The Who nearly crumbled under the weight of the dynamic examination of their conflicted relationship with each other and their past that rendered this mad and majestic rock opera. They had taken some time off after touring for 'Who's Next'; but when the band began sessions for a new album things dissolved with creative tensions and overindulgence in drugs and alcohol. During this time, the band also decided to find new management from Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp (who had taken money from their royalties to fund their own drug habit), eventually settling on Bill Curbishley.
'Quadrophenia' was produced by the Who with Lambert, Stamp, and Glyn Johns at Olympic Studios in London and at Ramport Studios in Battersea, London with Ronnie Lane's Mobile Studio. The sessions included Roger Daltrey on lead vocals and percussion; Pete Townshend on 6 and 12-string acoustic and electric lead and rhythm guitars, backing vocals, synthesisers, piano, violin, banjo, percussion, sound effects, pre-production, special effects, co-lead vocals on "Cut My Hair", "The Punk and the Godfather", "I've Had Enough", "5:15", and "Sea and Sand", lead vocals on "I'm One"; John Entwistle on bass guitar, horns, backing vocals, and partial vocals on "Is It in My Head?"; and Keith Moon on drums, percussion, and co-lead vocals on "Bell Boy"; with Jon Curle as newsreader voice; Chris Stainton on piano on "The Dirty Jobs", "5:15", and "Drowned"; Rod Houison on special effects; and Ron Nevison on engineering and special effects. Townshend also made field recordings with a portable reel-to-reel recorder that were included on the album.
'Quadrophenia' focuses on Jimmy, a teenager growing up in Brighton during the clashes between Mods and Rockers in the 60's. His 'double schizophrenia' was also a reflection of the four different personalities in the Who. Townshend would reveal: "I identify very strongly with Jimmy in several ways, but...he's a workshop figure. An invention. And while he may seem a lot more real than Tommy, he isn't. Tommy was set in fantasy, but there was something very real about its structure. Jimmy, on the surface, looks like a simple kid with straightforward hang-ups, but he's far more surrealistic. I don't fully identify with Jimmy's early experiences. . . his romanticism, his neurosis, his craziness. I never went through a tormented childhood. When I was a kid, it was just me and the guitar and the belief that if I ever learned the secret of rock'n'roll I would own the world. I feel closest to Jimmy when he's reached the stage, late in the album, of being stuck on the Rock. He's surrendered himself to the inevitable, whatever that is, and has put all his problems behind him. Jimmy's not become any kind of saint or sage, he hasn't even found anything, much less himself. Basically, he isn't gonna be any different. He's just reached the point in his life where he's seriously contemplated suicide -- as we all have -- and the fact that he chose not to kill himself has left him with a fantastic emptiness. A need to be filled. A lot of kids today try to fill that void by waving the rock 'n' roll flag, but they just don't understand it or feel it or live it. In a way, they should be totally immersed in rock 'n' roll the way I do which is practically in a religious sense ... The four-personality concept grew out of a naive understanding of schizophrenia -- a misunderstanding of schizophrenia. Jimmy is a kid who suffers from schizophrenia, and when he takes pills, his schizophrenia divides up and he suffers from quadrophrenia. It was a silly gag but it was something I felt. I tend towards manic depresssion -- I don't think I am a classic manic-depressive, but I tend towards it; I have, or have had, high highs and low lows in my life. In the times when I abused drugs, when I was very young -- and particularly when I used to use the amphetamines of the mods -- I used to feel that my manic depression became very complicated. That aspect is still there, it's just we don't hang it so obviously on the characters in the band ... Trying to project into the future, what I think will hurt me about 'Quadrophenia' when I'm old is its deliberate self-consciousnes. But I felt it was time for the Who to be self-conscious. It's incredible how well it works on record and how badly it works on stage. I found it so embarrassing to have to explain the album in between numbers. It's a bloody admission of growing old, to stand