A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.
We emerged from the shadows of The Dolphin pub in Plymouth’s Barbican and began walking toward the harbor, the open sea visible in the distance to the south, when a steadily mounting, mechanized buzzing was heard around the corner.
Were we being pursued by lawnmowers?
Soon the street was filled with flashy vintage motor scooters, piloted mostly by older men wearing archaic clothing from some time long ago, and suddenly there came a devastating flashback from somewhere within my Indiana heartland soul … but why? How could someone like me, born and raised thousands of miles away, who never even visited England until 1998, possibly experience Sixties-back-dated déjà vu on a Devon quayside in the year 2009?
Quadrophenia, that’s how.
Unbeknownst to us, at least until the whirring eventually subsided and my wife’s cousin deigned to explain, the Who’s seminal 1973 album was being adapted and restaged as a musical by its writer, Pete Townshend. The show would be playing at the Theatre Royal Plymouth, and so we bought tickets and attended a performance. It was cleverly done, with a group of young vocalists and instrumentalists gleefully blasting their letter-perfect way through passages made immortal by Townshend (guitar and vocals), Roger Daltrey (vocals), John Entwistle (bass and brass) and Keith Moon (drums and percussion).
Tears were in my eyes throughout, because Quadrophenia always works that way for me.
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The basic facts are well known. Quadrophenia was conceived by Townshend as a concept album embracing aspects of post-war British cultural history utterly remote from the American experience. Jimmy, the protagonist, is a Mod; on the other side of the contrasting ethos aisle are the Rockers. These rival gangs have everything in common when it comes to their shared white ethnicity and socio-economic futility in Great Britain; duly deprived of larger differences, they fight endlessly over small patches of turf defined primarily by styles, fashions and attitudes.
Jimmy’s personality is explained as a four-part disorder (perhaps “quad-polar” in amateur newspeak) of conflicting emotions, each of them further symbolized by a band member: Introspective “beggar” (Townshend); tough guy and “helpless dancer” (Daltrey); groping romantic (Entwistle) and manic lunatic (Moon). In turn, each of Jimmy’s personalities is scored as a musical theme, and in operatic fashion, these themes are stated through bookending instrumentals (“Quadrophenia” and “The Rock”), woven through the narrative, and brought to an epiphany in “Love Reign O’er Me.”
Arguably, Quadropenia is the Who’s aggregate musical pinnacle, fusing the players’ greatest individual strengths during a period just before weariness and attrition began taking their toll. Astoundingly, not one of them was 30 years old when Quadrophenia was recorded. As a whole, while oblique, Jimmy’s saga makes far better sense than that of Tommy, the group’s better known album. Upon release, Quadrophenia was no “instant” classic, but it has aged quite well, its deeper, layered textures successfully maturing over time. Like Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Quadrophenia’s universals are capable of creative reinvention apart from their original milieu. These days, Tommy seems positively impoverished by comparison.
However, Quadrophenia’s enduring resonance has less to do with the details of its birth and subsequent reincarnations than with an unquestioned, bedrock fact of the rock and roll canon in its most expansive sense, because in the end, the music’s all about me.
Pete Townshend, that distant Englishman, addressed me – one listener out of millions – with Quadrophenia, an album I first heard at 13 years of age and found utterly impenetrable, but a few short years later, gratefully embraced as fully capable of addressing the innermost labyrinths of my far-off Hoosier world in a way that was just plain uncanny, and remains inexplicable these many years later.
Why not?
That’s rock and roll.
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In retrospect, it is clear to me that from a very early age, I’ve harbored inclinations toward cantankerousness, rebellion and insolence. Curmudgeonly is my destiny. Granted, these traits took a while to coalesce into a doctrine for daily living. Like so many teenagers, I couldn’t always find words or principles to articulate my thoughts, and when I became aware of the Who and Townshend’s terse early statements of doubt, self-loathing and alienation (“Can’t Explain” and “Substitute”), contrasting with outbursts of aggression and bravado (“My Generation” and “Anyway Anyhow Anywhere”), they definitely were an influence.
But I can be a very slow learner and a very late bloomer. To grasp the broader implications of Quadrophenia, I had to grow a bit older and be knocked good and hard on the noggin in a metaphorical sense. My inevitable comeuppance came in 1979.
Although captivated by my philosophy and history courses, I was muddling disinterestedly through university, completely clueless about the future. Then, providentially, I met a girl, and for the first time ever, there was seeming clarity, because naturally, as with every TV show I’d viewed since the boob tube became my de facto babysitter in 1963, there would ensue a storybook romance, marriage, a career to pay the bills, children, softball, holidays … and so forth, until at last, decades later, I’d find myself seated in one of Thornton Wilder’s wooden stage chairs.
This stunningly short-lived relationship proved as providential as I’d imagined, only for all the “wrong” reasons – at the time. In retrospect, it simply isn’t possible to overstate my foolishness and immaturity; even worse, these conditions were just as uncomfortably obvious to me then. A lifetime of coddled pop song lyric gullibility was no preparation for a “happily ever after” plot line to be squashed unceremoniously underfoot, but there was a cassette handy for offering consolation: Quadrophenia. Pete knew what it felt like, and I listened to his prescription every day for weeks on end.
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On February 16, the surviving members of the Who came to Louisville and staged a compelling revival of Quadrophenia, performed in its entirety. The story of how I first came to appreciate the album occurred a thousand or more years ago. It was the jumpstart to a process of self-discovery that happily hasn’t stopped since, and yet oddly, just as Pavlov’s famous mutt can’t remember exactly why he’s salivating, not a one of my founding Quadrophenia myths surfaced during last Saturday’s performance. Instead, I just enjoyed the music. The rest of the historical document just didn’t seem to matter.
Maybe Quadrophenia by the Who at the Yum Brands Arena isn’t very local at all, but when it comes to mythology, maybe we need it to be arena-sized, and not confined to a busker’s cubbyhole. Maybe we’re always looking for selected whole planet universals to help us sort through our own small pond particulars. Maybe music functions as just such a religion in my own innermost world.
Maybe I’m kidding myself, because I know it does.
Tears get in my eyes. Music like Quadrophenia always works that way for me.
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