Quadrophenia: Rock ‘n’ Roll with a side of show tunes

“Quadrophenia” ‘n’ I have certainly got a history.  Like most of the rest of the Who’s discography, I gobbled it up in a fury that I can’t really completely explain.  I was swept up by the standard issue draws about the Who:  the guitar smashing, the windmills, the nose-bleed inducing, youthful abandon they threw into their performances, the humor, the irreverence, and just the simply kick-ass songwriting by Pete Townshend.  They had (have) an almost hilarious yet deadly serious alchemy of blitzkrieg and sheer beauty, extreme vulnerability and achingly adolescent want for macho posturing that brought the hairs up on the back of my neck then as a fresh-faced, well-meaning 7^th grader, and just as much now as a more drawn, but still well-meaning no-grader.  “Quadrophenia,” their sixth album, was a part of that, but my relationship with the album hasn’t always been simple.

When I first heard it, I think I was a freshman in high school.  I had already absorbed and loved “Tommy,” “Who’s Next,” and “My Generation,” and “Quadrophenia” was inevitably to come.  Right from the swelling storm of the atmospheric intro track, I was taken with it.  I had already heard “The Real Me” before on a compilation (that in itself was very important to who I was and who I am), but now I heard it with a new sense of paranoia and ‘fuck it’ style of abandon.  The words stood out:

“The cracks between the paving stones
Like rivers of flowing veins
Strange people who know me
Peeping from behind every window pane
The girl I used to love
Lives in this yellow house
Yesterday she passed me by
She doesn’t want to know me now.”

With the screaming chorus:

“Can you see the real me
Can ya, can ya?”

It was so hurt, so angry, so frank and so directly spoken from me, it seemed.  It was and is very potent angst.  The music in conjunction struck me as hard as anything ever has.  More than any other later period Who recording, the whole thing seems almost completely off-kilter.  Roger Daltrey belts out the angry lines with such thick conviction and strength that you forget that what he’s singing is so high-pitched and vulnerable.  His voice even strains under the pressure in an endearing and truly awesome way towards the end.  The guitar by Pete Townshend is agitated, scruffy and scratchy while still laying out the discipline in thick, authoritative chords.  John  Entwistle, in this song, is busier than ever.  His bass provides an endless number of memorable, melodic twists and turns that help keep the song speeding by and bubbling with energy.

Keith Moon, the drummer, speaking of energy, sounds nearly batshit.  I was thinking about his general drumming style the other day, and decided that its kind of like standard rock drumming, but everything you’ve ever wanted and more.  There’s often a basic beat or at least the template of one that he’s dancing or stomping around, but he’s all over the place with fills and rolls and brutally (actually brutal, not metal kid ‘brutal’.  Asshole) hard hitting cymbal washes and flourishes.  All of this would be ok by itself, but in Moon’s hands with this group of yarboes we get a completely distinctive sound that rolls and bounces along through even the heaviest of songs and subjects.  Keith Moon’s subtlety, individuality and sensitivity behind the drumset make for absolutely essential parts that can be memorized almost like the lyrics.  Imagine ‘Sparks,’  ‘Going Mobile,’ ‘I Can See For Miles,’ or ‘A Quick One…While He’s Away’ without Moon’s bright, unique touches.

“The Real Me” sets the tone for the entire album, which is a very, very good thing.  The problem with “Quad” is that while the feelings expressed in such a raw state in “The Real Me” remain constant and true throughout, not all of the songs reach those heights.  Furthermore, a lot of them take some stretch of the imagination to see them being played by the same band that first put out the almost childish in comparison “I Can’t Explain” just nine years earlier.  Of course, that fundamentally isn’t a problem.  What is a problem, is deciding if you like the new sound.

I think there may be a stage for everyone in his/her own hero worship where they simply want to love whatever their hero does.  Whether it comes from some need to cling to perfection, I don’t know.  But I went through it.  So, for a while, I assimilated all of the Who’s material that I wanted to and elevated most of it to genius level.   “Quadrophenia” was the one album that, over time, has really shifted around from love to indifference and back to love.  I was and still am, to a lesser degree, conflicted by it.  At the time, I sort of just selectively heard what I loved from the album and conveniently ignored the rest in order to call it as great as I wanted it to be.  But now, after about 9 years or so of “Quadrophenia,” I think I’m really able to hear it honestly; for better or worse.

