Emerging from the shadows of The Dolphin pub in Plymouth’s Barbican, we began walking toward the stunningly perfect natural harbor, the open sea a short boat ride to the south.
Suddenly steady, mounting, weirdly mechanized buzzing could be heard just around the corner.
Were we being pursued by lawnmowers?
Soon the street was filled with flashy vintage motor scooters, piloted mostly by older men wearing strange archaic clothing, and suddenly I experienced a devastating flashback from somewhere deep within my Indiana heartland soul.
But why?
How could someone landlocked and corn-fed like me, born and raised thousands of miles away from Plymouth—who didn’t visit England until he was 38 years old (and made a beeline for Brighton)—possibly experience 1960s-back-dated déjà vu on a Devon quayside during the Obama administration?
Elementary, my dear Jimmy: It’s Quadrophenia, that’s how.
When the whirring subsided and the scooters disappeared around the bend, my wife’s cousin explained that The Who’s seminal 1973 album had been adapted for restaging as a musical by its writer, Pete Townshend. The show would be playing at the Theatre Royal Plymouth, and so we bought tickets and attended a performance.
It was cleverly done, with a group of young vocalists and instrumentalists gleefully blasting their letter-perfect way through passages made immortal by Townshend (guitar and vocals), Roger Daltrey (vocals), John Entwistle (bass and brass) and Keith Moon (drums and percussion).
Tears kept advancing toward my eyes, throughout, because Quadrophenia inevitably works that way for me.
I’ll try to explain.
The basic facts about Quadrophenia are well known. It was conceived by Townshend as a concept album, embracing aspects of post-war British cultural history utterly remote from the American experience.
The protagonist Jimmy is a Mod; on the other side of the “contrasting ethos” aisle are the Rockers. These rival gangs have virtually everything in common when it comes to shared white ethnicity and socio-economic futility in post-war Great Britain; duly deprived of larger differences, they fight endlessly over small patches of turf defined primarily by style, fashion and attitude.
Jimmy’s personality is explained as a four-part disorder of conflicting emotions, perhaps “quad-polar” in amateur contemporary newspeak. Each of these emotions further symbolizes a band member: Introspective “beggar” (Townshend); tough guy and “helpless dancer” (Daltrey); groping romantic (Entwistle) and manic lunatic (Moon).
In turn, each of Jimmy’s personalities is scored as a musical theme, and in operatic fashion, these themes are stated through bookending instrumentals (“Quadrophenia” and “The Rock”), and seeded throughout the narrative. All of...Read more
