All the Madmen

by Clinton Heylin

  By September he already had a whole double album sketched out in his head; telling Rolling Stone he had these ‘fourteen or fifteen songs’ written and, by mid-November, mostly demoed. The starting point was not, as one might expect, ‘Love, Reign O’er Me’ – though, as ‘Pete’s Theme’, it would serve as the climactic point of the eventual album – but rather ‘Is It In My Head?’, a song about a man who wonders if feelings of existential fear and self-loathing – articulated by couplets like, ‘I try to number those who love me / And find out exactly what the trouble is’ – are real.

  Quadrophenia would be narrated from ‘in[side] my head’ by Jimmy the Mod who, as the story unfolds, begins to separate into four distinct personalities as his estrangement from the world grows (or, as he says in the album liner-notes, ‘Schizophrenic? I’m bleeding Quadrophenic’). The original premise, as Townshend later recalled, was a simple one: ‘A day or two in the life of a mod boy who comes apart and . . . realizes he needs to start again.’ Interestingly, his initial point of reference, as he told Penny Valentine in early August 1972, came from one of Ray Davies’ earlier works. Calling the piece a ‘song cycle’, not a rock opera, he suggested it would be ‘much more like The Kinks’ Arthur than Tommy.’ How far advanced his ideas were became clear as the interview progressed, and he laid out for Valentine (and her Sounds readers) much of the architecture for The Who’s latest artefact, fifteen months before its appearance:

  Pete Townshend: At the moment I’m pretty excited about [the idea]. It’ll be a decade of The Who in January . . . [and I wondered,] What’s happened to the individual members of the group, how they’ve changed? So I thought a nice way of doing it was to have a hero who, instead of being schizophrenic, has got a split personality four ways and each side of this is represented by a particular theme and a particular song. I’m the good part of the character needless to say – the choir boy who doesn’t make good, the [boy] scout who gets assaulted by the scout master. Then there’s the bad part, which is Roger, breaking the windows in coloured people’s houses, turning over Ford Populars and things of that nature. Then there’s the romantic part which is John Entwistle falling in love with the girl next door, everything going really well until her mother catches them one day in a compromising situation and flings him out and he goes off frustrated, despairing. Then there’s Keith – totally irresponsible, insane. Playing jokes on his girlfriends, telling terrible lies, blowing up the place where he works. [1972]

  Few of these particulars would survive the recording process, though the multiple-personality premise held firm. The queer scoutmaster, the smashing of ‘windows in the houses of black people’ and falling deeply in love while all his mates ‘want tit and little else’, all ideas dating from a July 1972 sketch, would also fall by the wayside. As would seven songs demoed in the early stages after Townshend decided ‘Jimmy is better left without a childhood, without any immature dreams and fantasies. It’s better we meet him already full of anger.’ Of this ‘clutch of songs’ – ‘Get Out and Stay Out’, ‘Four Faces’, ‘We Close Tonight’, ‘You Came Back’, ‘Get Inside’, ‘Joker James’ and ‘Ambition’ – just three would be worked on at the sessions themselves.

  Of these, ‘We Close Tonight’ was intended to show ‘Jimmy as a budding, but failed musician.’ ‘Joker James’, which in notes to his 2011 ‘Director’s Cut’ version Townshend thinks may well ‘contain the genesis of Quadrophenia’, he talked about back in 1972 as a song that provides ‘the basis for the image of the kid – the way he saw himself – as this kind of reasonable joker whose life doesn’t come off but . . . on the outside he didn’t appear that way at all, and he was very far from being a joker.’

  But the most unfortunate loss was a track originally called ‘Quadrophenia’, which was only definitively dropped from the project at the end of July 1973, eventually being released on the 1979 film soundtrack, as ‘Four Faces’. The song was, as Townshend now says, ‘almost a pre-psychiatrist view: Jimmy is explaining one of his problems; he is mixed up and confused, and torn in four directions.’ (In Jimmy’s liner-notes he explains how he is then sent to a decidedly Laingian ‘psychiatrist every week [who] never really knew what was wrong with me. He said I wasn’t mad or anything . . . [that] there’s no such thing as madness.’) Here then was the album’s original theme in its most distilled form:

  ‘I got four heads inside my mind

  Four rooms I’d like to lie in

  Four selves I want to find

  And I don’t know which one is me . . .

