Quadrophenia Real Me
Giorgina Makara
Quadrophenia is a film that, in its way, sums up the power, energy, and creativity of youth to seek out an idealised vision of life, and the fallout when youth discovers that said idealisation was a mirage, a wisp of a sound pulled cruelly away by the autumn breeze.
I first saw the film when I was 15 and was instantly hooked. It was the first time that I really understood the links between youth culture and pop culture, particularly in relation to music, and how invincible and inspired the connection between the two could make a young person in its throes truly feel.
But here is where my 15-year-old self would object. There is often talk of the empty gesture of the revival in popular music culture, the return of a subculture thought previously dead and buried that, when the revival of such is examined, is revealed to be only a thin echo of what made that culture special in the first place.
So I absolutely connected with the clothes in Quadrophenia, even if later research would lift the veil on their stylishness. I understood what it would be to wear something cool, a little under the radar, and feel like an absolute dude as you met your mates later at the pub or a party or a gig. I understood the symbolic power of a Fred Perry, of how a code of dress could also reveal a certain set of beliefs or attitude towards life. Quadrophenia opened that door for me.
For all the talk of music and style, there was one remaining factor that made Quadrophenia such an important film to me at 15: the character of Jimmy. I was having my own issues with flailing moods, trying to keep in one headspace long enough to make sense of the world and failing miserably. In Jimmy, I felt that I had found a kindred spirit.
And as for when he gets off the train back in Brighton and sees that his idealised, idolised Ace Face is actually working as a bellboy in a hotel, meek and servile, it crushes him. All of his ideas about the meaningfulness of life have been shattered. He has reached the point of no return, a point that I am thankful that I have never reached.
Chris Flackett is a writer for 25YL, Film Obsessive and TV Obsessive who loves Twin Peaks, David Lynch, Art House Cinema, great absurdist literature and listens to music like he's breathing oxygen. He lives in Manchester, England with his beautiful wife, three kids and the ghosts of Manchester music history all around him.
SET 2: I Am the Sea, The Real Me > Quadrophenia, Cut My Hair, The Punk Meets the Godfather, I'm One, The Dirty Jobs > Helpless Dancer, Is It In My Head?, I've Had Enough, 5:15, Sea and Sand, Drowned, Bell Boy, Doctor Jimmy > The Rock, Love, Reign O'er Me
\u201CNow we\u2019d like to play for you the better part of an album what we wrote, about something that was very dear to us when we were little. It\u2019s a story about a mod kid, and we call it Quadrophenia. It\u2019s all four of us, it\u2019s kind of an in-joke...it\u2019s not just a looking back, it\u2019s a kind of a bring it up to date. Quadrophenia\u2019s about where we\u2019re all at today.\u201D
Quadrophenia is The Who\u2019s collective autobiography. It explicitly references their early mod days as The High Numbers, it\u2019s thick with imagery from the mid-60s Britain where the band formed and Pete Townshend\u2019s memories of teenage angst. But it also attempts to create a complicated symbology through the main character Jimmy\u2019s split personality, a four-way representation of the band itself: brash Roger, sensitive Pete, sullen John, raucous Keith. It\u2019s the ultimate realization of Townshend treating The Who like an entity separate from himself, a rock n\u2019 roll avatar for expressing small feelings in arena-size, painfully loud statements.
\u201C[Jimmy] goes through a series of temptations. He realizes what the four facets of his character bring out in him. The good, the bad, the romantic and the insane come together. His triumph is strange, he feels ecstatic to find all his parts combined. He is also sad to be nostalgic again, looking back. Something makes him want to get back into life.\u201D
Last year, I wrote about how The White Album was the perfect choice for Phish to kick-off their new Halloween tradition, tying together several threads of where the band found themselves on the verge of a late 1994 musical breakthrough. They repeated the trick again in 1995 with The Who\u2019s second rock opera, another unexpected and ambitious pick that transcended the gimmick to offer both a snapshot of the band\u2019s current form and a mentor for their next stage. This time around, they studied at the knee of one of the most bombastic rock bands ever, receiving secondhand instruction in how to dominate the massive venues they now inhabit. But they also took the moral of the Quadrophenia storyline to heart: you can only go so far looking back, and you have to blow up the past to create the future.
