Fever (15 page)

Wearing a mechanic's jumpsuit (with knee pads), Townshend made one of his strongest statements as a man during the band's 1969 appearance at Woodstock: his long hair did nothing to disguise the fact that he considered hippie pretensions utter bullshit. In the
Woodstock
movie, the set climaxes with “Summertime Blues,” and Townshend smashes his guitar with the flair of a carnivore slaying his kill, then tosses the instrument's carcass into the audience, as though all its power came from them anyway. Later it was reported that he'd been through an altercation with Abbie Hoffman just before taking the stage and had clobbered the radical leftist with his Gibson SG just before performing X-chromosome voodoo on it. The Who were notoriously disappointed in this set, which fixed audiences' ideas about them for years. And in some respects it is a scrappy affair, especially next to the set they put out the following year,
Live at Leeds
(recorded shortly after they returned to England), which is rock's standard-bearer live album. But the Who dominate the
Woodstock
concert film along with Sly and the Family Stone and Jimi Hendrix. While he had a sense of humor, Townshend never succumbed to free-love euphoria—even songs like “Pure and Easy” and “Join Together” had a steadiness of purpose that rammed up against a lot of countercultural flakiness.

*   *   *

In between large projects, Townshend kept writing rock songs for another concept album, called Lifehouse, which devolved into a brilliant anticoncept album, 1971's
Who's Next. Who's Next
included the hits “We Won't Get Fooled Again” and “Baba O'Riley,” with its famous tagline (sung by Townshend himself at the ends of verses), “Don't cry, don't brace your eyes … It's only teenage wasteland.” It was Townshend's knowing adieu to the utopian dream of the sixties, fully spelling out the attitude he displayed at Woodstock.

Townshend's gender themes were fully realized on 1973's
Quadrophenia,
an album about the sixties disguised as a seventies' synthesizer tour-de-force. But Townshend got so carried away with musical pretensions (recurring themes, psychological leitmotifs, and carrying through on the promise of
Tommy
) that critics failed to note how much his narrative sense had focused. Jim, Tommy's younger fictional brother, is the ultimate seventies teenager: the victim of cosmic bad timing. Like most teenagers, Jim has a personality complex, and fears he has four different selves, a “quadrophenia” of the mind. The original concept was to build each personality around the different members of the Who, and the concept paralleled the introduction of “quadrophonic” sound, or double stereo, which never caught on.

Townshend was writing at his very best, both musically and in prose, specifically in the liner notes to the album which came inside a collection of black-and-white portraits by Ethan Russell. The story is simple: After returning from a weekend in Brighton where Mods square off against their archenemies, the Rockers on their motorbikes, things at home deteriorate. Eventually, Jim provokes his parents into throwing him out. All he can think about is how heroic and triumphant the weekend in Brighton seemed, how the smartest bird had actually lain down with him, and how lonely he feels at the prospect of real life, meaning a shit job and an unhappy marriage to live under. He even returns to Brighton to reminisce, only to find the most popular geezer from the big dance schlepping bags for the hotel (“Bell Boy”). So Jimmy finds a boat, wanders out to sea with his pills and drink, feels blessed by the power of the water, and winds up alone on a huge rock offshore.

Built around the organizing metaphor of the scuffles between Mods and Rockers in Brighton in the early sixties (the very crowd the Who used to play for), Jim's plight is less melodramatic than Tommy's. He's simply a kid who buys the right clothes, the right motorbike, adores the right bands, takes all the hip pills (“leapers,” or amphetamines)—and still feels like an outsider. “The Dirty Jobs” and “Bell Boy” are the mothers of all shit-job anthems; “5:15” is an exhilarating look at the daily grind's burnout pace; “Cut My Hair” captures all the resentment of a teen following his parent's orders, especially when the parents are none too happy with their own drugs—“My dad couldn't stand on two feet/As he lectured about morality,” Jimmy complains in “Sea and Sand.”