  There are four records I want to buy

  Four highs I’d like to try

  Every letter I get I send four replies

  And I don’t know which one’s from me.’

  Unlike with Tommy, Townshend was virtually writing Quadrophenia from scratch. The only songs predating the spring of ’72 were ‘Drowned’, a 1970 Meher Baba paean, and the 1968 lyrics to ‘Joker James’. As he told Valentine, “I’ve written a lot of stuff about this period, [but] it all comes out sounding like old Who material – quite unconsciously. And it gave me the idea to consciously do that. To start off with early Who sound and come through – more and more synthesizer, more and more snazzy recording until you get to the point where he finds himself coming together, fitting together like a jigsaw. Going from that period of sorta fucked up amazing spiritual and social desperation, despair with politics and everything – to come together as one piece of music.’

  He was already minded to make ‘Love, Reign O’er Me’ the ‘one piece of music’ that would resolve the story. However, there was a problem. The storyline in his head did not naturally lead towards such a resolution. Rather, as Townshend duly acknowledged, the point at which Jimmy ‘gets very desperate and tries to look around for an answer in the shape of religion, job, woman, family . . . I realized . . . was just like the end of Tommy’ . At the same time, ‘Love, Reign O’er Me’ had been offered to Lou Reisner as a possible addition to the London Symphony Orchestra production of Tommy, recorded in October 1972 (it went unused). For all its sense of epiphany it would remain the piece tacked on to Jimmy’s story to turn his mental collapse into an affirmation, not a final disintegration. Rock journalist Gary Herman, who talked to Townshend early in the writing process, was the first to note how the song ‘bears a minimal relationship to the story of Jimmy, but is absolutely vital to Townshend’s conception of the religious experience . . . It’s the ultimate joining together, the final programme: Pete’s theme, but not Jimmy’s. You see, there really isn’t any Jimmy.’

  Herman, the band’s first biographer, fully knew that Townshend was transplanting an awful lot of his inner self into his quadrophenic creation, just as he had invested a lot of himself in the songs he penned during the mods’ mid-Sixties heyday. Even Townshend’s choice of pop historian Nik Cohn to write the script for the now-abandoned Rock is Dead: Long Live Rock – ‘about how rock had developed, but then how it had been co-opted by various factions not entirely artistic’ – undoubtedly reflected Cohn’s lauding of the mod lifestyle in his seminal Awopbopaloobop (1969). In fact, the guitarist had been idealizing that period since before the birth of Tommy, when he had made his first concerted attempt to explain its cultural impact to an American audience (in this instance, via Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner):

  Pete Townshend: One of the things which has impressed me most in life was the mod movement in England, which was an incredible youthful thing. It was a movement of young people, much bigger than the hippie thing, the underground and all these things . . . We used to make sure that if there was a riot, a mod-rocker riot, we would be playing in the area. [There] was a place called Brighton. That’s where they used to assemble. We’d always be playing there. And we got associated with the whole thing and we got into the spirit of the whole thing . . . You see, as individuals these people were nothing. They were the lowest, they were England’s lowest common denominators. Not only were they young, they were also lower-class young. They had to submit
to the middle class’s way of dressing and way of speaking and way of acting in order to get the very jobs which kept them alive. They had to do everything in terms of what existed already. [1968]

  So as far back as September 1968 Townshend had already described the hero of Quadrophenia, even down to the ‘dirty jobs’ he took to keep himself alive and in zoot suits. Five years later, he was explaining Jimmy to Rolling Stone again, but now ‘he’s a failed mod, because he’s made the ultimate mod mistake: bad timing. This is 1965 and the mod scene is already falling apart – and what does he do but go to Brighton, just to remember . . . Already he’s living on his past. And he meets an old ace-face who’s now a bellhop at the very hotel the mods tore up. And he looks on Jimmy with a mixture of pity and contempt, really, and tells him, in effect, “Look, my job is shit and my life is a tragedy. But you – look at you, you’re dead.”’

