The Who - I'm One
Bonfire night, 1973. The Who are 50 minutes into their set at Newcastle’s Odeon Cinema, the first gig of a three-night stand. They’re promoting Quadrophenia, the grand new opus written by Pete Townshend, but all is far from well. Audiences have been struggling to grasp the ambitious concept, leaving both Townshend and Roger Daltrey to explain the story between numbers. It’s been disrupting the flow, cramping The Who’s swashbuckling attack. And the backing tapes keep malfunctioning. As the band tear into 5:15, there’s no tape sync at all. It eventually kicks in, 15 seconds late. That does it. Townshend explodes.
He strides over to Who soundman Bob Pridden, grabs him by the neck and hauls him over the mixing desk towards the centre of the stage. Then Townshend smashes his guitar on the floor and sets about the sound board, clawing out clumps of wire and laying waste the pre-recorded tapes, before stalking off stage altogether. Much like the punters, his bandmates can only stare in silent disbelief, before the latter feel obligated to follow him into the wings. The stage curtain clunks down and an eerie quiet befalls the room. The Who are gone.
They’re back 20 minutes later, although there’s still a testy atmosphere. The Quadrophenia songs are abandoned, and the band start playing the old hits instead. Townshend clearly isn’t done. He berates the crowd for their inability to comprehend his new work, spits out a volley of four-letter words and finishes with a seismic version of My Generation, the climax of which sees him demolish another guitar – a Gibson Les Paul – and hurl an amp to the floor. Drummer Keith Moon makes similar wreckage of his kit, while Daltrey aims a boot at the microphone. Then they’re gone for good.
The audience roars its applause, but the local press scent blood. The Newcastle Evening Chronicle calls it “a ridiculous display of unwarranted violence” and “an extremely childish publicity stunt, with a potentially damaging effect on the thousands of youngsters who invariably follow their idols in all they do”.
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The following day both Townshend and Moon appear on local TV show Look North to help quell the incident and confirm that the other two Newcastle gigs will still go ahead. “Well, nobody asked for their money back, did they?” laughs Moon.
It was, in fairness, hardly unique behaviour. The Who’s formidable reputation was partly based on such wanton acts of violence against unsuspecting hardware, though the sudden assault on Pridden was altogether more extreme. This was different. Townshend’s tipping point was the result of sustained pressure and frustration.
Quadrophenia, arriving hard-at-heel after his aborted Lifehouse project, was supposed to be his defining moment of the 70s, a rock opera to out-Tommy anything that had gone before. “If Tommy is rock opera, Quadrophenia is grand rock opera,” says lifelong Townshend associate and Who biographer Richard Barnes. “If Tommy is tabloid, Quadrophenia is broadsheet. I think Pete moved The Who to another level with that record.” But by the end of February ’74 The Who had stopped playing it entirely. “The whole thing was a disaster,” griped Townshend. It would be 22 years before they attempted it again.
Quadrophenia, likened by Townshend in 1973 to “a sort of musical Clockwork Orange”, was a deeply personal endeavour. Ostensibly about a young 60s mod at the crossroads of his adolescent life, it charts the spiritual yearning of main protagonist Jimmy Cooper through drugs, unrequited love, beachfront barneys, a string of useless jobs and unsympathetic parents.
The mod scene sours quickly, his best mate runs off with his girl, he trashes his beloved scooter and makes a break for Brighton in a desperate attempt to reconnect with the thrill and camaraderie of the mods-versus-rockers skirmishes. But the summer of ’65 is long gone. Consumed by despair, he rows out to sea to end it all, but has a sudden epiphany.
Quadrophenia the album is a record awash with metaphor – particularly the sea as both a destructive and redemptive force – and sprinkled with allusion to The Who’s own past. It is, in fact, the idealism of 60s youth culture refracted through the lens of the cynical 70s, by big, rich rock stars who’d lived through it. It’s as much about The Who as it is about Jimmy.
It’s a complex, vaultingly ambitious work that is echoed in the music itself. Surging guitars and big vocals are tempered by brass arrangements, semi-orchestral strings and intricate layers of synths and piano.
