The Who Had A Huge Hit In 1969 With A Song They Wrote To Appease A Critic

On today’s Morning Show, James Harrison featured the song “Pinball Wizard” by The Who. The song was written by Pete Townshend and featured on The Who’s 1969 rock opera album Tommy. It became one of the band’s biggest hits and is still a wildly popular track on rock stations around the globe.

But did you know that the song was included on Tommy as an afterthought, or that Townshend regrets having written it?

Tommy was conceived as a concept album – the first of its kind, really – about a “deaf, dumb and blind” kid who is seemingly miraculously cured and becomes the head of a cult. So what does any of that have to do with pinball?

Well, during the album’s production the band played a rough cut for British music critic Nik Cohn. Cohn wasn’t impressed and warned the band that the album would likely receive poor reviews and be a total commercial failure.

Townshend was determined to see the album and his concept succeed. Knowing that Cohn was a pinball fanatic, he suggested that perhaps Tommy could be a master pinball player, free from the distractions of bells, buzzers and lights. Cohn was thrilled with the idea, so Townshend quickly wrote the pop-friendly “Pinball Wizard” and it became a last-minute add-on to the album.

The song became a smash hit, reaching number 4 on the UK charts and number 19 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100. Townshend, however, still finds the song to be a bit of an embarrassment.

In an interview included in the album liner notes of a re-release of Tommy, Townshend said:

I knocked it off. I thought, 'Oh, my God this is awful, the most clumsy piece of writing I've ever done. Ever since I was a young boy, I played the silver ball, from Soho down to Brighton, I must have played them all. Oh my God, I'm embarrassed. This sounds like a Music Hall song.

Everybody was really excited and I suddenly thought 'Have I written a hit?' It was just because the only person that we knew would give us a good review, was a pinball fanatic.

Despite Townshend's attitude toward the song, “Pinball Wizard” remains a crowd favorite and classic rock staple.