What do I hear?  Well, I still don’t love all of the songs, for one thing.  Yet, something new becomes clear.  Once you get used to the most frenzied of rock bands playing songs that almost sound like show tunes, you become free to drink in the absolute sincerity and quality melodies with which the whole project simply breathes with.  It is this straight-from-the-heart quality combined with simply some truly excellent music that makes the whole album, excepting a few bores, work so powerfully.

I won’t go song by song through the album, but I’ll say what for me makes the album so worth hearing and so curious at the same time.  Its frankly odd to have such overblown and show-tune-like songs like “Is It in My Head?” and “Helpless Dancer” and “I’ve Had Enough” alongside such breathtaking, heartbreaking classics like “Love Reign O’er Me,” “5:15,” and “I’m One.”  But, I’ve learned to live with what I cannot change; and, nowadays, the songs I like or love far outnumber the clunkier ones.

When I was a younger lad, the urge to simply explode on stage was at the forefront of my mind quite often.  “Quadrophenia” both reflected and instilled such ideas onto and into me.  I wanted, not to be a ‘rock star’ like the Disney channel talks about, but I wanted, simply, to impress upon others something incredible.  I wanted them to sit down, shut up, and pay attention as I slammed them with blistering feedback and made them understand.  This only sporadically came to fruition with bands I was (and still am) in, but the dream was there and was really all that mattered.  “Quadrophenia” both helped create that dream and reflected what dreams were already there.

Not that the album aimed to be truly triumphant or all-powerful in this way—it was too honest and self-aware for that.  Rather, it simply expressed these dreams and desires and used tremendous power to express the feelings of the meek and the helpless and the outcast.  It seemed to hold the world in its hand while, realistically, pissing it all away or meekly hiding in the corner at the same time.  Let me explain:

With a song like “I’m One,” for example, you get a very powerful, well-written, melodic, smashing-good song, that contradictorily demonstrates awesome power while reflecting the (mostly, I’ll explain in a moment) powerless thoughts of a blustering, lonely, alienated adolescent.

But he’s ‘one.’  He may be a loser with no chance to win, but he’s one.  This is his only powerful insight.   It’s not clear what being ‘one’ means exactly, but for the hero, and for me, its clear that to be ‘one’ is to be at least something rather than the nothing that he feels like.

“Ill-fitting clothes and I blend in the crowd
Fingers so clumsy, voice too loud
But I’m one
I am one
And I can see that this is me
And I will be, you’ll all see
I’m the one.”

I think this sums up the entire album, in a way; or at least it sums up what’s great about it.  We get strong, authoritative, exuberant music and melody to hold up the bluster of a weak, inarticulate kid and to even lead him to a kind of mystical new understanding and even appreciation of himself.  Its really not hard to see why a young, sensitive boy like me grasped onto it so hard.  I think a lot of the greatest art, or at least a lot of my favorite stuff, performs this kind of transcendence in contradiction.  This theme runs through the heart of “Quad” and especially in my favorite moments.

What IS my favorite moment?  There probably isn’t one.  But for a good while, “5:15” was my favorite Who song, and that says a LOT.  Its not like it has moved down the list much either.

The song seems to say everything and nothing about disillusionment, failure, alienation and the real lack of a place to call home.  He’s disappointed in his heroes, his past and himself most of all.

“Where have I been?
Out of my brain on the 5:15.”

The words work well enough when looked at on a piece of paper, but this isn’t poetry, its music.  That’s what unimaginative people never understand about lyrics.  What makes the song so wistfully tragic is the anthem-like way the song goes.  We get a familiar Townshend chord progression that only serves to prolong the half-reverie between the sad, wonderful piano part that frames the song asking:

“Why should I care?  Why should I care?”

Moon’s drumming has scarcely been more creative.  As the song progresses, the train nears a stop, as does the reflection.  As he comes down, both from the pills and the train, he doesn’t care anymore.  He just slinks off into relative obscurity and quiet desperation.  Moon’s drumming mimics a train more closely than almost anything I’ve ever heard before.  It is not a gimmick, however, as it breaks down the hero, slows him down, and finally stops his mind from racing, or indeed, moving in any significant way at all.  His drumming ‘settles’ the dream.

