The Beat Patrol

Charles Shaar Murray article from Creem magazine, January 1974. The Who had just recently come out with their double album conceptual work, Quadrophenia. The Who, and especially Keith Moon, would never reach this level of creativity again…  

 

Townshend’s Quadrophenia is a rather daunting proposition. Another Who double-album rock opera? About a kid called Jimmy? With a massive booklet of grainy monochrome tableaux stapled into the sleeve? With titles like ‘The Real Me’, ‘I Am the Sea’, ‘Love Reign O’er Me’ and ‘I’m One’?

The mind boggles, and you get the sneaking feeling that Pete Townshend has tried to out-Tommy Tommy and gone sailing right over the top.

The impression even persists when you start playing side one. The first thing you hear is a “Desert Island Discs” surf-crashing-on-the-shore sound effect in sumptuous stereo while distant echoed voices intone the four principal themes from the piece.

Then it suddenly cuts into ‘The Real Me’, and you hear that sound, as uncompromisingly violent as a boot disintegrating a plate glass window at 4 a.m., and simultaneously as smooth as a nightflight by 747.

Prime-cut Who, and suddenly you realize that Pete hasn’t blown it after all. Face it, he very rarely does.

Quadrophenia is both less and more ambitious than its notorious predecessor.

Tommy tripped over its mysticism rather too often for comfort, and after being the indirect godfather to everything from Jesus Christ Superstar to Ziggy Stardust, it didn’t seem likely that Townshend himself would return to the scene of his former semi-triumph.

However, he has avoided most of the expected pitfalls with his customary agility.

The hero of this little extravaganza is Jimmy, the archetype mod. Frustrated, inarticulate, violent, thoroughly confused and prone to all the ills that teenage flesh is heir to.

Each member of the Who represents a different side of his character, and a recurring musical theme. Keith Moon represents the “bloody lunatic,” John Entwistle is “the romantic,” Roger Daltrey appears as the “tough guy,” while Townshend casts himself as “a beggar, a hypocrite.”

His odyssey leads him away from the constriction of his parents’ home to a dead-end job as a dustman, and by way of various other adventures to Brighton via a pill-crazed ride on the (you guessed) 5:15 train.

Finally, he ends up dexed-up and pissed out of his brain on a rock off Brighton Beach where he achieves some kind of satori and reconciliation with himself.

On the face of it, there’s nothing very heavy going on there, especially when synopsised as ruthlessly as I’ve had to do.

Whereas Tommy took a headlong dive into esoteric symbolism, Quadrophenia is superficially mundane, as far as subject matter is concerned – but the implications of this autobiography of a generation go far deeper than those of the previous work.

To say that Quadrophenia is an affirmation of the strength of the human spirit is an invitation to accusations of pretension and screaming simpism, but I’m afraid that that’s the way it breaks down.

Beating a hasty retreat from the Philosophical Implications, Cosmic Messages and Assorted Heaviness Department, we can start looking at Quadrophenia simply as the latest album by The Who. It would be an interesting critical exercise to demolish it, and I’ve no doubt that there’s more than one typewriter jockey who’ll try.

In some ways, it’s extremely vulnerable to adverse criticism. Some of the more extravagant production touches, for example, even after a half-dozen listens, sound about as comfortable as marzipan icing on a half-ounce cheeseburger.

Also, the band have dubbed on so much synthesizer, keyboard and brass parts that, at times, one aches just to hear some unalloyed guitar-bass-drums-and-vocals Who.

In any case, does rock and roll need masterpieces, magnum opuses (apologies to my school Latin teachers; I know you tried hard) or works of genius? Isn’t intensive listening to two years in the making double albums antithetical to the spirit of true rock and roll?

Personally, I couldn’t care less. If you’re not prepared to listen to Quadrophenia in the spirit that it was made, then simply don’t bother. If you’re going to sling it on at a party or walk in and out of the room when it’s playing, then you’re not going to get a damn thing out of it and you might as well save your money for other purposes.

Basically, the early Who classics were straightforward expositions of an attitude, while Quadrophenia is an investigation of what went into constructing that attitude, and of its results.

It could be described as an obituary for the Mods by the band who did most to define that attitude.

I mean, we’ve all heard about how the Who were more a band who played to and sang about Mods than they were actually Mods themselves, but for those of us who were out in the provinces during the Mod era, Mod was the Who. And it is only fitting that the Who should be the ones to conduct this lengthy exorcism of the Ghost Of Mod.

After all, the spectre of those days has hung over the Who for the best part of a decade, and now Pete Townshend has summed up every stage of the Who’s chequered past on one work.

Quadrophenia wipes the slate clean, leaving the Who free, hopefully, to follow it up with their freshest collection of new material since their very first album.

 

Pete Townshend opens up the door, immediately preceded by a large and presumably amiable dog named Towser (the facts, Ma’am, we just want the facts). Townshend is clad in bovver boots, extravagantly patched jeans and an Indian cotton shirt. He whips up a couple of coffees in large brown mugs and settles down on a sofa to get quadrophenic.