Townshend's intense identification with this character goes only so far, however, as the piece ends with Jim's suicide by drowning. That Townshend would write a piece this long and pretentious and wind up having it be about a fan's suicide is kept from being maudlin by the heft of the Who's seventies sound: just as hard and biting as their sixties work, only more controlled; adults kicking through cherished adolescent myths. The dedication reads “This music is dedicated to the kids of Goldhawk Road, Carpenders Park, Forest Hills, Stevanege New Town and to all the people we played to at the Marquee and Brighton Aquarium in the summer of '65.” Having grown up enough themselves to find humor and humility in the fans they once played for, the Who played with a renewed, albeit tailored, fire.

The songs had lots of large spaces in them, and Moon was playing at his very best—especially on “The Punk Meets the Godfather,” (the instrumental) “Quadrophenia,” and the relentless onslaught of what used to be side 3: “5:15,” “Sea and Sand,” and “Drowned,” and Moon's vocal spotlight, “Bell Boy.” His crash cymbals ring out on opposite channels, and there's never a moment when he doesn't seem to be heading toward or away from them. The oceanic sound effects that frame the waves of tension in the music work as a metaphor for Jim's swarming social anomie. (If you want to get really pretentious about it, the ocean here is a bit like the ominous fog in Dickens's
Bleak House.
) Moon's playing mimics the tidal pull of waves crashing on rocks, barely receding before crashing again.

The finale, “Love Reign O'er Me,” is meant to be the blissful fadeout, as Jimmy sinks and drowns on an artificial high into the womb of the earth, the sea, which is both redemptive and consuming. The Townshend essay helped give shape to the narrative, filling in blanks that the music had no patience for, and gave the lead character a dramatic voice.

Jimmy's parents sent him to a psychiatrist every week, who was both unimpressive and checked out. He told Jimmy there was no such thing as madness; Jimmy says he should try standing in a queue at the football grounds on Saturday mornings. His father described his moods as changeable, like the weather, schizophrenic. His mother called him nutty. Pretty much like a typical guy with adult hormones suddenly coursing through his veins, the most disorienting drug of all. Only everybody around denies him his response to it.

Along with their heedless disdain for adolescent mood swings, the parents are clueless to Jimmy's flailing about for emotional gravity, especially as it might orient him toward a meaningful idea of manhood that's different from Mod posturing.

Like most teenagers, Jimmy's sense of hypocrisy is acute: he finds it unnerving that his parents disdain “illicit” pills when they drink themselves silly in front of the TV each and every night. After Brighton the fights got worse: sleeping on the beach ruined his suit and clothes, and his mother can't see any romance in that. When she'd had a few Guinesses, her sense of disappointment was searing. Finally, Jimmy announces he's moving out, both to shut his parents up and piss them off even more. But his mother, drunk, rejoices, “like the war had just ended.” And while his uppers are fashionable, they don't do much for his paranoia. The other thing that distinguishes Jimmy's consciousness is his awareness of how drugs affect him, how the high is answered by an overwhelming undertow of depression. “Coming down off leapers isn't much fun,” he says. At first they make him feel “like Tarzan,” but soon after he feels omnipotent in an almost tragic sense; “People couldn't hide from me when I was leaping.” The sign in his shrink's office says paranoids have “some idea” of what reality is. “That was me on leapers,” Jimmy says. Not blanked out but too full of feeling; not blotto but too aware of how stilted and disappointing his world seems.

Amphetamines, the drug of choice for young Mods, are at least fashionable compared to his parents' drinking. And he's leaving home because of his Brighton experience—it gave him a taste of something bigger, and almost anything was better than the withering hypocrisy of his own house.

Even the Brighton scene resembles his use of uppers: it cheered him up, but ultimately let him down. The climactic Mod gathering—flight from parents, shared passion for music—hadn't delivered him from school, work, and the fights he returned to at home. But his deepest disappointment is in his peers: “I never ever thought I'd feel let down by being a Mod.” So he steals a boat and launches out toward a rock off the coast, chasing “leapers” with booze, wondering what course his life will take, and how to make any sense out of things that used to seem so important. “I didn't know what I was up to, but I know now” is his ambivalent conclusion.

Franc Roddam's 1979 Film of
Quadrophenia
has its moments, but it's basically a wash (if not on the same baroque scale as Russell's
Tommy
). The ending fudged on the suicide: instead of Jimmy leaping off a cliff on his GS scooter, the motorbike fell alone, and the implication was that he had trashed his Mod accoutrements and gone ahead to a new stage in life. But neither ending really satisfies. Jimmy remains the Teen Everyman, struggling with the same thing countless others like him had been through since time immemorial.