I can’t get enough of that chorus—“out of my brain on the 5:15.”  With the melody written by Pete and intoned by Roger, its so loud, so defiant, so angry and so embracing of its failure that it’s beautiful.  It practically twirls the mic itself.

I suppose the guitar work in the song could be seen as nothing special, but I don’t talk to those people.  I’ve always believed that, as wonderful a visual, visceral and symbolic image as the ‘windmill’ is–the act of swinging one’s arm wide about oneself to hit the guitar strings–especially and maybe only in Pete’s arms, the act has a wonderful SOUND too.  In the guitar to “5:15,” we can hear the windmills and the pick scraping down the strings.  It just makes me want to dance.  In the context of the song, it creates the height from which the hero must fall back into indifference and desperation.  The guitar, like all of Pete’s best, is so ecstatic that its infectious, and its truly affecting when the part takes its leave.

Basically, what you get with “5:15” is a typical day in most people’s lives where they have a moment to reflect, however unpleasant it may be, before they drift back into the comfort of the present.  When I was younger, the ‘comfort’ of the present, to be un-reflective, was, to say the least, harder to do.  I won’t lie and say that I was a miserable, unhappy person, but the reflective state of mind made up of insecurities and disappointments in myself and others and the world was hard to displace.  “5:15” is an anthem to reflection, which is what makes it one of my favorite songs ever.

The more I think about “Quadrophenia,” the more I’m tempted to ignore its faults and say its completely great.  But its got a couple of problems besides just a couple of its songs being weak.  Its overblown beyond belief, for one.  There’s an absurd amount of reverb as well as having a few overextended chord sequences and repeated refrains and over-inflated, exaggerated vocals.   Respected internet critic Mark Prindle has called “Quad” a “bunch of flabby show tunes for old people” and, at one time, I may have agreed with him.   In “Quad’s” worst moments, it seems, once again, odd that these weak elements could even be within a thousand miles of its best parts, let alone on the same album.  Its not so much because these elements are truly awful, but that they couldn’t be farther from the youth that not only the album is about, but what the Who seemed to be about and represent since their very beginning.  Interestingly enough, incidentally, I really like “The Dirty Jobs” now—the most synth-laden and show-tuney of the tracks.

In fact, what led me to write what you’re reading now, was listening to “Doctor Jimmy” again after years of kind of hating it.  I just wanted to see if it was as bad as I thought.  As it turns out, it isn’t.  But the production with its reverb and keyboards and general lack of Pete’s guitar still is.  It doesn’t help that Daltrey, who creates another problem for “Quad” in the process, occasionally goes overboard with his delivery of stuff like this.  When its a sensitive, quavering Pete-song, and not a rocking one, sometimes Daltrey can make it unintentionally overstated on this album (and on stuff like “The Song is Over”).  He can bring too much theatricality to what could just be a song, not necessarily an opera.  “Doctor Jimmy” is one of those moments.  Still, its got both damned good lyrics and damned good melody, and is still enjoyable because of them.

The only truly weak tracks for me now are on side two of the album:  “Is It In My Head?” and “I’ve Had Enough.”  Some of the lyrics in “Helpless Dancer” are kind of dumb, but overall I still really like the song.  And, really, I love the choruses and other parts of “Head” and “Enough,” I just don’t like the production, any part of the verses or Roger’s tone.  These parts sound like Gilbert & Sullivan’s impression of a Who song for some musical.  This, I cannot abide.  I should also add that I’m not a fan of the ‘Zoot suit’ stuff in the otherwise beautiful ‘Cut My Hair’ or the ‘my jacket’s gonna be cut…’ faux-rocking refrains that jump in out of nowhere to remind you that you’re listening to songs that link together.  We don’t need that reminder, Pete.

