No. 890 – The Acid Queen

Performer: The Who

Songwriter: Pete Townshend

Original Release: Tommy

Year: 1969

Definitive Version: Live at Swansea, 1976, or pretty much any live version from 1975 or 1976 with Roger on vocals.

Scott’s music-finding buddy latched onto a recording of The Who’s epic set at Woodstock just before we went to Hawaii in the summer of 1984, so that album is pretty much synonymous with that trip. Needless to say—but I’ll say it anyway—I’ll have a lot more to talk about there.

But this also presented a problem at home—one that presented itself whenever Scott latched onto some new Who bootleg: When was I going to listen to it?

See, by the summer of 1984, if I had a waking moment, chances were very high that I was spending it with Beth—not that I minded that development. By this time, we had become lovers, so ANY time together meant the possibility of sneaking away at any given moment. Being a healthy, heterosexual male, that worked for me. Whipped? At 20? Duh?!

But Beth Hated The Who with a capital H. (She also hated baseball, so as you can tell, our relationship was doomed from the start, but we were too in love and lust at this point to care about trivial matters.) We did like a lot of the same music, but she didn’t care for hard rock.

That meant The Who was the sound of vacations apart—like Hawaii—of the few nights I would go out with friends or get together with my brother or sister when Beth wasn’t around. It was the soundtrack of driving to and from my job at Food World. And, of course, I had plenty of opportunities to crank it up after I was safely back at Wabash.

It was a small price to pay to keep her happy and her foot firmly on the accelerator of my sex drive.