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The Pinball Wizard and the Miracle Cure: Reflections on Tommy (1969), Meher Baba, and the Post-Psychedelic Spirituality of Pete Townshend Holland Hall University of Florida April 1, 2016 ii Abstract This project utilizes The Who’s rock opera Tommy (1969) to illustrate the ways in which spiritual seekers navigated the psychedelic era of the late 1960s. Tommy tells the narrative of a “deaf, dumb, and blind” boy’s spiritual journey, which is a semi- biographical account of the group’s primary songwriter, Pete Townshend. By portraying the history of post-psychedelic religious movements through Townshend’s own involvement with the spiritual master Meher Baba, I demonstrate that countercultural members did not use psychedelic drugs merely for recreational purposes. Rather, this project illuminates how some countercultural members who experimented with psychedelic drugs sought to expand their spiritual perception—oftentimes with promising results. Although psychedelic drugs opened a door to a richer spiritual experience for many, they typically failed to provide a permanent pathway to enlightenment. This essay focuses on the narrative of Tommy to show how Westerners began exploring Indian religious practices as an alternative for their psychedelic experiences. iii Table of Contents A Dedication: Dear Prudence……………………………………………………………. i Prelude: A Weekend at the Meher Spiritual Center, 2015………………………………. ii Introduction: Historiography of Music and Indian Spirituality; Music Criticism and Musicological Evaluations of Tommy…………………………………..… 1 Chapter 1: Tommy as the “Normal Post-War Child”: Navigating the Aftermath of World War II and the Psychedelic Era…………………………………...……..... 7 Chapter 2: Rejecting the Psychedelic (and Christian) Gospel: Western Responses to South Asian Religious Movements…………………………….………... 20 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………… 29 List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………... 30 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………. 31 i A Dedication Dear Prudence, open up your eyes. Dear Prudence, see the sunny skies. The wind is low. The birds will sing That you are part of everything. - The Beatles, lyrics from “Dear Prudence,” 1968 Many of us who came of age in the ‘60s continue our spiritual quests and know the joy of living peace. Before long, we will be gone—but others will carry our legacy. There is nothing more important any of us can do for ourselves and our world than for each to embark on our own unique spiritual journey within… This revolution in consciousness continues with our children’s generation and those to follow. They grew up knowing conceptually that happiness comes from within, and that by changing ourselves we change the world. We are changing the world and we must continue making it more enlightened so all humans across this earth live side by side in peace. - Dr. Prudence Farrow Bruns, Dear Prudence: The Story Behind the Song, 2015 This project arose out of a smaller research paper I completed for my History Practicum, Dr. Louise Newman’s “1968,” in the fall of 2014. The subject of that project was Prudence Farrow Bruns, the woman who inspired the Beatles song “Dear Prudence.” I first became aware of Ms. Bruns while attending her presentation on Transcendental Meditation about four years ago. When embarking on my senior thesis in Spring 2015, I was rather directionless as far as my topic was concerned. But Bruns’s memoir, Dear Prudence: The Story Behind the Song, had just been published in June, so I knew Bruns’s memoir was where I had to begin. Bruns’s life story illuminated the profound relationship between psychedelic drugs and new forms of spiritual seeking in the West during the 1960s, which led me to further explore how other popular music artists—in this instance Pete Townsend—may have expressed their own experiences with newly popularized “spiritual” drugs and subsequently Indian religion. ii Prelude: A Weekend at the Meher Spiritual Center, 2015 Figure 1 The website for the Meher Spiritual Center proclaims that it serves as “Meher Baba’s home in the West,” and that it provides “a spiritual retreat for rest, meditation, and renewal of the spiritual life, for those who love and follow Meher Baba, and those who know of him and want to know more.”1 Although Meher Baba died in 1969, the Center still attracts guests who come for rest and remembrance of Baba. 1 “Meher Baba Spiritual Retreat,” Meher Spiritual Center, accessed January 12, 2016, <http://www.mehercenter.org/>. iii On November 6, 2015, the wheels of my Honda Civic rolled from the asphalt of Kings Highway onto the gray dirt parking lot of the Meher Spiritual Center in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. In my passenger’s seat I had a single backpack filled with a few changes of clothes, some toiletries, my laptop, and two vinyl records: the “rock opera” Tommy (1969) by an English rock ‘n’ roll band, The Who, and Who Came First (1972) a solo album by Pete Townshend, The Who’s primary songwriter. The next few days were to serve as my “first-time