History
The first track, "Athena", peaked at #28 on the Billboard Pop Singles charts.
The album cover, designed by Graham Hughes, depicts a young boy playing Atari's Space Duel arcade game. It is a reference to Tommy, with the pinball machine that the main character played updated to the times.
In 1997, MCA re-released the album with new mixes for the album correcting problems evident in the original mixes for "Athena" and "Eminence Front".
Pete Townshend has been sometimes noted to give a brief history of "Eminence Front" before playing it in concert. He would explain what the song was about, and finish by saying the album's name ("It's Hard").
Read more about this topic: It's Hard
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“It’s a very delicate surgical operation—to cut out the heart without killing the patient. The history of our country, however, is a very tough old patient, and we’ll do the best we can.”
—Dudley Nichols, U.S. screenwriter. Jean Renoir. Sorel (Philip Merivale)