“Bellboy,” however, the fourth song on side three, is a magnificent song that works in such an almost arrogant way.  I’m not talking about typical rock star style arrogance, of which the Who remain relatively free of (hear that Oasis?), but the kind of serious defiance needed for Townshend to write a song so very theatrical and operatic while also having an intricate and stomping chord progression that, as the song rises and falls in action, rocks unabashedly.  I can’t help but smile in listening to the Who (with Townshend’s songwriting) simply get away with it, let alone just enjoying it as the great song that it is.  It took serious balls to make such a dynamic and seemingly odd song.  In a way, I could have just described almost every Who song ever made.   But while the Who had always been theatrical, culminating up to that point with “Tommy,” they’d never before skirted so close to out and out stage musical style trappings while still rocking–and they don’t always succeed.  But here in “Bellboy,” its daring and perfect and unlike anything I’ve really heard before.

I love the one tom that Moon plays in this song (and ‘I’m One’) that he seems to have picked up for this album only.  He only hits it every once in a while, but its low and frigid sounding like a stiff winter wind.  Somehow, with this incorporated into his usual triumphant upbeat rolls, it just makes the overall effect more appropriately grandiose and powerful.

“Bellboy” involves our hero running into the leader of his old mod gang; now reduced to gathering tips and humiliation in equal measure as the bellboy for a hotel.  With the stage that I’m at in my life right now, I identify with the self-loathing, pathetic bellboy more than I used to.  Keith Moon delivers a partly comical, partly pathetic but seriously touching lead vocal turn for what was something like one of the two or so times in the Who’s catalog.  During one of the quieter moments:

“Some nights I still sleep on the beach
Remember when star were in reach
I wander in early to work
(I) spend my day licking boots for my perks”

The other day, a little absentmindedly, I found myself rehearsing a bit of hypothetical small talk with myself that I’d have with my supervisor at work.  When you bring home with you your stunted chatter, your diminished expectations and muted intellect that you adopt at work out of productivity, its an unpleasant feeling.  Finding you have little to do and sitting placid on top of your ambition, you find yourself at work early and a bit more desperate to please.  I think a lot of people have been there, me included.  That’s “Bellboy” to me.  Except I’m happy when I listen to it–and I dance a lot more.

Any discussion about “Quad” for me has to involve the two instrumental overture-ish tracks that come after the first and before the last songs.  The first is the title track itself, which has to be the one of the most involving and invigorating overtures I’ve ever heard.  It represents, in four disctinctly different mini-songs, the four major recurring musical themes in the album.  I love this track far too much.  The flamenco-ish strumming from Towhshend in the bellboy/Keith theme along with the brisk roll from Moon that starts the song, are enough to give me goosebumps every time.  Later, when this track is reprised as “The Rock,” its sadder and more damaged, but maybe even more affecting.  It sums up all we’ve been through and leads right to “Love Reign Oe’r Me, one of the best songs, to end the album.

All in all, because of “Quad’s” difficulties, I’ve always been tempted to just ignore it as much as I’ve attempted to praise it.  To just shelve it and say “eh, its got some good songs but its not good enough to consider much beyond that.”  Well, even if I were to judge simply by my descriptions earlier in this thing, I would say that that is just wrong.  When I add to that the simple fact that when I put on this album, for the majority of it, I feel the uncontrollable urge to move, to dance, the previous point becomes even more moot.

Oh yeah.  Also, fans of the Who may have noticed that I haven’t discussed one shred of the overhanging concept to the album that helps to play up the theatricality (not that that’s necessarily a bad thing).  Well, the album was meant to cap off the childish conceits of both the band and their audience by telling a story of a fan who reflected the four extreme personalities of the group–quadrophenia.  The album reflects, in its arc, the story of the growing up of their mod audience, and the growing up of the Who.  Its really a pretty good story, but I’m not here to tell it.  It simply doesn’t figure directly into my enjoyment of the album near as much as how, say, the natural, ambiguous progression of the story of “Tommy” seeps in over its running length to be an essential part of my talking about the album.  With “Quad,” its just not near as essential to my experience.  The songs speak to me on their own terms, not as someone else’s story, but as my own, really.  In the end, I think that Townshend would appreciate that.

I simply love this album.  It sweeps me up every time, despite its just WEIRD defects.  Its got some of the most poignant and beautiful and rocking music ever created in it, while it also just so happens to have some of the more uninteresting, bland show-tunes ever created.  Odd, but never to be ignored.

Aaron J Brian