“At the time, Pete and I were writing to each other and I used to call him Tannhäuser because of Quadrophenia,” says Barnes. “Which was apt because it does sound really Wagnerian with those horns. You can imagine these big, fat ladies in helmets, riding Vespas. It’s a heavy, hard rock album but there are such delicate bits with violins and synthesisers. Pete has such a delicate touch. It’s like porcelain and reinforced concrete side by side.”
Rewind to the summer of 1972 and Townshend was in a dilemma. “I was worried about the band at the time,” he tells Classic Rock. “We were all bored with playing Tommy, and only played three songs from Who’s Next on stage. I wanted a Tommy replacement for our stage act. And the guys in the band were itchy, I think. I was definitely looking for a way to stroke the four eccentric egos of the guys in the band. We’d always been different, but by 1972 I felt I’d one last chance to do something that might hold us together and unify us in the eyes of our fans.”
The initial idea, floated by Townshend in the music press, was born out of a work called Rock Is Dead – Long Live Rock, which addressed The Who’s 60s roots. The as-yet-untitled Quadrophenia was, he said, designed to reflect the four distinct personalities within the band. But, as with Lifehouse – Townshend’s sci-fi fantasia about rock music’s ability to create a new kind of social utopia – it was less easily definable than that. He wanted to address the communal rapport between a band and its fans.
“Jimmy represented a special kind of pop-rock fan who demanded to encapsulate and reflect the members of the band he followed,” continues Townshend. “In this case the four members of The Who. So it was the reverse of what I was pitching in the music papers. In 1972/73 there were no mods, no ‘armies’ or ‘uniforms’ of any kind in the pop-rock audience, just big shirts with big collars, and haircuts from a Shakespeare play.
"Part of what I wanted to do was re-establish with our fans the principles they themselves had set up when we’d started. I think The Who had been servants of the audience in 1964/65, not the other way around. Our job was always to give our audience something they needed, not make them think we were stars.
"Inside The Who, Keith Moon was not just doing a ‘star’ thing, but taking it to extremes. He was behaving like a Saudi Prince. We all had our part to play. We’d lost perspective partly because our stage shows were so fucking intense. We felt inviolable… I think I felt a kinship with teenaged fans, but by 1972 I was 27 years old and maybe this was a last grab at writing my follow up to Tommy; my Catcher In The Rye.”
One of the central themes of Quadrophenia is the idea of joining a tribe or gang for the purposes of personal development, perhaps best expressed by the song I’m One. Townshend: “As a young man I needed, and wanted, to be part of a gang of young men. I’d grown up in a gang, one that started when I was a street kid in Acton when I was four years old, running wild when it was still safe to do so.
"What happens when you’re subsumed in a gang or collective of any kind is that you soon find the parts of you that don’t fit, that can’t be accommodated. For Jimmy – for all the piss-taking I got from the band about following the Indian spiritual master Meher Baba – what didn’t fit the mod gang he was in was his spiritual confusion, his lack of a sense of deep human purpose.”
In September ’72 Townshend had issued his first solo album, Who Came First, a devotional album dedicated to Meher Baba. Were there certain aspects of himself that couldn’t be accommodated in The Who? “It was mainly my interest in spiritual things, and artistic endeavours, that the band found hard to accommodate without taking the piss.
"Sadly, many – though not all – music critics were the same. They thought anyone who was in a band was necessarily a thick cunt who’d struck lucky, and should just shut up and play, make some money and fuck some girls, then crawl away and die and leave the analysis to them. No one in our team seemed to have any spiritual questions at all. They saw Meher Baba as a joke.”
The Who began recording Quadrophenia in early ’73. They’d recently bought an old church hall in Battersea, which they planned to strip down and convert into their own, state-of-the-70s recording studio and rehearsal room. But it still wasn’t ready, so they decamped to the mobile studio of good mate Ronnie Lane, then on the verge of leaving the Faces. Townshend singles out those early sessions as being particularly special, the band’s first major undertaking since Lifehouse and its resultant 1971 salvage operation, Who’s Next.
“With Lifehouse I really wanted a communally creative band, properly engaging with its audience, but I think it was all a bit too art school to work. Much is said about the sci-fi complexity of Lifehouse, its cumbersome narrative and the fact that I failed to explain it properly. Not so much is said about the fact that we’d become soft as a result of the success of Tommy, and then the unexpected windfall success of Who’s Next.
