Pinball Wizard

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pinball Wizard
The Who
publication 1969
length 3:01
Genre (s) Rock music
Author (s) Pete Townshend
Cover version
1975 Elton John

Pinball Wizard (German: Flipper-Zauberer ) is a song by the British rock group The Who from 1969, written by their guitarist Pete Townshend . He is part of the rock opera Tommy , in whose film of the same name Elton John took over the role and the vocals.

Emergence

Pete Townshend conceived Tommy as a rock opera that follows an overall concept both in terms of content through a dramaturgically composed plot and musically through the revival of certain themes. The rock group The Who, originally from the mod culture, and their creative mind Townshend tried with the album to establish themselves as international pop greats by shaping their music across genres and media. It played under the direction of Kit Lambert on February 7, 1969 Townshend on electric and western guitar, John Entwistle on bass, Keith Moon on drums. Roger Daltrey took over the vocals and was partially assisted by Townshend.

According to Townshend, Pinball Wizard came about as an attempt to get music journalist Nik Cohn to do a better review of the album Tommy . After listening to a pre-release version, Cohn had described the album as pretty good, but too deadly serious and humorless. The figure of Tommy as a guru also seemed out of date to him. Townshend tried to explain to the unenthusiastic Cohn that Tommy was more of a kind of divine musician who perceives vibrations than music. Cohn said he would give the album four out of five stars. Finally, Townshend, who knew Cohn was a pinball fan and was working on a novel about a young pinball player, asked what it would be like if Tommy were a pinball champion and that's why he had so many followers. Cohn replied that there would be five stars and an extra ball. The next day Townshend wrote the piece and recorded a demo version in his home studio. To keep the overall story coherent, the lyrics of some of the songs have been adjusted to refer to the pinball theme.

Musical structure

The song refers to the opening piece of the rock opera Overture with an intro recorded on the western guitar . An acoustic switch between the two channels creates a stereo effect. The intro and first stanza begin on a tonal center in B, which descends in a sequence by three whole tones and a semitone step to the dominant F sharp. All steps are first struck with a fourth lead (sus4) and then resolved in major. The electric guitar creates a pompous gesture through its short change from the sub-second to the keynote. Bass and vocals start in parallel. The electric guitar takes on the dominant role in the following instrumental bridge over the chords B, A, D and E and consolidates the rocking listening impression. The refrain that begins after repeating the combination of verse and bridge plays the cadence over dominant, subdominant and tonic three times, but then changes between G and D. Another bridge takes up D and thus announces a change in the harmonic center of the song by H. D an: The third verse and the chorus, which start again on Hsus, are followed by the fourth verse in D major, before the song fades out on a short outro that suggests the second bridge.

content

The first-person narrator introduces himself as an avid pinball player who has been playing since childhood and who has developed a great skill at the machine. Now he is astonished by Tommy, who, as a deaf-blind man, seems to have mastered the game better than himself. He describes Tommy's peculiarities when playing, his concentrated calm and his apparent connection with the machine. Tommy's following, who worship him like a messiah, is also discussed. In the bridge the song changes from the narrative to a dialogue form, in which the question-and-answer game of two vocalists (in the original Daltrey and Townshend) gives the astonishment additional authenticity. The inferiority of the narrator is clearly established, and Tommy is recognized as the true pinball wizard.

Publications

Pinball Wizard was released on March 7, 1969 in the United Kingdom on track record 59262 as a single with Keith Moon's instrumental composition Dogs, Part Two . In the USA it was released on Decca Records under the number 732465. The concept album Tommy followed as a double LP in both countries , the third track of which is Pinball Wizard on the third side .

Cover versions

In 1975 Ken Russell adapted the story of Tommy in the film of the same name , for which Elton John played the role of the Pinball Wizard. While the other pieces of the music film were recorded by The Who musicians and some well-known studio musicians, Elton John used his own band with Ray Cooper as percussionist, Davey Johnstone on guitars, Dee Murray on bass and Nigel Olsson on drums. The pianist John replaced the intro of the western guitar and the dominant guitar accompaniment of the verses with his own piano playing. Pinball Wizard was released as a single from the accompanying soundtrack and reached number seven in the American charts. At least 16 other cover versions are known, including the recordings of Rod Stewart and Petula Clark as well as live versions of Genesis and the Kaiser Chiefs .

Importance, Criticism, and Success

Chart positions
Explanation of the data
Singles
Pinball Wizard
  UK 4th March 22, 1969 (13 weeks)
  US 19th 05/24/1969 (11 weeks)
  DE 25th 05/03/1969 (2 weeks)
Pinball Wizard (Elton John)
  US 7th 1975 (7 weeks)

Pete Townshend judged Pinball Wizard to be the clumsiest piece he had ever written. Nevertheless, it is one of the most famous pieces by the band, whose artistic focus was not on the single format, but on the album as a total work of art. The canonization of rock music follows this self-assessment and often discusses rock opera as a whole.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Pete Townshend: Who I Am . London: HarperCollins, 2012, ISBN 978-0-00-746603-0 . Pp. 161-162
  2. a b c Christofer Jost: "Pinball Wizard (The Who)". In: Song Lexicon. Encyclopedia of Songs. Ed. by Michael Fischer, Fernand Hörner and Christofer Jost, http://www.songlexikon.de/songs/pinball , 08/2012 [revised 07/2014].
  3. Coverinfo.de
  4. Charts DE Charts UK Charts US
  5. Richard Barnes, "Deaf, Dumb and Blind Kid". Liner Notes on the album Tommy (remastered)