up an talk about "When I was nineteen..." Nineteen isn't too fucking young and that was years ago. When I walk onstage I feel time less. I feel abundantly athletic, free, and liberated and unfettered and complete unselfconscious. I don't feel like I'm Pete Townshend, I feel like one of the Who -- a group with tremendous collective impact on that audience. I get lost in the rush and then all of a sudden, there you are trying to explain yourself. Well, it won't happen again because another conscious aspect of 'Quadrophenia' is that it's a rejection of that sort work ever again. Or at least the adolescent obsession, the teenage frustration thing. I've got some lyrical growing up to do ... What happened with 'Quadrophenia' is it's a very elegant piece of work that to an extent is confused by its grandiosity. But it's a very very simple story. A young man has a bad day, basically, and that's really all there is. It's a series of events...He just realizes that all he has in his life is himself and some spiritual future ... The music is as good as it gets from me – as a collection it covers a lot of my broadest skills as a song-writer. And it was a very important time for The Who and for me personally. The band were really hot in the studio, all of us, and it was an excellent joint production. Ron Nevison’s role must not be underestimated: it was his first major engineering project and he was faultless. (That’s why we worked together again straight away on the 'Tommy' movie soundtrack album. I’m surprised we didn’t go on to do more together to be honest.) The story endures because it is turnkey: it allows the listener to easily enter the action and believe they might be the central character, the hero...I believe this empty glass system to be at the heart of the best modern music: a place – or even an actual performer – the listener can occupy, supported by a movement of music and themes, and of course a setting of appropriate fashion and ideology, that he or she can fully identify with and make their own."
'Quadrophenia' went to number thirty-five in Australia, seventeen in the Netherlands, eight in Austria and Norway, seven in Germany, and number two in Canada, the UK, and the US (the highest chart performance for any of their albums). Daltry says: “['Quadrophenia' ] is easy to understand. It’s that period of your life when you’re going through adolescence and you’re trying to find out who you are. Hopefully you get to that point quite soon after your teens. Obviously some people would get into their 30s before they get there. Maybe even their 70s. That kind of story doesn’t change. The songs are so superb, but they come from a very deep space within the psyche.”
Townshend considers: “I think if you’re one of those people that gets left out of the loop somehow, if you can’t do twitter, God you must feel pretty lonely. This is about a young man who doesn’t fit in, that’s all. Everybody are now starting to communicate through texting, through emails, through Facebook, through all kinds of social media. And one of the difficulties with that is if it’s not a place where you can be absolutely authentic to yourself, you will have great difficulty when you try to, in a sense, mature, grow...And that’s what 'Quadrophenia' is about. It’s this young man who realizes that he hasn’t quite managed to solve the problems of growing up and what he has to do is he has to sit and offer up to the universe and that’s all he can do. And I can well imagine that there are young people all over the planet at the moment coming to that point in their life, where they put their computer aside and they just try to sit with themselves and find out what does it feel like to sit in the rain and pray? I don’t know. I can imagine it’s happening everywhere.”
"Love, Reign o'er Me"
"5:15"
'Quadrophenia'
full album:
1. "I Am the Sea" 2:08
2. "The Real Me" 3:20
3. "Quadrophenia" 6:13
4. "Cut My Hair" 3:44
5. "The Punk and the Godfather" 5:10
6. "I'm One" 2:37
7. "The Dirty Jobs" 4:28
8. "Helpless Dancer" (Roger's theme) 2:33
9. "Is It in My Head?" 3:43
10. "I've Had Enough" 6:14
11. "5:15" 5:00
12. "Sea and Sand" 5:01
13. "Drowned" 5:26
14. "Bell Boy" (Keith's theme) 4:55
15. "Doctor Jimmy (containing "Is It Me?")" (John's theme) 8:36
16. "The Rock" 6:37
17. "Love, Reign o'er Me" (Pete's theme) 5:48
Six years later 'Quadrophenia' was made into a motion picture directed by Franc Roddam.
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