No pics but I have nothing to gain from lying about this. They borrowed it from the theater school I was attending (DePaul) and I got the costume shop manager to give it to me after they returned it. I wore it as a Halloween outfit a couple times after that and then my GOD DAMN MOM donated it to goodwill, like a crazy person, what's goodwill supposed to do with a bellhop outfit. I was SO MAD, I wanted to give it back to the band and maybe meet them and become best friends with Paul Languedoc or whatever.
Anyway it was a great show. I still remember the Jesus Left Chicago, Fishman bringing the house down on "Love Reign O'er Me", and driving about 20 friends to the show in the back of a U-Haul, lol. Wildly unsafe, I'm glad nobody died.
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I Am the Sea- A decent start to the album, but just a lot of noises that foreshadow the whole thing.
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Quadrophenia- An untimed instrumental that takes the album out of overdrive from “The Real Me”.
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Sea and Sand- Filler Song
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Drowned- Less of a filler song, but still forgettable.
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The Rock- Another instrumental that just touches on some of the albums previous pieces and sets up the finale.
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I’m One- A good acoustic song that’s a nice edition to an otherwise sad album.
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Cut My Hair- This song really sets up Jimmy’s lifestyle and his problems, and the mentioning of “Zoot Suit” is kinda cool.
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The Dirty Jobs- Very cool synth that starts the song, and shows how Jimmy has to do dirty jobs just to fit in.
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I’ve Had Enough- The set up to the next phase of the album that takes place in Brighton. It’s and OK track.
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Doctor Jimmy- The Doctor Jekyl and Mr. Hyde of this album is very triumphant with the string and horn arrangement. The song is longer than Stairway to Heaven, and arguably better.
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Bell Boy- Keith Moon. That’s all.
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Is It In My Head?- A very loud and triumphant song that is the turning point for Jimmy’s mental health.
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The Real Me- The first actual song on the album is a beast that throws everything at the listener and gets them into the feeling of the whole album. The driving force behind this colossal piece is how fast it is. It’s truly a masterpiece.
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The Punk and the Godfather- The amazing guitar strings and vocals of Pete Townshend. The inclusion of “My Generation” in this song is cool because it tells us about Jimmy’s love for The Who themselves.
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Helpless Dancer- This. Song. Is. Amazing. The inclusion of Townshend slamming the piano and Entwistle’s horn is amazing, with Roger’s vocals shifting. The song ends with a snippet of “The Kids Are Alright” and “Is it me, for a moment?”.
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5:15- A perfect arrangement that sets up Jimmy’s drug abuse and how he’s going back to Brighton will under the influence. The whole thing is wonderful and simply amazing.
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Love, Reign O’er Me- I have no words for this song. It is the best song on this album, with very little room for argument.
haha just kidding… unless 😳
I don’t see a logical reason as to how he would have survived, seen as he’s trapped on a rock at the end of the album. I would like to believe he changed in the end and he survived, but the ending fits so well with his death.
I have a lot of thoughts on this album, and they are all over the place. The only Who album I'd heard going into this list was Tommy, which I thought was a fine record. As far as concept albums go, it was a little on the nose. The story was fine, but it wasn't very grounded. There wasn't much for me to latch onto that made the story feel all that relatable. I was watching Tommy rather than walking alongside him.
Now, before I get carried away, I just want to clarify, this is a top tier record for the bucket lists.
This record goes in the exact opposite direction. The story of Quadrophenia tries so hard to connect itself to the real world that it hasn't aged very well. As someone who didn't live through the 60s, I found it difficult to relate to Jimmy at times, with all his fashion struggles and whatnot.
I think the concepts for this concept album are interesting, and had a lot of potential, but it's really just too many ideas at once and they try to make them all work under one metaphor and one story and it just feels jumbled at times. And there's all these characters that just show up and are never heard from again. The Punk, The Godfather, Ace Face, why should I care about them? I don't really understand, there's just something I'm not getting.
