pat DiNizio employs a custom Strat style model.
But the punch of Townshend’s SG Special-based sound is unbeatable. He played the model exclusively on-stage from 1968 until 1971, and reportedly bought his first at New York City’s Manny’s Music in July ’68. Mostly he used Specials from 1966 to ’70, with full black pick guards.
Townshend briefly stopped using SG Specials in 1971, but the next year settled into playing a natural finish SG with a stop tailpiece custom made for him by Gibson as well as Les Paul Deluxes.
In 2000 the Gibson Custom Shop immortalized Townshend’s SG bashing with a superbly appointed signature model featuring a mahogany neck and back, neck binding, a wraparound tailpiece, two P-90 pickups, chrome hardware and a mahogany red satin finish. Only 250 of the guitars were manufactured, and sales benefited the Who’s
Double O charity, which focuses on a variety of social issues including surviving drug and alcohol damage, disaster relief and young people’s prison reform.