“Pinball Wizard” by The Who

"Pinball Wizard" is the jukebox heart of the Who's 1969 rock opera Tommy, and it went out as a single that same year. Pete Townshend wrote it and plays guitar, and he and Roger Daltrey share the lead vocal, telling the story through the eyes of a local pinball champ who has just watched the opera's hero, the deaf, dumb and blind Tommy Walker, take his crown. Kit Lambert produced, with Chris Stamp as executive producer and Damon Lyon-Shaw engineering.

Townshend himself once dismissed it as the clumsiest thing he had ever written, which only proves writers are poor judges: the single reached number four in Britain and 19 in America. Flip it over and there's "Dogs Part Two", an instrumental credited to Keith Moon that has nothing to do with the band's 1968 single "Dogs".

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