Sexual Satisfaction

5 Iconic Songs Despised by the People Who Created Them

The Who's rock opera Tommy was the first album of its kind. Each song serves as a chapter in an overarching story about a blind, deaf, and mute boy who becomes a religious leader (we didn't say it was a good story). Tommy went on to sell 20 million copies and was adapted into an Oscar-nominated motion picture, the most memorable sequence of which is arguably when Tommy beats Elton John at pinball.

The song playing while Sir Elton does his best to look like Clint Howard in space goggles and moon-shoe stilts is "Pinball Wizard," the lead single from Tommy and one of the Who's most popular hits. The success of the album, and its ultimate adaptation into film and stage versions, can be traced directly back to the success of this catchy, upbeat pop number about a half-retarded kid playing pinball after getting molested by his uncle a few songs earlier in the story. It became a fixture of the Who's concerts from then on, and it's been covered countless times by as many bands over the past 40 years.

Pete Townshend, the Who's lead guitarist and songwriter, refers to "Pinball Wizard" as "awful" and "the most clumsy piece of writing I've ever done" (we assume this also includes the statement he wrote while under investigation for child pornography). It was never meant to be included in the album -- the fact that the Tommy character would be inexplicably good at pinball was an afterthought, thrown into the mix at the last minute to try to get a good review from Nik Cohn, one of the most influential music critics in the industry, who, by the way, happened to be a big pinball fan.

When Townshend first gave an early mix of the album to Cohn, Cohn thought it sounded like a confused pile of ****. But when Townshend offered the rejoinder that perhaps he could add a song about pinball, Cohn immediately said that Tommy would be "a masterpiece" (he was REALLY into pinball). So Townshend sped home and scribbled out a generic stream of enthusiastic pinball-related gibberish, called it "Pinball Wizard," and brought it to the rest of the band, who stunned him by declaring it the obvious hit single of the record. But not even they could have known that it was the track that would follow them all to their graves.

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