"The other guys in the band hadn’t had to do very much, creatively speaking, to make that happen – just support me during recording, and then do the road work to back it up. I felt really supported by the other guys, especially at the moment they first started to play my new stuff. Running through one of the first songs we recorded for Quadrophenia, I remember thinking that we’d never sounded better, or played with such conviction on unproved material. This was especially true of Roger. He sang like a raging bear. His Love Reign O’er Me will never be surpassed.”
Received wisdom has it that the rest of The Who didn’t quite get Quadrophenia to begin with, which Townshend concedes is “understandable” given that “it didn’t really land completely as a collection of songs until about three weeks prior to starting to record”. But perhaps the one member who took to the project most readily was bassist John Entwistle, who was given free rein to add some ravishing horn parts to the mix, most notably the pumping brass salvos on 5:15, the semi-orchestral flourishes on the title track and the eruptive climax to Love Reign O’er Me.
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Townshend today describes Entwistle’s input as “Stunning, he was also wonderful to work with: meticulous, disciplined, funny and inspired. I loved it that he wrote out his brass parts on music manuscript paper like a proper composer. What he arranged and played on a whole variety of exotic brass instruments fit my own synthesiser and string arrangements perfectly.
"The Who members all had one great facility once we were making music: they listened. So many musicians and band members couldn’t do that. It’s the mark of a great musician, even if – like Keith Moon – he was a drummer who didn’t keep time. He listened very carefully, and what he played fit my songs perfectly.”
The initial recordings were to be produced by The Who’s co-manager, Kit Lambert, Townshend’s usual port of call for feedback on his creative works, though the dynamic of their relationship was by then in deep flux. A year earlier Daltrey had discovered what he saw as discrepancies in The Who’s bank accounts. By ’73, no doubt hastened by Lambert and fellow manager Chris Stamp’s rejection of his debut solo album, Daltrey brought in Bill Curbishley to oversee his affairs. Townshend’s more protracted shift of allegiance to Curbishley signalled the end of an era, though it was hardly a surprise to all parties.
“My strategy was always to run to Kit Lambert or Chris Stamp to fly new ideas,” Townshend explains. “By 1973 they had both lost interest in The Who to some extent. Kit had long-since left the stage as my songwriting mentor, but I was hoping he would co-produce. He turned out to be too distracted.”
Whether all this management hoo-ha informed the recording of Quadrophenia in any way is something Townshend rejects out of hand: “I don’t think the trying events around us informed the album. We were at the height of our powers as a business as well as a band. We could make studios appear out of thin air. What we didn’t have enough of was time, so the much-vaunted quadrophonic mix never happened. And neither did the quadrophonic stage act.”
Richard Barnes adds: “Who’s Next had moved them up in one way, as it was the first record not produced by Kit Lambert – it was Pete and Glyn Johns – and they’d got a new, clear sound. The other thing was that Kit started getting into hard drugs after Tommy, so he didn’t have that same influence.”
Quadrophenia featured cameos from Grease Band pianist Chris Stainton and actor John Curle (the voice of the newsreader), but otherwise it’s classic Who. First single 5:15, which soundtracks Jimmy’s barrelling train journey to Brighton, gobbling purple hearts on the way, was written while Townshend was was “killing time between appointments” in Oxford Street and Carnaby Street. “What I had was a studio track and a riff, the essential riff behind 5:15, which is a little like a Chuck Berry derivation. I stood in the street and wrote down phrases while watching people walking past. I did it again in 1976 with Street In The City for the Rough Mix album with Ronnie Lane.”
And what of Drowned and Love Reign O’er Me, two of the choicest moments The Who have ever pressed to vinyl? “They’re two of my best songs,” Townshend agrees. “Drowned is wonderful to perform. They belong in Quadrophenia. The songs that have been most cathartic for me are probably the angrier ones. This kind of writing has always been, for me, an attempt to make the spiritual journey accessible as an idea, using watery metaphors. I explain in some detail in the [Quadrophenia reissue] liner notes how I came to write Love Reign O’er Me. It’s a kind of ‘scoop’, so I don’t want to spoil the surprise. I think Roger has dozens of fine moments, and his many live renditions of Love Reign O’er Me on recent tours have always blown me away. From: https://www.loudersound.com/features/the-who-quadrophenia
