The 1975 classic Pete Townshend wishes Stevie Wonder had sang: “These guys are taking the piss”
Collaborations aren’t much of a rarity within the music industry, but The Who took the practice to the next level when creating their 1975 film Tommy, recruiting a selection of bona fide rock icons like Tina Turner and Eric Clapton to bring their vision to life. Ultimately, though, not every artist was quite so eager to get on board.
Tommy completely changed the game when the album was first released in 1969, ushering in a profound new age of rock operas and a swift move away from hit singles in favour of narrative-driven albums. It is no surprise, then, that when it came time to cast the cinematic rendering of that album, artists from across the rock and roll spectrum were falling over themselves to get involved.
A great deal of mysticism surrounds the casting process of Tommy, likely spurred on by the fact that the mid-1970s was a particularly hedonistic period for The Who. If you were to believe everything that has been said about the casting, then it appears as though the band wanted virtually every rockstar in the world to appear in the film.
Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Barbara Streisand and – most bizarrely – Peter Sellers were at one point, or another, rumoured to be involved in the picture.
In reality, of course, half of the names that were rumoured to be appearing in the film were simply names that had been thrown out by the band members during the brainstorming process. “We would write down hundreds of names,” Pete Townshend later affirmed in an interview with Matt Kent. Seemingly, the role of the ‘Pinball Wizard’ seemed to conjure up the most ideas, and for a while, the high-pitched tones of New York’s Tiny Tim seemed destined to take on the role.
There was, however, somebody else that Townshend was determined to get for the role. “In the same list that Tiny Tim was mentioned, so was Stevie Wonder,” he remembered, adding that the Motown superstar “nearly did it”. In the final film, though, it was Elton John who played that legendary role, in his oversized Dr Martens boots. Reportedly, Townshend and the band had a hard time trying to convince Wonder to play a character that was “deaf, dumb, and blind.”
“The problem that I had with Stevie was trying to convince him that it was OK for a Black, blind guy to actually play the ‘Pinball Wizard’,” Townshend admitted.
“At the end, somebody in his group said to him, ‘Listen, these guys are taking the piss.’”
Pete Townshend
So, just like that, the dream of having Wonder appear in Tommy was dead. To be fair to the songwriter, though, his trepidation about the role is pretty easy to understand.
Wonder has, after all, been forced to deal with endless ill-humoured jokes about his blindness throughout his career, not to mention the added discrimination of being a Black man in 1960s and 1970s America. With that context in mind, the idea of him willingly taking on a role as a blind pinball master who is openly described as deaf and dumb seems utterly ludicrous.
According to Townshend, he was able to iron out any offence caused to Wonder years later, affirming that he only wanted the Motown hero to appear in the film because he “would have been fucking brilliant” rather than as a means of poking fun at his blindness. Either way, as far as replacements go, you can’t get much better than Elton John.
