“Acid Queen” by The Who

Pete Townshend wrote "The Acid Queen" and took the lead vocal himself: it's the ninth song on Tommy, the Who's rock opera, and one of its darkest turns. Tommy's desperate parents, still hunting for a cure, hand the boy over to an eccentric Romani woman who calls herself the Acid Queen, and she feeds him hallucinogens and throws sex at the problem in a bid to break through his isolation. It doesn't work.

The song is often grouped with the track after it, "Underture", a long instrumental about Tommy's hallucinations and his acid trip, and "Eyesight to the Blind", the album's only cover, may have been there partly to introduce her. For Townshend, Tommy's blindness stood for everybody's blindness to reality.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.