For a year that\u2019s light on narration, the first set is thick with Phish lore. Cracking the book on Icculus for the first time in almost a year (and the last time for 4 years), Trey sets the night\u2019s expectations for weirdness and evil spirits. The set-closing Harpua \u2014 1995\u2019s only complete version, and the last until the Clifford Ball \u2014 includes a fantastic Mike dream recap that is deeply unsettling, searing his delivery of \u201CBABY RACOONS!?!?!\u201D into my mind for 25 years and counting. Neither go deep into Gamehendge, with Harpua\u2019s storytelling largely an excuse to squeeze in one last \u201CBeat It\u201D tease and tell their own story about a Jimmy, but the bookends are still a noteworthy return to the early mythology of Phish.
Phish fills the space between the story-songs with high-energy material, every tempo juiced by finally reaching the holiday at the tour\u2019s halfway point. Everyone listens to the LivePhish SBD these days, for good reason (the Rosemont Horizon/Allstate Arena has never been known for acoustics or taping), but it\u2019s worth sampling a couple first-set songs just to hear how incredibly AMPED the crowd was, even on a Tuesday night in strip-mall suburbia.
Phish feeds off that energy \u2014 there\u2019s no sparkling Reba this year, but fierce versions of Divided Sky and Antelope and the return of Guyute, now in its final form, feed the crowd\u2019s fire. And again, the emphasis is on yesteryear \u2014 the first four songs and the last two songs all debuted in the 80s, Mike references last year with \u201Cwatch it, Rocky!\u201D in his dream; it\u2019s the Ghost of Halloween Past.
Similarly, The Who prologued the Quadrophenia portion of their sets in 1973-74 with a flurry of oldies, typically opening with their first single (\u201CI Can\u2019t Explain\u201D) and running through both \u201CSummertime Blues\u201D and \u201CMy Generation.\u201D It\u2019s as though they were trying to put themselves back in the headspace of the young mods at the center of the rock opera they\u2019re about to play, prepping themselves for time travel.
Let\u2019s cut to the chase here: the Quadrophenia set is a mixed bag, the least of the 1.0 album covers, though admittedly that establishes a very high lower bound. It deserves a ton of credit just for being a huge swing: another double album, likely harder to play than The White Album even with 13 fewer songs to learn, and not a lazy choice from The Who catalog.
And Phish truly commits to the bit, recording their own versions of the album\u2019s interstitial sound effects (including a cover of \u201CThe Kids Are Alright\u201D I\u2019d love to hear someday, if it exists in full) and the \u201CI Am The Sea\u201D soundbites, or recreating the Sousa march after \u201CThe Dirty Jobs\u201D and the \u201CDrowned\u201D fade-out onstage. In its production values, including a full horn section, a guest \u201Cvocalist,\u201D and (if you count the encore) props and pyro, it foreshadows the Broadway Phish productions of holiday shows in 3.0.
But Quadrophenia, an album that I love, is maybe not the best 90 minutes of music to perform on stage unabridged. It\u2019s heavy \u2014 sonically and thematically, basically a prolonged contemplation of suicide. It\u2019s a dense studio creation, coming from the deepest period of Townshend\u2019s primitive synthesizer obsessions. Its story might be more direct than Tommy, but it\u2019s still a bit of a head-scratcher unless you\u2019re reading along with the liner notes, particularly for American listeners in the mid-90s.
Even The Who thought their double-album was a bit much to force their audience to sit through \u2014 the 73/74 tour omitted both the title track and its reprise \u201CThe Rock,\u201D skipped most of Side B by jumping straight from \u201CI\u2019m One\u201D to \u201C5:15,\u201D and added some explanatory narration (e.g. \u201CHere's a song about a journey down to the sea...and to get there, he gets on...THE FIVE FIFTEEN!!\\\") between songs. The Who infamously struggled with playing the album live, with the band vetoing Townshend\u2019s plan to add a touring keyboardist and instead choosing to play awkwardly to backing tapes and click tracks.
That\u2019s not a problem for Phish, they\u2019ve got a keyboard player right over there! And it\u2019s Page who shines brightest on this year\u2019s costume (\u201CQuadrophenia was as much a part of Page\u2019s DNA as TheWhite Album was of mine,\u201D Trey says in The Phish Book), adding the piano layers the originators lacked live and taking the lion\u2019s share of the lead vocals as well. Page doing Daltrey isn\u2019t an obvious choice, but it works great; he\u2019s got the range to hit those notes, but gives the material a youthful sensitivity that the macho Daltrey lacks in the original, hewing closer to Townshend\u2019s voice on the Quadrophenia demos released in 2011. It\u2019s Trey who takes most of the Pete parts, while Mike and Fish each get their crack at a Daltrey epic. But for one night, it\u2019s Page McConnell & Band, and it rules.
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