![]() ![]() This song is one of the band's most famous live songs, being played at almost every Who concert since its debut live performance on. The song "Pinball Wizard" was written and recorded almost immediately. ![]() Knowing Cohn was an avid pinball fan, Townshend suggested that Tommy would play pinball, and Cohn immediately declared Tommy to be a masterpiece. Following this, Townshend, as Tommy's principal composer, discussed the album with Cohn and concluded that, to lighten the load of the rock opera's heavy spiritual overtones (Townshend had recently become deeply interested in the teachings of Meher Baba), the title character, a "deaf, dumb, and blind" boy, should also be particularly good at a certain game. In late 1968 or early 1969, when The Who played a rough assembly of their new album to critic Nik Cohn, Cohn gave a lukewarm reaction. The song was introduced into Tommy as an afterthought. It was a perpetual concert favourite for Who fans due to its pop sound and familiarity. Townshend once called it "the most clumsy piece of writing ever done" nevertheless, the song was a commercial success and one of the most recognised tunes from the opera. Always has a replay Never tilts at all That deaf dumb and blind kid Sure plays a mean pin ball.", and " I thought I was the Bally table king, but I just handed my pinball crown to him". The set also touched on jazz, blues and comic spins on a few classical pieces, including a whistled version of the Badinerie from Bach’s B minor Orchestral Suite, all cleverly arranged and played with humor, energy and virtuosity.The lyrics are written from the perspective of a pinball champion, called "Local Lad" in the Tommy libretto book, astounded by the skills of the opera's eponymous main character, Tommy Walker: " What makes him so good? He ain't got no distractions Can't hear those buzzers and bells Don't see lights a flashin' Plays by sense of smell. These British comedian harmonists are drawn mostly to rock oldies: their program included antiquities like Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild” and the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the U.K.” which they performed as a cheerful campfire song, complete with swaying and comparatively recent songs like Wheatus’s “Teenage Dirtbag” and Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Lyrics were occasionally tweaked: in a version of Isaac Hayes’s soul classic “Shaft” the line “What’s the most important part of a coal mine, apart from coal” was added just before the refrain. Julia Nunes, a 21-year-old player from upstate New York, has a huge following on YouTube, where her inventive version of the Foundations’ “Build Me Up Buttercup” has had nearly two million plays. George Harrison was a devoted ukulelist: he periodically turned up, uke in hand, at meetings of the George Formby Society, and he is seen strumming the instrument in “The Beatles Anthology.” Younger musicians have taken to it as well. But the instrument has a dedicated constituency. Perhaps because the ukulele has long been treated as a four-string mini-guitar for amateurs, only a handful of ukulelists have achieved much renown, most notably George Formby in Britain and Tiny Tim in the United States. Its musicians play ukuleles of different sizes and pitches, from soprano to bass, though Jonty Bankes’s electric bass ukulele looks a lot like a conventional bass guitar with a vaguely ukulelelike shape. Now in its 25th year, Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain is really only an octet, and on Tuesday it was smaller still: with one player ill, the group performed as a septet. Instead of playing the introduction, or any instrumental accompaniment, ensemble members put down their ukuleles and sang a richly harmonized a cappella backing to George Hinchliffe’s vaudevillian lead vocal. Or maybe it was during the group’s gracefully sung, delicately plucked account of David Bowie’s “Life on Mars,” an idiosyncratic reading of an offbeat selection, even before it morphed into a handful of songs from entirely different universes: among them Stevie Wonder’s “For Once in My Life,” the theme song from “Born Free” and the Who’s “Substitute.”Ĭome to think of it, another Who song, “Pinball Wizard” a natural for a ukulele ensemble, you might think, given the rapidly strummed introduction on the Who’s recording yielded a greater surprise. The most revelatory moment in the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain’s concert at Zankel Hall on Tuesday evening probably came during its performance of “Psycho Killer,” the Talking Heads song, when you realized that David Byrne had missed the boat by not recording the tune with an ensemble of singing ukulele players.
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