Despite a 1998
Quadrophenia
revival tour, which argued for its greater aesthetic status, all this emotion poured out over the solitary fate of a lone fan couldn't redeem the idea of the Who as men's men, the ancestors to Heavy Metal Man, that tortured, alienated, and exploited macho throwback of seventies rock. Led Zeppelin gave this character his most freighted baggage (of rustic medieval satanism!), but the watered-down version found his voice in early Aerosmith and the new legion of metal cartoons like Kiss, Van Halen (a very paltry Kinks and Who tribute band) and the pompous gloom metal of the 1980s and 1990s.

If you listen closely, however, Townshend's character is worlds away from the metal jock he inadvertently spawned. Jim's mod is the kind of teenager who made Townshend famous, yet by the end of
Quadrophenia,
the music doesn't deliver the same transcendence as it once did, and this gets at the heart of what
Quadrophenia
tries to tell its audience. Once again, the immersion in Mod culture (instead of pinball or rock/religious fanaticism) takes Jimmy only so far; it's the only place he can find any clues about manhood, and it lets him down. The ambivalence of the ending in “Love Reign O'er Me” is as great (if not as thrilling) as the close to
Tommy.
It's Townshend's way of saying, “Even rock 'n' roll can't save some people.”

CHAPTER 5

Man Overboard

While rock men were caught up in passionate confusion about their new roles, rock women were increasingly pissed off to find out how little “free love” had to do with equality. The signal feminist figure on TV in the early seventies was Mary Tyler Moore's Mary Richards. Like
Julia
and
That Girl
before her, Mary was a smart, gorgeous career woman who … never got laid. The network even vetoed the original character concept of a divorcée who relocates to Minneapolis—the divorcée part was too controversial. Richards's girl talk with upstairs neighbor Rhoda, who eventually got her own show, consisted of professional and family matters and rarely veered into feminist perspectives. Watching reruns, you have to wonder: why was she throwing that hat up into the air?

Against this TV backdrop of “life as usual” during the countercultural revolution, female rock stars enjoyed far greater freedom in singing about people's fantasies and behavior than TV or movie characters. A string of world-class feminists strode across rock's stages well before Gloria Steinem launched
Ms.
magazine (in 1972); and for the most part, this feminist rock catalogue—especially the work of Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell, Bonnie Raitt, and, later, Patti Smith, Debbie Harry and Blondie, Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders, PJ Harvey, and, of course, Madonna—still expresses feminist independence better than the throwback roles played by Barbra Streisand, Jane Fonda, Goldie Hawn, Jodie Foster, Meryl Streep, Michelle Pfeiffer, Whoopi Goldberg, Jennifer Lopez, Halle Berry, or Julia Roberts.

If Aretha and Janis carved out new modes of expression for women—with an audacity that lifted emergent feminism toward the regal—it took a Canadian folkie and a key Brillpop scribe to get to the essence of the new woman poetically. Joni Mitchell never approached the superstar status of Tina, Aretha, or Janis (never mind Linda Ronstadt) but her work has stayed relevant beyond its singer-songwriter context—which makes her songs not only bold, but rare. Of course, it was Carole King's
Tapestry
that made the biggest impact on early-1970s pop, even if many who bought it didn't make the connection between King's girl-group writing and her new singer-songwriter persona. While
Tapestry
included a maudlin remake of her 1960 Shirelles song “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” the album's enormous success argued that the connection wasn't necessary. So it's important to put King's pop triumph in perspective with Joni Mitchell's work. At the time, King was far and away the bigger star, but Mitchell had a far more progressive aura, especially since she was a folkie, and her work in this period better reflects what women were thinking and feeling than King's does, since King's 1960s work is her finest (“Tomorrow,” and pearls like “Chains,” “Up on the Roof,” “Every Breath I Take,” “Don't Ever Change,” “Crying in the Rain,” “The Loco-Motion,” “Don't Say Nothin' Bad About My Baby,” “I'm into Something Good,” “One Fine Day,” and “Goin' Back”).