Forth, it was clear that he'd done an awful lot of thinking before he even made the album. And we realized that, if not exactly autobiographical, the piece was definitely about his life and times as a young man. Pinball in "Tommy" is a metaphor for rock-and-roll.

Mr. Townshend said he had only recently begun to think of "Tommy" as autobiographical because in the 1960's he had considered Tommy an invented character, and wrote about him in the third person. "I had always thought that 'Tommy' was the exception, that it was the spiritual piece. And the other stuff, from the Who's first records up to the present day with my solo writing, was about this guy who was 15 or 16 years old in Shepherd's Bush in 1964, and is now about 50. I'm his voice, I still write for him, he's my Holden Caulfield and I don't want to write about anybody else.

"But in discussions with Des, I realized 'Tommy' is the same story, the same voice. The deaf-dumb-and-blindness becomes a metaphor, if you like, for that dynamic between confrontation and escape that goes on at the moment of teen-age rebellion, which is what rock-and-roll is about. As a teen-ager, you're never alone, ever. You're never responsible for yourself. Whether you confront, whether you escape, whether you stay or whether you go — in the words of the Clash — the critical moment for you as a teen-ager is when you realize you're on your own.

"With Tommy, I realized I had invented a new kind of hero — a hero with nowhere to go. A hero with no potential for heroism, a hero who only had what we all have, which is life stretching out before him. That's the moment that you end up at in the play. You end up with Tommy at that great rock-and-roll moment."

Mr. Townshend said that the La Jolla audience found the scenes in which Uncle Ernie "fiddles about" with the young Tommy the most disturbing, although nothing graphic is portrayed. "I think a lot of people have weird stuff happen to them that they never, never tell anyone else about," he said. When assembling "Tommy," Mr. Townshend asked the Who's bassist, John Entwhistle, to write a song about "the evil Uncle Ernie who interferes with Tommy."

When Mr. Entwhistle wanted more information, Mr. Townshend said he told him: "The worst thing that ever happened to me was when a friend of my father's came to say goodnight to me after the pubs had closed. It was about 11 o'clock at night, he was very, very, very drunk, and he tickled me until I nearly died. He was just too drunk to know when to stop. He kept tickling, and I laughed, and I started to scream, and in the end I started to rage at him, and my father came in and told me off. He said, 'Don't speak to your uncle like that.' And I turned him into Uncle Ernie."

The ending to "Tommy," when his erstwhile followers sing "We're Not Gonna Take It," has changed with various productions. On the album, it seems that Tommy becomes a crackpot guru, imprisoning his would-be disciples in "Tommy's Holiday Camp" and forcing them to play pinball with blindfolds, earplugs and gags until they finally rebel. In Ken Russell's "Tommy," in which Mr. Daltrey plays the title character, his fans pursue him up a mountain of garbage until he swims away in a symbolic baptism. "Possibly the ending dodged the issue," Mr. Townshend said. "I think Ken is not a dramatist, although he understands storytelling. Ken is a fantasist of the highest order."

In the La Jolla production, the spiritual awakening and demagoguery of the 1960's was replaced with a kind of cocooning, as Tommy praised "normality" and returned to his parents' home. And for Broadway, the ending has once again been reworked, in ways that Mr. Townshend and Mr.

McAnuff aren't revealing in advance.

In La Jolla, Mr. Townshend said, "Roger Daltrey came to see the show. And I'm paraphrasing, but he said that he felt that in a word that the Tommy we'd created was a wimp. He felt that Tommy needed to have some kind of drive to do something for himself. He's actually released from darkness into light, and what does he make of it? What we'd done is that we'd taken away his ego. So when we rewrote the second act, we gave him his ego back."

That ego is a star's ego; in Act 11, Tommy becomes something like a rock idol, until his audience turns on him. It's a situation that Mr. Townshend obviously has thought about.

"At times," he said, "the audience becomes like an abuser. It demands submission from the celebrity, and it demands submission on its terms, and if you change those terms you will stop being a celebrity. You are rich, you are famous, you are a hero, but you have no part in it.

"A lot of people inside and outside the production have ambitions for Broadway," Mr. Townshend added. "They hope that what 'Tommy' might do will bring rhythm to Broadway, the rhythms we all grew up with." But the composer says he has no plans to leave rock-and-roll. "I see myself at the moment as part of a Broadway thing. But I'm going to pass through it."