The Who’s rock opera, released October 26, lays the groundwork for the Mod revival as the band struggles to survive a tour wracked by intraband fistfights, angel dust ODs, malfunctioning equipment, and arrests for hotel trashing.
For the next Who album, guitarist-songwriter Pete Townshend initially envisioned a rock opera called Rock Is Dead, Long Live Rock, about a band struggling not to lose its ideals to decadence. Townshend decided to tie it in with a movie and enlisted rock critic Nik Cohn to write the script. In spring 1972 the band recorded “Long Live Rock,” “Love Reign o’er Me,” and “Is It in My Head?” but then Townshend abandoned the concept.
He gave “Long Live Rock” to Billy Fury to sing in That’ll be The Day, the film with Ringo Starr, in which Who drummer Keith Moon also had a role. But the other two tracks eventually found a home in the rock opera the Who actually did do next, Quadrophenia. The melody of “Long Live Rock” became a recurring motif in some of its songs.
The key inspiration for Townshend arrived when he agreed to organize Eric Clapton’s Rainbow Concert on January 13, to help Clapton get back on his feet after a long struggle with heroin. To complete the band they recruited the Faces’ Ron Wood, Steve Winwood, Traffic drummer Jim Capaldi, and bassist Ric Grech of Family. During the rehearsals, Grech introduced Townshend to liquid amyl nitrate, a.k.a. poppers. After the show, crashing from all the amyl nitrate, Townshend felt depressed. He had given up drugs after some bad trips six years ago (though he still drank), so the comedown was particularly acute, reminding him of a night in 1964 when he was nineteen.1
It was right when the Who had been taken over by a manager who decided to turn the band into the Mod band, changing their name and their wardrobe and encouraging them to write with Mod lingo to cash in on the burgeoning English subculture. Mods drove scooters, listened to R&B and jazz, tended to work in offices in the southern cities, and were obsessed with fashion. Cohn said, “It was the Mods who first made Carnaby Street happen, 1962–3.”2
On Easter weekend 1964, the Mods made national headlines with their first major rumble with the Rockers, who wore leather, rode motorcycles, still listened to ’50s rock, and often worked in factories in the country. The next weekend the Who played gigs at the seaside resort town of Brighton, during the famous two-day “Battle of Brighton” in which over a thousand youths skirmished in various resorts along the coast.
That Saturday night Townshend and an art school friend named Liz Reid missed their train home, so they took a walk on the beach where some Mods and Rockers were still fighting. When it started to rain, Townshend and Reid took refuge under the pier and found Mods in parkas wading barefoot in the water. Townshend had taken Purple Heart speed pills that were wearing off, so he felt bleak, but he also felt a spirit of camaraderie, a part of the Mod movement. And he fell in love with Liz as they rode the train back home together that morning.3
He never went out with her again (his memoir doesn’t say why). But his sudden flashback to the fleeting idyll, on the morning after the Clapton show, inspired him to write a short piece that became the basis for Quadrophenia’s plot, eventually included in the album’s liner notes. The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau called the prose “as brilliant a piece of writing as Townshend’s ever done.”4
The story centers on Jimmy, a teen in 1965 London in love with a girl who is “a perfect dresser / wears every fashion / gets it to the tee.” But he works as a trash man, and neither she nor the rest of their crowd notice him. The one thing Jimmy feels he has going for him is being a Mod (“I’m One”), wearing a zoot suit or Italian clothes or Levi’s (just come into fashion in England that year). His one great memory is when the Mods beat the Rockers at the pier. “When I was [in Brighton] last time there were about two thousand Mods driving up and down the promenade on scooters,” reads the liner-notes story. “I felt really anonymous then, sort of like I was in an army.”
But the lifestyle goes hand in hand with amphetamine addiction. When his mom finds a box of pills in his room, his folks kick him out. He goes to the dance hall and hopes the girl will join him on the beach, but she doesn’t. He takes the train to Brighton, the scene of his one triumph. There he discovers that the head Mod, Ace Face, is a bellboy at a hotel. All the Mods copped Ace’s style; he took on two Rockers at once and beat them. But Jimmy realizes Ace is still going to be “licking boots” for the next fifty years. In the end Mod means nothing. The song covers the same working-class desperation Springsteen made his own at the end of the decade.
