Digitizing a Rock Opera

            Growing up, my dad always played The Who at our house. At the age of seven, I memorized the lyrics to “Pinball Wizard” and would perform my own version alongside the concert DVD of Roger Daltrey, John Entwistle, Keith Moon and Pete Townshend at Woodstock. Years after I performed these living room concerts, I began to fiddle with my parent’s record player. I flipped through their extensive vinyl collections to find Tommy – the album with the track “Pinball Wizard.” Tommy is a double album, containing 24 tracks. This album is a rock opera that follows the life of Tommy, who becomes blind and deaf after witnessing his father murder his mother’s lover (The Who, 1969). He feels the world through music, but is considered “a freak” by society (Sanders & Dalton, 1969). The album begins with Tommy being born, follows his experiences in life, and ends with him being liberated from his numbness to society (The Who, 1969).

The Who performing at Woodstock in 1969

Source: Henry Diltz

The two records are two sided, each side containing a certain number of tracks (The Who, 1969):

-         Disc one, side one contains six tracks (approx. 17 minutes)

-         Disc one, side two contains four tracks (approx. 22 minutes)

-         Disc two, side one contains eight tracks (approx. 13 minutes)

-         Disc two, side two contains six tracks (approx. 18 minutes)

Since Tommy is a rock opera, I believe the band strategically ordered and arranged the tracks on certain sides of the record in order to tell the story of Tommy. Most operas, musicals and other types of performing arts have intermissions. I have been to musicals where there is only one intermission and ballets where there are at least two intermissions. I offer that these intermissions are to split up the plot of the story and give the audience the opportunity to digest the performance. I think that in the case of Tommy, finishing a side of the record and flipping it over is the equivalent to an intermission in a performance. When one side of the record has finished, the listener can either flip the record over right away and continue the story or give themselves an “intermission.” They can listen to the four sides all at once or take pauses between the sides to reflect on the content of the songs.

Source: Wikipedia/Polydor

Vinyl limits the minutes of music contained on the record and holds approximately 22 minutes on each side (Vinyl, 2016). As you can see above, the minutes of music on each side of Tommy vary. The Who could have distributed the songs equally over the four sides, but I think they made a conscious choice to arrange the songs the way they did to portray the story of Tommy to the listener. On each side, Tommy goes through different experiences and realizations about himself and society (The Who, 1969). I don’t believe the track listing on each side is arbitrary, but instead splits up the music to portray the boy’s journey to the listener.

            When this album became digitized to mp3 format, I believe that some of the choices the band made while creating the vinyl album were discarded due to the nature of digital formats. In a digital download version of Tommy, the track list is continual and there isn’t an opportunity for “intermissions” like there is in the vinyl version. If you buy Tommy (Remastered) on iTunes, you will receive 24 tracks in a row. The digital download isn’t able to offer the listener the experience of having “intermissions” between the different instances in Tommy’s journey on each side of the vinyl records. Sperberg-McQueen (1991) says “representations are inevitably partial, never disinterested; inevitably they reveal their authors' conscious and unconscious judgments and biases” (p. 34). I believe that the arrangement of the vinyl album was a deliberate judgement and artistic choice from the band, one that is unable to be represented in digital format.

iTunes also offers a super deluxe version of Tommy, which includes 70 tracks (final cuts, Pete Townshend demos and live Canadian concert versions) and the deluxe edition, including 45 tracks (final cut versions and live Canadian concert versions). These digital copies provide the consumer with many different options of how to experience Tommy, a feature that the double vinyl album does not have. These are choices that the digitization process enabled.

I think a small solution to the “intermission” dilemma could have been to display the track list in their “acts” on the album artwork of a CD. However, CD’s are not popular anymore and the music world has mostly moved to mp3 downloads or streaming. I’m unsure how the sectioned track list could be shown on a digital version. Vinyl sales have been reported to have increased over the past few years. In 2014, the U.K. expected vinyl sales to exceed 900,000, so it is possible more people will listen to Tommy through the physical vinyl copy (G.M., 2014). Both the digitized version and vinyl version of Tommy present the listener with different experiences of how to enjoy the story of the boy trying to navigate his way in society through music.

References

Sanders, Rick & Dalton, David. “Townshend On 'Tommy': Behind the Who's Rock Opera.” Published July 12, 1969. Rolling Stone. http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/townshend-on-tommy-behind-the-whos-rock-opera-19690712

G.M. “The Rebirth of Records.” Published June 3, 2014. The Economist. http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2014/06/vinyl

Sperberg-McQueen, C.M. "Text in the Electronic Age: Textual Study and Text Encoding, with Examples from Medieval Texts." Literary and Linguistic Computing6, no. 1 (1991): 34-46. [http://go.utlib.ca/cat/7731513]

The Who. Tommy. 1969. London, England: Polydor. Vinyl Record.

“Vinyl.” Chicago Mastering Service. Accessed September 28, 2016. http://www.chicagomasteringservice.com/vinyl.html