Pinball Wizard

The Zoo Crew is spinning “Pinball Wizard” by The Who off the 1969 rock opera Tommy, and if you have ever stood in front of a machine with a pocketful of quarters and a little too much nerve, this one lands right where it should. Over at THE ZOO, the Zoo Freaks know a deep cut when they hear one, and this is the song that turned a deaf, dumb and blind kid into the king of the arcade. Pete Townshend wrote it, Kit Lambert produced it, and the band cut it at Morgan Studios in London on February 7, 1969. The single showed up in Britain on March 7 on Track Records, with “Dogs Part Two” on the flip, and it climbed to number four. In the States, Decca put it out on March 22 and it reached number nineteen. The American picture sleeve even promised the rock opera still on the way, Tommy.

The story behind the song is better than the chart numbers. Townshend has told it a few different ways over the years, and he has owned up to the tall tale. The version he gave Uncut in 2004 is the one the Crew keeps coming back to. He played a rough assembly of Tommy for his friend Nik Cohn, a rock writer who also happened to be a serious pinball player around Soho. Cohn was not sold. The spiritual weight of the piece was heavy, and he did not hear a hit. Townshend, with a little sarcasm in the mix, asked whether pinball in the story would buy a decent review. Cohn said anything with pinball in it was fantastic. Townshend later called the song a scam written to win that review. In a later radio conversation he clarified that he had already written “Pinball Wizard” for Cohn and simply had not played it yet. When Cohn still said he did not hear a single, Townshend offered to swing the song into the opera. That meant going back through the lyrics so the deaf, dumb and blind boy had to become a pinball player.

In his 2012 memoir Who I Am, Townshend tied the idea to the Indian mystic Meher Baba, whose teachings he had taken to heart. Baba had spoken about God playing marbles with the universe, and the pinball element echoed that. Townshend also remembered that Cohn used to toss around the phrases “pinball wizard” and “mean pinball” whenever they played. In the next few weeks it was simple enough to drop pinball into a couple of other spots in the Tommy sequence and redo the vocal lines. He has called the leap absurd. The hero would play pinball while still deaf, mute and blind. Daft, flawed and muddled, he said, but also insolent, liberated and adventurous. He had no doubt that even if the opera did not change anybody’s life, “Pinball Wizard” would hand the band a hit.

Townshend was not in love with his own writing on this one. In notes tied to a later Tommy reissue he called it the most clumsy piece he had ever done, and said he was embarrassed. It sounded like a music hall song to him. Sure plays a mean pinball. He scribbled it out, the verses came out the same length, and there was no real middle eight. He thought it was going to be a dud, then he carried on anyway. The opening guitar figure borrowed from the mock-baroque beginning he had used on “I’m a Boy,” then he grabbed at a bit of vigorous flamenco. He has also said the chordal structure of that intro came from Henry Purcell’s “Symphony Upon One Note,” a short baroque piece built around a single bowed note running all the way through. He analyzed every chord and found ways to play them on guitar. He knocked a demo together, took it to the studio, and the rest of the band loved it. The flip side is its own piece of Who mischief. “Dogs Part Two” is credited to Keith Moon, Towser and Jason. Towser was Pete’s spaniel. Jason was John’s Irish wolfhound.

Once the record was out, the song stuck to the band. It has been played at almost every Who show since 1969. At Woodstock that August, after they played it, Abbie Hoffman charged the stage and hollered that the whole thing was a pile of something while John Sinclair sat in prison. Townshend was not impressed with the set afterward, but the performance helped seal the band’s reputation as a live act you did not want to miss. In 1975 Ken Russell’s film of Tommy put Elton John in the role, stomping through “Pinball Wizard” in platform boots that looked like they could clear a bumper. The Who turn up in that sequence too. Years later a Broadway staging of Tommy spun off its own pinball machine, The Who’s Tommy Pinball Wizard, built by Data East in 1994, loaded with songs from the show. The Bally table king had left the lyric sheet and landed on an actual playfield.

None of that happens if four West London kids do not find each other in the early sixties. Roger Daltrey, a sheet-metal worker who had already been bounced from Acton County Grammar, put together a band called the Detours in 1962 out of the Sulgrave Boys’ Club on Goldhawk Road in Shepherd’s Bush. He was playing lead guitar and trombone at the start, with Colin Dawson on vocals. One day he spotted John Entwistle walking down the street with a bass and pulled him in on the spot. Entwistle and Pete Townshend already knew each other from school. They had played in a Dixieland outfit, the Confederates, with John on trumpet and Pete on banjo, then drifted through short-lived groups before the Detours. Townshend came aboard on rhythm guitar. Daltrey eventually set the guitar down and took the lead vocal. Doug Sandom held the drum stool for a while, older than the others and already married, and then stepped aside.

Keith Moon arrived from a surf band called the Beachcombers and sat in, the story goes, at the Oldfield Tavern in Greenford, a room that became a shrine in Who lore. The Detours were introduced there as The Who. Manager Peter Meaden pushed a sharp Mod image and a brief name change to the High Numbers, and they cut a single, “I’m the Face,” a rewrite of a Slim Harpo number. New managers Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp steered them back to The Who, pushed Townshend to write, and encouraged the onstage aggression that became the calling card. Auto-destruction, feedback, Moon’s drumming like a storm hitting a pier, Entwistle holding the floor while the rest of the room came apart. By the time Tommy arrived they had already put “My Generation,” “I Can See for Miles” and a stack of singles into the world. “Pinball Wizard” was the door that let the opera walk through.

The band still keeps the porch light on for the old records. Their official home is The Who, and the song’s own page sits right there at Pinball Wizard, with the Track and Decca release notes and the reminder that this was the first taste of Tommy. You can find them on Facebook, on Instagram, and on X. Fans have kept their own camp going for years at thewho.net, an unofficial home that still logs Whostory day by day, including the odd cover of this very song. There is also a long-running fan circle on Facebook, The Original And Best The Who Fan Group, if you want the stories, the photos and the arguments about which night Moon really outdid himself. Cue it up, Zoo Freaks. That acoustic intro still feels like a silver ball dropping into the lane.