retreat”2 at the Spiritual Center, named for and dedicated to Meher Baba, the Indian spiritual leader whose influence on Townshend hasn’t yet been well understood, although Baba’s Western following reached its zenith as part of the post- psychedelic religious movements of the 1960s counterculture, in which Townshend played a pivotal role. My preliminary research had already revealed that by the end of the 1960s, the center was attracting individuals who had once heavily experimented with psychedelic drugs, but had subsequently become disenchanted with the drugs that purportedly took users on spiritual journeys. I was voyaging to Myrtle Beach to explore how the center may have helped to satiate those spiritual yearnings in the post-psychedelic landscape of the late 1960s, and to search for further evidence that the renunciation of drug experimentation had played a significant role in expanding Meher Baba’s Western following. Thus, the albums weren’t meant to keep me company on a personal retreat, but were my primary motivation for travelling to the Meher Center. Tommy, an allegorical rock opera, tells the story of a spiritual journey, as the title character searches for a cure for his being—literally and metaphorically—deaf, dumb, and blind: a metaphor for his lack of 2 “First-Time Retreat,” Meher Spiritual Center, accessed January 12, 2016, <http://www.mehercenter.org/visitor/first-time.html>. iv spiritual perception. Although there is no explicit lyrical allusion to Meher Baba in any of the songs, on the inside of the album sleeve, there is a dedication: The Who credits Meher Baba as “Avatar”—the Hindu term for a deity’s manifestation in human form. Townshend’s solo album also has a reference to Baba, this time a memorial to the “Avatar” who had “dropped his body”3 in 1969 (and who Townshend never met). On the album’s cover, there is a photograph of Townshend wearing a button of Baba on his white boiler suit, and on the inside of the album sleeve, there are pictures of the spiritual master discoursing via his own unique rendition of sign language (Baba took a vow of silence beginning in 1925, but communicated his discourses through his own unique rendition of sign language—a few of his close followers were responsible for interpreting his messages and relaying them through speech and writing). Although Townshend became an ardent follower of Meher Baba in 1967 and commissioned the friend responsible for his conversion to Baba discipleship to illustrate all of the album’s artwork, he did not intend Tommy to be a “proselytizing vehicle for Meher Baba,” but rather to express “spiritual yearnings during… post-psychedelic times.”4 The 1960s counterculture is often remembered as epitomizing the hedonistic mantra of “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll,” but as Townshend’s statement suggests, Tommy reveals another significant narrative of the time. Many members of the counterculture confronted their existential anxieties, along with the perils of drug abuse, by swapping a hedonistic creed for a higher power, often with the assistance of South Asian religious influences. In other words, Tommy’s narrative is partly biographical—as both the title character and Townshend himself experience alienation and abuse as a child, yet overcome their troubled 3 Followers of Meher Baba often refer to his death as the moment he “dropped his body.” 4 Pete Townshend, Who I Am: A Memoir (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), 163. v childhoods and achieve wildly successful careers. The fictional Tommy becomes famous for his pinball wizardry and vulnerable to all of the sensual pleasures that accompany fame, recalling Townshend’s own ascension from a childhood filled with sexual abuse, parental neglect, and bullying to the status of a famous rock musician. In the rock opera’s story, the title character Tommy yearns for more—a cure for his physical ailments. Tommy’s parents, who are baffled and frustrated by their son’s illness, suggest possible cures for the boy—cures that mock the avenues for healing that were most possible in the West: Christianity and the consumerist excitement of “Christmas,” a psychotherapist (“There’s a Doctor!”), LSD (“The Acid Queen”) and even illicit sex, as a pimp, “The Hawker” tries to sell a woman to Tommy, promising, “She’s got the power to heal you… Every time she starts to lovin,’ she brings eyesight to the blind.”5 All of these efforts prove futile, although the psychotherapist points the boy to a mirror, suggesting that his cure is within himself. However, Tommy misunderstanding the advice, gazes at his own reflection, egotistically surmising that he is his own cure: “I’m Free!” sings Tommy, believing he has extraordinary healing powers and that he has miraculously cured himself. Thus, Tommy, the pinball wizard, tries to convert his fans to become his spiritual followers, but they reject him as their Messiah, and in the album’s final song, “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” the pinball wizard is again presented as deaf, dumb and blind.

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