Quadrophenia: Can You See the Real Me?

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1

The Who started as a band with four

very different individuals

with very, very different needs.

Got a few hits,

managed to pull off Tommy,

managed to pull off some

kind of amazing live stage energy.

'A special TUC conference in London

has voted...'

'New challenges and burdens

created by the oil crisis...'

'As the gas situation gets worse...'

'The miners need some inducement to

come to talks...'

'I think the three-day week should

be called off at once.'

'Ten years on from The Who's

first successes comes the release

'this weekend of a new double album

that could be a step on,

'even from Tommy, Quadrophenia.'

When we got to Quadrophenia,

talking 1973,

something strange was happening to

the internal politics of the band.

It was quite clear that Keith Moon

was certifiably insane

and that if he hadn't had a drum kit

to play with, he probably would have

ended up in jail.

John Entwistle simply wasn't happy

because he was a songwriter,

and it seemed as though for him,

the band had come all about me

and my ideas.

Roger wanted something which meant

he could swing his hair

and looked glamorous

and take his chest off

and be a superstar.

I had difficulties as well.

Lifehouse, which followed Tommy,

failed.

The accusation was, "You failed

with your big idea

"because you're an arty-farty

pretentious twat."

It felt, to me,

as though we were drifting apart.

So my first mission,

my first part of the brief that

I gave myself was replace Tommy as

a performing vehicle, that was it.

So my story was, I'd bought this

riverside property out...

It's actually in a place

called Cleeve on the River Thames.

One day I got this call

about Eric who was wallowing

down in his house in the country,

and would I go down and see Eric?

Eric had done an album

and ended up as a heroin user.

I remember going down and seeing

him. He was very courteous, very

kind, very dignified, very loving,

very friendly

as he always was to me.

But I was affected by it.

I start to think about how we can...

Not rescue Eric,

but just to kind of stimulate him.

I turned to a couple of my mates,

Ronnie Wood, Stevie Winwood

I was nodding off and Rick the bass

player said, "Try this." I said,

"What is it?"

He said it is

a kind of a popper thing,

he said, it wakes you up,

and it was amyl nitrate.

And I took it and I went, "Oh,

that's fun, a bit of a buzz,"

and then played. I did not get stuck

on it but I used it quite a bit.

Once the concert with Eric

in January 1973 was over, I suppose

I must have had some sort of come

down from the lack of amyl nitrate.

On a dark, wet winter

weekend at the cottage at Cleeve,

with the river running

faster than usual,

I had a flashback to

when I was 19 years old.

The Who had just played this

amazing gig at the Aquarium Ballroom

in Brighton and I was

with my art school friend Des Reed.

After the gig

we missed the train home.

So we hung out

and we went down under the pier

and there were all these boys

in parkas

with the f***ing tide

coming up around their feet.

They didn't seem to understand

that they were going to drown!

Under the pier, I was coming

down from taking purple hearts,

the fashionable uppers

of the period.

Sitting there at Cleeve,

that day nine years later,

that same feeling came flooding back

of feeling depressed,

lost and hopeless

and I grabbed a notebook.

Quickly when I was still in this

sad and lonely mood,

I scribbled out the story that is

on the inside sleeve of the original

album of Quadrophenia.

This was the story of a mod

called Jimmy.

Jimmy was a normal boy, with normal

needs, passing through the normal

things of childhood, but what made

everything so much more complicated

for him was he had a bipolar

problem, he was schizophrenic.

I think that Jimmy is meant to be,

instead of schizophrenic,

he is meant to be quadrophrenic,

and that is the original concept,

to have Jimmy have these four

personalities.

So Quadrophenia was a double-album,

in the old days of vinyl that meant

you had two 12 inch vinyl discs.

And it's that difficult,

dodgy '70s thing, the concept album.

A sensitive story of a mod

on a journey of self-discovery,

but played by The Who - tough,

muscular, physical, a man's band.

What I know is that I'm going to

be on a stage

with a bunch of yobbos

with an electric guitar.

I'm going to have to turn it up, I'm

going to have to jump up and down,

I'm going to have to tell them

to f*** off and shut up.

This is Pete, the writer, trying to

serve Keith and John and Roger,

giving them really

stimulating, useful

f***ing stuff that they can express

their stage personalities through.

The Who's sound has got those

warring elements in it.

On the one hand they are

a street fighting band,

doing all that physical,

visceral side on the one hand,

on the other hand that spiritual,

whimsical,

melancholic lyrical side and banging

them together, often in one song.

This bit of paper is kind of,

on the top line you've got me,

Roger, John, Keith.

The next line is good, bad, romance.

They are joined together with

the word sex, insanity.

The idea that each of these themes

would produce songs.

In actual fact, this is just

a musical blueprint for what

I wanted to do.

Pete, you know,

is working very hard.

I don't know quite what on but...

You know, I think it'll be good.

The trouble is with Pete,

working with him,

he had these wonderful little

kernels of ideas

but then he would want to pitch them

and make them into stories.

But we got the essence of it.

This guy's got all the personalities

of every member in the band

and it's just one guy.

And that was enough for me to say,

"Great idea, let's go for it."

This is how the album starts, OK.

No other Who album starts with

ambient noise.

And it very specifically

is putting you in a place,

it sets a scene, which

none of the other Who albums did.

Once we had the sea noise going,

we just introduced each

theme of the four themes.

The first thing you hear

is I Am The Sea,

the breathy sound of,

"I am the sea."

And do-dee-do-do-do, which is

the Helpless Dancer.

Then you hear, is it me for a

moment, which is the romantic side

and so on.

Instead of having

a straight overture,

you get pieces of the songs

and it comes back as memories.

You're automatically put

on that rock.

And you hear the themes and then

bang into the first track which is,

Can You See The Real Me?

He's at the doctor,

he's going to the shrink,

he's going to the priest,

he's going to his mother for advice,

and I wanted to establish

very, very quickly

that this is not just a troubled

boy, this is a boy that has

mental illness.

He's bipolar

or he's manic-depressive.

And this idea of him being,

you know, doubly schizophrenic.

I went back to my mother

I said, I'm crazy, ma, help me

She said, I know how it feels, son

Cos it runs in the family

Can you see the real me, mother,

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