No illusions left, Jimmy goes on a bender and gets beaten up. He decides to steal a boat and row out to a rock in the sea to drown himself. “Something else happens to him though,” Townshend wrote in the press release, “something inside clicks, and his original drive to suicide becomes sidetracked as he starts to feel, on the boat at sea, his first genuine high.”
The sound of crashing waves has recurred throughout the album, as if the sea has been calling him from the beginning. Townshend later elaborated, “God’s love being the ocean and our ‘selves’ being the drops of water that make it up. [His guru] Meher Baba said, ‘I am the Ocean of Love.’ I want to drown in that ocean, the ‘drop’ will then be an ocean itself.” In “Drowned” and “Love Reign o’er Me” the water heals Jimmy, giving him an epiphany of a life beyond pills, fashion, and street fights.
The songwriter summarized, “When it’s over and he goes back to town he’ll be going through the same shit, being in the same terrible family situation and so on, but he’s moved up a level. He’s weak still, but there’s a strength in that weakness. He’s in danger of maturing.”5
Townshend made demos in his home studio, then began recording with Moon and bassist John Entwistle on June 1. They arrived daily around two, joked around for a few hours at the bar built in the studio, then got down to work. The rhythm section followed the demos fairly closely, though Townshend encouraged embellishments.
For the opening rocker “The Real Me,” Entwistle sat on the bass cabinet and turned himself into the star of the song without trying, in one take, via his deliriously over-the-top playing. “I was joking when I did that bass part. The band said, ‘Wow, that’s great, that’s great!’”6 Moon avalanches across the toms at the end of every line, Townshend slams away at power chords, and Roger Daltrey roars, announcing the band had returned to rock even harder than “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” The customized studio speakers were so loud they ruptured one of the secretaries’ ears.7 The musicians usurp Daltrey, but he fights back howling, all slamming for attention, a prime example of why Rolling Stone readers voted Entwistle the No. 1 bassist of all time and Moon the No. 2 drummer (after his protégé Bonham). Despite Jimmy’s Catcher in the Rye–esque dark night of the soul, Townshend wrote in his memoir that “recording Quadrophenia with The Who was a joyful experience.”
On the gentler end of the spectrum is the folkish opening of “I’m One,” not far from Simon and Garfunkel, its slightly eerie echo perfectly invoking the mood of falling leaves. Jimmy (Townshend) sings of facing another year as a loser before erupting into a defiant vow that everyone will notice him now that he’s a Mod.
“5:15” was one of the few songs not demoed. Townshend made up the riff in the studio during a sound check, a variation on “Long Live Rock.” As Jimmy wanders the streets on booze and pills, Entwistle plays along on brass like the band of a strip show, appropriate for a guy who met his demise doing coke with a stripper twenty-nine years later. Jimmy walks into a Beatles concert; Townshend explained in the Quadrophenia documentary that the lines about “girls of 15, sexually knowing,” with ushers “sniffing eau de cologne,” were inspired by the time he saw the Fab Four live in Blackpool. After the female fans wet themselves in excitement, the ushers sprinkled cologne on the seats in a futile attempt to mask the smell.
One of their most ferocious jams, “5:15” was also one of their most poignant. The aching refrain “Why should I care? Nowhere is home” resonated with young Who fans with troubled home lives, runaways, or kids kicked out by their parents, self-medicating on the boulevard.
The plot is mostly conveyed through the trio of “Cut My Hair,” “I’ve Had Enough,” and “Sea and Sand.” In the former, Townshend sings the quiet verses like a mixed-up vulnerable kid, until aggressive Daltrey joins in on the choruses to boast he’s “dressed right for a beach fight,” defiantly strutting down the street with his gang on “leapers” (speed). “I’ve Had Enough” fiercely catalogs the clothes Jimmy believes make him cool enough for the girl as he rides through the sleet on his scooter. But halfway through, his reverie is interrupted by the glimmering synthesizer of “Love Reign o’er Me,” the first hint of the epiphany that will later save him.