  If Townshend didn’t realize the scale of his ambition at the time – for Pete’s sake, he was writing about the death of the Sixties – he had certainly come to terms with it by 2009, when he was involved with staging the first theatrical presentation of the album as a musical play (appropriately performed in Brighton), and looking back with wiser eyes:

  Pete Townshend: In a sense my mission [was] to bring back some of the greyness, the bleakness of those years, and demonstrate . . . that what happened simply had to happen, otherwise we would all have gone nuts. It wasn’t a game, it wasn’t an optional outing of boys playing on scooters, it was a vital rebellion. You have to understand that after the Ban the Bomb movement and the failure of Anti-Apartheid, and then the Cuban Crisis, young people felt their input was pointless. Fashion, music and daily life was elevated to a form of aloof poetry, and was very much a secret society . . . Quadrophenia isn’t even about battles in the street, it’s a musical journey inside a young man’s man during a drug-fuelled psychotic episode. This is a day or two in the life of a young man who really can’t do what his peers are doing, and survive. [2009]

  In his own way, Townshend was unwittingly anticipating the punk revolution, itself a reaction to the death of the 1960s beat scene and its spirit of political dissent. It was a connection he would in time willingly embrace, writing in 1977 of how there was ‘mixed up in Quadrophenia . . . a study of the divine desperation that is at the root of every punk’s scream for blood and vengeance’.

  What soon fell away from the 1973 song cycle, though, was any sense that by breaking their ties with their mod past, the band would succeed in moving forward. Richard Barnes, invited to Townshend’s house to hear the idea fresh, remembers the guitarist telling him that he felt The Who ‘were too involved in their own legend and their mod connections, and he wanted to cut this connection so they could search for new directions’. But by the time the album was completed, Townshend was ridiculing the very notion that a rock band could instigate change, inwardly or outwardly, informing NME: ‘This album is more of a winding up of all our individual axes to grind, and of the group’s ten-year-old image, [but] also of the complete absurdity of a group like The Who pretending that they have their finger on the pulse of any generation.’

  The thumbnail sketches Townshend gave Valentine of the other band-members’ psychological quirks, intended to form the building blocks for Jimmy’s quadrophenic breakdown, became the one aspect toned down on the finished work. (In 2009 he still felt a need to clarify that original creative goal: ‘It was not my intention that the personalities of each band-member were meant to be part of Jimmy. Each band-member was supposed to perform an aspect of each of Jimmy’s four personality extremes . . . a crucial difference.’)

  Each band member also got their own theme-song although Entwistle’s theme, ‘Is It Me?, which was a song in its own right when Townshend demoed the material, was never recorded by The Who, but was instead placed inside the song written to capture Jimmy’s inevitable breakdown. Refining the original song-idea ‘where the kid is really fucked up with drugs and chicks and his family’, the resultant ‘Doctor Jimmy’ even subtly alludes to two earlier Entwistle compositions (‘Whisky Man’ and ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’), as he directly addresses his disintegrating self: ‘Dr Jimmy and Mr Jim / When I’m pilled, you don’t notice him / He only comes out when I drink my gin.’

  Describing the song’s composition in The Decade of The Who songbook, Townshend explained how ‘all of the songs from Quadrophenia are meant to fit together, or at least all reflect the personality of one person – as a result they are all structured similarly. But “Dr Jimmy” is the archetype, more so, in fact, than “Quadrophenia” itself . . . From a lyrical point of view it is much narrower, though; we just see the bragging lout, none of the self doubt or remoteness.’ The song also reflected the hero’s desire to end it all, much as Townshend almost had back in 1971:

