tommy can you hear me? - Yes, I can. Loud and clear - 50 years on

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I say this a lot as time and decades speed past me, but the overall concept and reality of time as they relate to me becomes more frustrating to understand and put my head around. Once again, I go back to the fact that everything my elders told me about life when I was young was true. Life IS short, and the older you get, the shorter it seems and the faster it goes. Furthermore, for me, something that happened a few months ago can seem like it happened 10 years ago, and something that happened 10 years ago can seem like it happened yesterday. I am unsure about others, but time travel is possible as I get older, at least in my head and my heart. And it is usually brought on by music, movies, and pictures.

Last night, and the night before, I went back to 1975 - hook, line, and sinker, and if I had my way, I never would have left. To celebrate its 50th anniversary, the movie “Tommy” by The Who was shown at select IMAX theaters for two evenings. 

I was 14 years old when Tommy came out in March of 1975, right in the middle of the 70’s, which I am forever grateful is the decade I grew up in. For those of you who may be unfamiliar, “Tommy,” the movie, was enormously successful, as was the original album by The Who, released in 1969. Both changed the landscape of music, rock musicals, and movies forever. Like the rest of my music-loving friends, I fell completely in love with the movie, its narrative, and its music. The movie affected me very deeply then; I experienced an equal amount of heightened joy, energy, happiness, sadness, and tears every time I saw it. I saw it as many times as I could when it was in the theater, and later, when it played at the local midnight movies in the 80s, I never missed it. I am sure I went through at least two to three copies of the VHS tape. For some odd reason, I have not seen the movie in well over 20 years, and probably more, until the past two nights. And I know I have not seen it in a theater since the 1980’s. To experience it again in all its glory in IMAX was almost too much for me to handle. All the emotion I felt as a 14-year-old came back immediately, and with almost an entire lifetime lived since then, everything I have experienced along the way colored it even more. I cannot recall the last time I had so much fun in a movie theater.

Experiencing “Tommy” fifty years on, it is more than obvious that the genius that it is could only have been a product of the 70s. However, oddly enough, it did not seem that dated to me. Ken Russell created a masterpiece that I feel no one else has ever matched in its genre. One of the many glorious things that stood out to me was that this is real movie-making. There is no CGI. No computers. It was all real live actors and sets, making an epic rock opera movie to the iconic music of The Who, which will forever stand alone. Yes, there is one thing I would have changed: Oliver Reed should not have sung his own vocal parts. But other than that, to me it is a masterpiece of its time. A time I wish could have lasted. A time when rock and roll and movies were real, ruled, and were allowed to create the art they wanted without worrying about offending anyone. The only way really true art can be created, in my opinion.

“Listening to you, I get the music. Gazing at you, I get the heat. Following you, I climb the mountain. I get excitement at your feet.”
        Jeff