Another thing was that the main character wasn't all that likable? He's racist, sexist, and homophobic, and he also blames the working class for the struggles that society forces upon them. And I know that was (one of) the point(s), to use a privileged protagonist to portray the struggles of everyone around him. Townshend was using Jimmy's words to portray the opposite message of what he's literally saying. It's an interesting angle, but I just don't think it works very well. Especially since the (another one of the) whole concept(s) here is that Jimmy is struggling from a misunderstood mental health condition (Quadrophenia) and thus is oppressed himself.
I think that the idea of a fake mental health condition is a very interesting one with a lot of potential. You don't need to worry about portraying the illness 100% accurately because you're making it up, and you can use it as a way to relate to anybody who struggles from any type of mental health condition regardless of symptoms. That's not the angle here, and I think it suffers for that.
Jimmy is struggling mentally throughout the story, but that's not really the focus of the story. They just use Jimmy's 4 personalities as parallels to each member of the
... keep reading on reddit ➡Anyone else excited about the prospect of more Quadrophenia content in 2023? I’d love to see them tour it again for the 50th anniversary (though I feel that’s unlikely) and possibly some new merch? I don’t know if there’s any more material since we already have a Super Deluxe but who knows.
What are you guys favorite tracks on the Quadrophenia? Mines are The Dirty Jobs and LROM.
I don't understand why nobody got this reference. That is what she did, immediately obvious to me. Which met the brief.
Tell me I am wrong.
"Actually, the good thing I'm going through at the moment is a kind of renaissance in songwriting, which is a strange process. It's not a conscious move; it has nothing to do with the way the scene is, or rock revivals, or anything like that. Suddenly I find myself writing songs that sound as if they could have been written in 1965."
One of Townshend's current projects, among the tapes and machines in the studio at his Thameside home, is a new Who rock opera.
"It's about teenage life," explains the man. "And, funnily enough, all those real classics - 'Generation', 'Substitute' and 'I'm a Boy' - all those songs were good because I'm good at writing about teenage life. I wasn't a teenager when I wrote those songs but I was acting out being a teenager - in the rock tradition. Just the same as someone like Marc Bolan is now. Y'know, acting out being younger than he is...?"
Chuck Berry, I suggest, was no teenager when he wrote the all-time teenage classics. "Right," smiles Townshend. "Actually Chuck Berry still writes like a kid, doesn't he? Y'see, I'm finding myself writing about being kicked out of home, parents not understanding, first drug use... first screw... things like that. And the melodies and lyrics are coming out reeking of, not 'My Generation', but of 'I'm A Boy', 'Odorono' and 'Tattoo' and songs of that era.
"I shouldn't call this an opera 'cos it's even less of an opera than Tommy was: but what I'm trying to do is get the writing to reflect the changes in The Who's character. So it starts with a sort of 'Can't Explain' '65 feel and progresses like a reflection of The Who's history. We're just coming up to our first decade, y'know. So that at the end of the action there is an incredible amount of synthesiser."
Is there a plot?
"Yeah, there's a story which is really just a caricature of The Who. It's a four-barrelled thing with one hero in the middle who, instead of suffering from schizophrenia, suffers from quadrophenia. So there are four individual characters who mould into one at the end - a history of The Who."
~
Quadrophenia was recorded between May 1972 and September 1973, and released in November 1973. Listen on YouTube.
Thank you
I asked this for the albums last week, but the soundtracks are a separate story. Tommy features many big changes to songs, such as Eric Clapton's rearranging and redoing of Eyesight to the Blind and Tina Turner singing Acid Queen. However Quadrophenia adds more songs and songs from other artists of the time. They even include Zoot Suit.
Here's the only lyrical sample that I think applies:
"Ain't you the guy who used to set the paces
Riding up in front of a hundred faces?
I don't suppose, you would remember me
But I used to follow you back in '63"
Whaddya think?
What is your story with "Quad"? I hear it's helped countless amounts of people get through tough times and for that, they regard it as seminal in their human experience.
I've always wondered what others thought. I love Quadrophenia but I can listen to Tommy over and over again.
I've been wanting to pick up quadrophenia on vinyl. I've seen pretty mixed reviews about each pressing and no consensus.
Which do you recommend?