For the climactic “Love Reign o’er Me,” Moon’s toms and cymbals echo the “Psalm” of Coltrane’s A Love Supreme before Daltrey enters and progresses from crooning to belting. During the sessions he came in after the others were gone to add his voice to their instrumentation. He didn’t party like them; on tour he went to bed early. He also bristled at being directed too much by Townshend. Daltrey told Billboard that Townshend saw “Love Reign o’er Me” “as a kind of a gentle love song, whereas I saw it as a scream, a heart-wrenching, internal scream of frustration. The first time I played my (performance) of it to him, he didn’t like it at all!”8 But Daltrey wanted to top, or at least try to match, his career-defining howl at the end of “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”
The recording industry believed quadraphonic sound to be the new cash cow that would convince consumers to buy new hardware and repurchase music they already had in a new format. Stereo had taken over from mono in the mid-’60s, and now the industry hoped people would want four channels instead of just two. Quadraphonic eight-track debuted in 1970, quadraphonic vinyl the following year, and by ’73, artists like Jeff Beck, Blue Oyster Cult, Bachman Turner Overdrive, Black Oak Arkansas, and the Doobie Brothers had released albums with a quad version.9 Townshend was most impressed by Pink Floyd, who issued a quad mix for Dark Side of the Moon and achieved amazing sound in their live shows by positioning speakers in four corners of the concert halls.
Always hungry for a gimmick, Townshend decided Jimmy would not only be schizophrenic (at the time generally misconstrued as “split personality” syndrome) but quadrophenic with four distinct personalities. Each band member would sing one of the personalities, and each voice would come from one of the four speaker channels.
But after they wrapped recording in early August, the label pressured him to mix the double LP in less than a month so they could release it on October 13, two weeks before the Who’s new tour, and capitalize on the Christmas-present-buying season. Scheduling a quad mix would mean postponing the tour until spring. Thus the album called Quadrophenia was issued only in stereo, continuing the long Who tradition of grand ambitions compromised by time crunch. (The radio station concept of The Who Sell Out was carried through only for part of the record; the Lifehouse rock opera was truncated into Who’s Next.) Not that it made any difference to the brilliance of the individual songs. In the end, consumers were happy with stereo, and quad petered out by the second half of the decade.
Townshend realized listeners would not be able to discern his plot through the song lyrics, so he commissioned a photo book to be included with the double album, photographed by Ethan Russell, who shot the covers for Who’s Next and the Beatles’ Let It Be. Townshend’s synthesizers sounded nothing like 1965, but the black-and-white photos grittily evoked the British New Wave films of the era, with smokestacks, housing developments, boiling kettles, and greasy British breakfast food, along with the Mod fashion of parkas and bull’s-eye T-shirts. The shot of Jimmy on the train featured him with a dead ringer for the old man on the train in A Hard Day’s Night (and the film later played up the connection with schoolgirls dressed like Pattie Boyd).
Still unsure he’d gotten his message across, he sent the album to journalists with a multipage explanation of the songs’ meanings, “specifically intended to be used for reviewer purposes as a guide to your appreciation of Quadrophenia.”
By that point Townshend was on the edge of quadrophenia himself from the pressure. He stayed up for two days putting together backing tracks of synthesizers and sound effects that would play along with the band onstage, then headed over for a tour rehearsal with the others, which was set to be captured by a film crew. Townshend arrived late, soused from brandies imbibed en route in the limo. Daltrey was mad at waiting around for the imperious Townshend. He had his own solo Top 5 hit that year with “Giving It All Away” (written by his discovery Leo Sayer); he didn’t need this shit. After some film crew snafus, he said he was going home.
Townshend thrust his finger into his chest. “You do as you’re fucking told.” The roadies rushed to hold Daltrey back as he yelled that Townshend had mixed his vocals too low on the record. Townshend sneered, “Let the little c—t go, I’ll fucking kill him.”10
“Pete was very drunk and has come at me with a guitar, then he’s tried to punch me so I ducked the punch and hit him. It was a very clean uppercut and it knocked him spark out. He still reckons that’s what caused his bald spot.” Daltrey had been a sheet metal worker in his youth. “I had a pair of shoulders on me and my hands were like rocks.”11
“I probably deserved to get knocked out,” Townshend conceded, “… but it was the only one—there was too much respect there for it to happen again.”12
The album, their sixth, debuted on October 26, and climbed to the second spot on both sides of the Atlantic, blocked by Bowie’s Pin Ups in the UK and Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road in the US. Still, it was their best album performance in America.
