Who

Jimmy is standing on the edge of a huge rock, at night. Rain falls on him, mixing with his tears. Below him the sea churns, waiting impatiently for Jimmy to finally make up his mind. And so, with one foot over the edge, memories of a lifetime begin to resurface: loves and failures, families and shattered dreams and endless frustrations. And a single prayer: "Love, reign o'er me".

“The story is set on a rock”, Pete Townshend tells us, since at that point in his life – amid alcoholism, delusions of omnipotence and inferiority complexes, endless tours and a family in crisis – he found himself looking back on his adolescence and on everything he had become as an adult. This was because, despite the success of “Who's Next”, Townshend wasn't satisfied: while masterpieces like “Baba O'Riley” and “Won't Get Fooled Again” were destined to become stadium anthems chanted for decades to come, “Who's Next” was, in his eyes, a failure. Don't misunderstand: the album was in fact a compromise with the far grander original idea, the desperate attempt to complete “Lifehouse”, the rock opera meant to give meaning to Townshend's mystical philosophy, to Rock as an art form and to Music itself, forever uniting musician and audience in one endless one note. But that record, which was meant to become a film, could never be realized (except as a posthumous box set at the start of the new millennium), because Townshend's utopias could only ever remain that. Nor did “Rock Is Dead” ever come to fruition, the intended self-celebratory musical project of which only the title track survives.

Townshend wanted to explore the rock opera format once more – after all, he was the one who had invented it. He realized it was time to take stock, simplify the process, dig deep inside himself and speak from the heart. This time there would be no deaf, dumb and blind boys, no pinball machines. He needed to return to lived experience, abandoning the parable and embracing History: so his mind travels back ten years, to the records that shaped him, to the mod dancehalls and the clashes with the rockers (which, in truth, he never actually took part in). In short, back to when the Who, their audience and rock music itself were all young.

This is where the story told in "Quadrophenia" begins: that of a boy in the mid-60s searching for his identity, lost and split into four different personalities. Enter Jimmy, the "quadrophenic" London kid who lives for the moment's fashions and struggles to get through adolescence to become a man. A mod at war with the rockers, in a perpetual struggle against the world, work, and family, his life is fragmented into the four personalities that control his (self-)destructive impulses, each one representing a member of the Who: there's the helpless rebel, told in "Helpless Dancer", who bears the outline of Roger Daltrey; the deranged degenerate "Bell Boy", voiced by Moon the Loon; the inconsolable romantic who emerges in the ravings of "Doctor Jimmy & Mr Jim", asking "Is it me, for a moment?", with the reflection of John "Thunderfinger" Entwistle in his eyes. And finally, when the protagonist's entire existence collapses miserably and that foot dangles over the void, Pete Townshend's heart and soul become the scream of Jimmy "the beggar, the hypocrite" in "Love, Reign O'er Me".

"Quadrophenia" holds the story of the Who and of a generation, but above all it holds Townshend's talent and sincerity: he writes the songs alone – music and lyrics – produces the record, and sings in its most intimate moments, when character and author blur into one. It is, essentially, his record, while the rest of the band are kept on a tight leash (just listen to the home-made demos, virtually flawless already), with Moon and Entwistle reined in by rigid, note-perfect arrangements.

The greatness of the record lies in its incredible emotional palette, in the countless shades that make Jimmy feel real: the desolate neglect of "The Real Me", the unvented rage of "I've Had Enough" and "The Punk And The Godfather" (where Townshend sings in the first person about rock's failure as a means of saving people), and the unbearable melancholy of "Sea And Sand" and "I'm One", where "every year is the same, and I feel it again: I'm a loser, no chance to win".

"Quadrophenia" is at once a back-to-basics move and a remarkable leap forward in the band's sound. The quadrophonic experiment (intended as one channel for each theme and each personality) marks a return to the rock'n'roll formula ("Drowned", "5:15") as well as a triumph of synthesizers, which push the album into the ranks of art-rock masterpieces, especially thanks to the overture and underture "Quadrophenia" and "The Rock": in the latter, the leitmotifs of the four personalities – and thus of the four members of the Who – merge contrapuntally in the finale into a single musical movement, enough on its own to prove Townshend's unmatched mastery. It's the emotional passage that leads us into "Love, Reign O'er Me", where the synthesizer riff takes over from the delicate piano intro, building to an explosive guitar solo, before everything closes on a single, immense minor chord that carries us into silence. Perhaps the most intense moment in the English band's entire discography.

In Daltrey's rending scream that closes the record, Jimmy's fate hangs suspended: will he jump, or will he face life despite his endless failures? It's up to each of us to put ourselves in his place and write our own ending.

Such a musical and emotional tour de force would leave Pete Townshend exhausted, sinking into alcoholism and gripped by a depression that would inevitably mark his life and the rest of the band's career – further compromised, this time for good, by the death of Keith Moon five years later.

But "Quadrophenia", despite being an unlucky record that never fully entered the collective imagination – even bypassed by CSI's opening themes – remains without doubt Townshend's favourite project, one he would return to again and again: first as a film (1979), then through various anniversary tours, up to the orchestral consecration of "Classic Quadrophenia" (2015). His only regret about it is not having waited for the right technology to stage it properly live.

It is indeed in this work that the Who achieve the perfect synthesis of punk and art-rock, power chords and synths, prayer and youthful rage, straight-to-face sound and sonic exploration, Life and Death. "Quadrophenia" is a coming-of-age novel set to music, a musical experiment in song form, an unprecedented experience and – of course – one without equal.

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01/01/2017