  Pete Townshend: ‘Dr Jimmy’ was meant to be a song which somehow gets across the explosive, abandoned wildness side of his character. Like a bull run amok in a china shop. He’s damaging himself so badly so that he can get to the point where he’s so desperate that he’ll take a closer look at himself. All he knows is that things aren’t right in the world and he blames everything else. And it’s getting in a boat, going out to sea and sitting on a rock waiting for the waves to knock him off that makes him review himself. He ends up with the sum total of frustrated toughness, romanticism, religion, daredevil-desperation, but a starting point for anybody. He goes through a suicide crisis. [1973]

  In keeping with an innate, abiding faith in man, Townshend was always looking to make Jimmy’s story one of redemption. Even when stuck on this rock out at sea, snorting the words, ‘It must be alright to be plain ordinary mad’, Jimmy remains the hero, not the anti-hero. As such, in the end we must believe he will be saved. As the songwriter told Charles Shaar Murray: ‘Our album clarifies who the real hero is in this thing – it’s the kid on the front. He’s the hero. That’s why he is on the front cover. That’s why he is sung about. It’s his fuckin’ album. Rock ’n’ roll’s his music . . . This isn’t a direct nostalgic thing, it’s more a search for the essence of what makes everything tick.’

  Ill-fitting or not, the final song was always going to be ‘Love, Reign O’er Me’; not that it was the only song on the second part of Quadrophenia to reflect Townshend’s own pantheistic view of religion: ‘When the tragic hero of [the album] sings [“Drowned”], it is desperate and nihilistic. In fact, it’s a love song, God’s love being the Ocean, and our “selves” being the drops of water that make it up.’ By album’s end, Jimmy has returned to the ‘starting point’, the blank slate, longing ‘to get back home / to cool, cool rain’, and Townshend – in his determination to find something ‘to replace Tommy as the new centre of the . . . show’ – had surpassed himself. He may also have signed the band’s death warrant:

  Pete Townshend: I felt that The Who ought to make, if you like, a last album . . . It’s very peculiar that this album has come out at the same time as something like Bowie’s Pin Ups because . . . the [underlying] ideas are fairly similar. What I’ve really tried to do . . . is to try and illustrate that . . . 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 . . . If someone like Bowie, who’s only been a big star for eighteen months or so, feels the need to start talking about his past influences, then obviously the roots are getting lost. [1973]

  Maybe Pete was reading a tad too much into Bowie’s stopgap contract filler, and not enough into his unique sign-off to the Sixties’ own schizophrenia. But then, divorcing enduring import from immediacy of impact was not always within the powers of the most self-conscious rock star on the planet. And having spent months honing a whole that was so much more than its parts, he knew he would have to start all over again when The Who convened at Ramport studios in May 1973 to begin work on the album of the demos of the concept.

  This time the demos would serve as more than just the guide they provided on Tommy and Who’s Next. In the interi
m, Pete had put some of his increasingly professional-sounding demos on his first commercial solo album, Who Came First (1972). Now, as studio engineer Ron Nevison told Richard Barnes: ‘Pete’s [Quadrophenia] demos had him playing pianos, synthesizers, all guitars and drums plus some sound effects. It was silly to try and redo it, so the demos were used to work to, and as they overdubbed parts they wiped Pete’s originals.’

  This was just the beginning of the surprisingly tortuous process, however. Townshend insisted on reserving at least one-third of the sixteen tracks on the multitracks for more string and synthesizer parts. Entwistle, meanwhile, spent hours and hours arranging and multitracking the many horn parts Townshend demanded. Looking back in 1976, the bassist remembered the recording being ‘so complex it took four months to put together. I was there most of the time. Moon was in the studio for about three weeks, and Daltrey took a week to do his work. But for most of the time it was just Townshend and I.’

  Townshend, understandably, continued to insist on the final say; still haunted by recent failures. Of one thing he remained convinced: ‘I needed to guide Quadrophenia alone. It was a new kind of song-cycle, a development on the system I’d invented for Tommy, and my previous attempt at a dramatic work (Lifehouse) had fallen almost at the first post. Roger had some problems with me having so much control, but that was only because he wanted to find some way into the story and I’m afraid I wasn’t very helpful.’ As far as the intoxicated workaholic Townshend was concerned, for Daltrey the album was a week’s work; for him it was a year’s.