Now, talking to Pete Townshend is always a treat. He’s intelligent, aware and articulate, qualities that aren’t as prevalent among rock musicians as one might wish. Furthermore, he’s capable of discussing the more esoteric aspects of his work with a remarkable detachment that’s totally removed from the self indulgent egocentric ramblings of many other acts.

First off, if the word “quadrophenia” is an expansion of “schizophrenia” as is indicated on the sleeve, why the missing “r”?

“It’s a sort of jokey expansion of it, but it’s a bit of a mouthful with the ‘r’. It’s something of a pun on ‘quadraphonic’ as well. The whole album has been put together as a quadraphonic composition. I suppose stereo is a bit of a compromise.

“We’re fairly happy with the quadraphonic mixes we’ve done, but you know the problem with the transcription down to disc. It’s all very well on tape, but when you try and get it down onto a record everything goes completely berserk.

“We were talking about a January 1st release date for the quadraphonic version, but at the moment it’s a bit of a myth. I heard the Doobie Brothers’ quad album of The Captain and Me and it just doesn’t come anywhere near the stereo version.”

Okay, on to the album itself. Is it in any real sense an epitaph to Mod?
“It’s probably a lot more than that. That’s right in a way, but then songs like ‘My Generation’ were that kind of epitaph in a more realistic sense. This album is more of a winding up of all our individual axes to grind, and of the group’s ten year old image and also of the complete absurdity of a group like The Who pretending that they have their finger on the pulse of any generation.

“The reason that the album has come out emotionally as it has is that I felt that The Who ought to make, if you like, a last album.

“Also, in a way, I wanted to embrace the Who’s early audiences – but also to give a feeling of what has happened to rock and to the generation that’s come up with us. It’s very peculiar that this album has come out at the same time as something like Pin-Ups because, although that’s a more direct thing, the ideas are fairly similar.

“What I’ve really tried to do with the story is to try and illustrate that, as a study of childhood frustrations, the reason that rock is still around is that it’s not youth’s music, it’s the music of the frustrated and the dissatisfied looking for some sort of musical panacea.

“Then we have difficulty relating to the business. We’re not pure innovators, and we never really have been. We’ve always been people who have latched onto things which were good and reflected them, and I don’t feel anything at the moment.

“I mean, if someone like Bowie, who’s only been a big star for eighteen months or two years, feels the need to start talking about his past influences, then obviously the roots are getting lost. The meat and potatoes, the reasons why people first pick up guitars, are getting forgotten.”

Harking back to what Townshend had said earlier about rock responsibility, there’s a considerable case for the view that when rock starts thinking about what it’s doing instead of simply reacting, then it’s losing something of its essence.

“The most hilarious thing about arguments like that is the fact that people put forward the arguments in the first place.

“It shows that they’re viewing the whole thing intellectually, that they’re arguing intellectually and that what they’re actually doing is putting forward an intellectual argument to denounce their particular rock star for becoming an intellectual – which is what they are. And they’re blaming him for the fact that they’ve grown old.

“In actual fact, most of the American rock journalists that use these arguments are suffering from maturity, and it’s unpleasant for them because they’re in the rock business. A pop star somehow seems able to get away with it, I don’t know why. Jagger and people like that are still able to get up on the stage and prance about like idiots.

“It’s very difficult to write like an enthused child, which is really how rock should be written about all the time; It’s very difficult to do that if you don’t feel like an enthused child all the time, or if you’re not a showman and can’t switch it on and off like a light bulb.”

A lot of people in my profession, I pointed out, prefer their stars to be noble savages.

“A lot of them are like that. I’ve never been like that, there’s always been something missing. At times when I was heavily doped I never got any chicks. At times when I was playing good I never got any chicks – or any dope. You really can’t have all three at once unless you’re a physical dynamo.

“In the case of Iggy, I think the music suffers. Look at a band like Sweet, for example. They’re probably a very straight bunch, dope-wise and wife-wise and god knows what, but I think their music does contain a lot of the tight, integrated, directed, pointed frustration of a fifteen or sixteen year old, although it doesn’t quite get there and they’re a bit out of place time-wise. They should have been around ten years ago.

“But someone like Iggy and the Stooges couldn’t grasp that if they stood on their heads, because inside they’re old men. I think that applies to many people. I think in a way that is why the freshest music that you can find at the moment is very, very middle of the road stuff.

“I think that there’s a strong argument about whether a journalist’s idea of what a pop-star should be really means anything. I think that our album clarifies who the real hero is in this thing.

“It’s this kid on the front. He’s the hero. That’s why he’s on the front cover. That’s why he’s sung about. It’s his fuckin’ album. Rock and roll’s his music.

“It’s got nothing to do with journalists, and it hasn’t really even got anything to do with musicians.”

Charles Shaar Murray