They introduced “5:15” on Top of the Pops, Daltrey in the bare-chested, curly gold mane mode he popularized with Robert Plant. He pumped his arms, stomped in place, threw his mic like a lasso, and spun around. Moon leered amid a ridiculous amount of tom-toms and a giant unused gong. Townshend did his split-leg leap, kicked in Moon’s drum set, and then smashed his guitar perfunctorily, pissed off at having to go through the motion of being pissed off, not even waiting till the prerecorded music was finished. Moon joined in, stabbing his tom-toms, while Townshend flipped off the show’s producer, which got them banned from the BBC. As opposed to the Stones’ perversion, this was untrammeled aggression, which was why all the nerdy young Hulk and Godzilla fans loved them.
On the first night of their US tour at San Francisco’s Cow Palace on November 20, someone slipped Moon some animal tranquilizer, a.k.a. PCP, a.k.a. angel dust. Just like Iggy Pop a few months earlier, Moon started slowing down, then collapsed behind his kit. “We’re just gonna revive our drummer by punching him in the stomach,” Townshend told the audience.13 Backstage Moon briefly rallied; he tried to return for “Magic Bus” but passed out again, the first time any of them had blown a gig. The woman Moon was with, who also took the stuff, was taken to the hospital.14 Townshend asked if anyone in the audience could play the drums. A nineteen-year-old from Iowa named Scot Halpin climbed onstage and sat in. Rolling Stone gave him the Pick-Up Player of the Year Award.
Even on a good night, the band had trouble playing in sync with the prerecorded synthesizer tapes, which frequently malfunctioned. In Newcastle when the tapes came in late on “5:15,” Townshend grabbed soundman Bob Pridden by the neck and yanked him over the soundboard, then smashed his guitar, tore the wires from the board, destroyed the tapes, and stalked offstage. The other three gaped, then followed in silence. (Pridden continued to work with the band for the next four decades.) A little while later they returned to play oldies.
Townshend was also angry because the audience kept yelling for him to leap and slam his guitar strings like a windmill. His right hand was already damaged from the tradition. It hurt when he was sober, and he was trying not to drink as much. Decades later he would say, “This wrist is only connected to the hand by cartilage.”15
Back in their hotel after a gig in Montreal, someone hit a ketchup bottle too hard and the condiment splattered on the wall. Townshend suggested framing it, so Moon punched a picture frame and took the picture out so they could use that. Townshend cut his hand with a steak knife to add some more red. Some accounts claimed he and Moon smashed a marble table through the wall between rooms. Townshend wrote in his memoir, “What had started as a joke ended with a sofa being thrown out of a window into the beautiful courtyard gardens. As it exploded through the tempered glass … we all stood quiet for a moment. Directly opposite us was the hotel reception area behind a glass wall. The hotel staff looked at us in shock; we stared back, equally horrified as we slowly came to our senses.”16 They were escorted to jail, even Daltrey, who had gone to bed early and wasn’t present for the carnage. Moon kept the cops waiting as he donned his smoking jacket and found his cigarette holder. At the station he told the officer behind the desk, “I believe I booked a suite.”17
Nik Cohn, who was originally tapped to write the script for the aborted Long Live Rock project, was hired by New York Magazine a few years later to write about the disco scene popular among Brooklyn Italians. Instead of researching, he drew on his experiences in the Mod scene and just recast it in the current setting. “Tony and [his gang] The Faces are actually Mods in everything—except the dances,” he later told Melody Maker.18 The article was adapted into the John Travolta vehicle Saturday Night Fever. After it became the fourth-highest-grossing film of the year, a movie adaptation for Quadrophenia received the green light.
The album’s photo book served as a storyboard. Phil Daniels scored the role of Jimmy, because he looked like a cross between Pete Townshend and the model in the photo book, and gave a critically acclaimed performance. Sting played Ace Face, the bellboy. The film gained added significance when Moon fatally overdosed during development. The movie did well in England, and The New York Times gave it a strong review, though it languished on the American midnight-movie circuit.
The film, along with revival band the Jam, helped the Mod movement endure as a small but surprisingly durable subculture. Over the ensuing decades, Mod revival clubs intermittently sprang up on both sides of the Atlantic, given a further boost by ’90s Britpop. The cast still reunites at comic cons and Quadrophenia conventions in Brighton.
“The reason why the album is so important to me is that I think it was The Who’s last great album, really,” Townshend told Billboard. “[The Who] never recorded anything that was so ambitious or audacious again. And it was kind of the last album where Keith Moon was in a fit state to be a working member of a band. He kind of went off into space after that, so it’s a poignant album for me.”19