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Finally number 1

On the morning of August 17th, 1969, The Who performed selections from Tommy at Woodstock. At the time, the rock opera didn’t make any impact on the world outside rock.

49 years later, in the summer of 2018, Roger Daltrey returned to the site of that historic festival in Bethel, New York, accompanied by an orchestra, and sang the double-album in its entirety. Tommy, when released in 1969, peaked at number-four on the Billboard 200.

The album Daltrey made from that show, The Who’s Tommy Orchestral, is currently number-one on the Billboard Classical Album Chart. It entered the chart above Andrea Bocelli’s Si and Luciano Pavarotti’s Music From the Soundtrack: Pavarotti.

Roger Daltrey on Tommy.

“In my opinion it’s one of the best operas ever written. It’s a real opera with a narrative that has meat and potatoes and not just a glossy little sprinkling of very sparse lyrics to link a lot of pleasant melodies together, you know, which is what most of grand opera is.”

Photo Credit: Anthony Moore/Photorazzi

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