Pete Townshend discussing the last great album by The Who: “It’s precious to me”
No artist can claim to be at the top of their game forever. There’s an expiration date on any great rock and roll band, and even though they might continue on past their glory years, there’s usually a defining moment when they start to run out of gas. And while Pete Townshend continued to steer the ship for The Who for decades, he thought that Quadrophenia was the last time that they had something worthwhile as a complete package.
Once Townshend stumbled into the 1970s, though, rock and roll was starting to mean something more than just a catchy tune. He had the ability to write songs like ‘My Generation’ if he wanted to, but he wasn’t going to get anywhere if he kept on playing the same raucous material over and over again.
Tommy marked the moment when he first stepped out of garage rock’s shadow, but the aborted sessions for Lifehouse left him feeling a little bit cold. Sure, the scraps resulted in what might be the group’s best album, Who’s Next, but it has to sting when a project didn’t turn out nearly as well as you heard it in your head.
Instead of going the deaf, dumb, and blind route again, Townshend knew that he wanted Quadrophenia to look back to his past. Framed as a tragedy of a former Mod rocker, the entire project is a more refined version of what Lifehouse was supposed to be, with everyone at the peak of their powers and Townshend turning his standalone songs into cinematic art pieces like on ‘Love Reign O’er Me’ and ‘The Real Me’.
In fact, there are some points on the record that seem to rival Tommy in some respects. Nothing can replace tracks like ‘See Me Feel Me’, but songs like ‘I’m One’ are a more tender take on the rock opera than what we had previously heard, and ‘Bell Boy’ absolutely wipes the floor with Keith Moon’s previous vocal features like ‘Tommy’s Holiday Camp’.
Even though many fantastic records would come out after Quadrophenia, Townshend felt that The Who never captured anything nearly as good as their second rock opera, telling Billboard, “The reason why the album is so important to me is that I think it’s the Who’s last great album, really. [The Who] never recorded anything that was so ambitious or audacious again. It’s a precious album for me, and it’s a kind of a turning point album for me as well.”
For all of the great moments on the album, it was also a touch bittersweet knowing where Moon would be going in the next few years. Outside of his madcap persona, he was slowly starting to waste away after too many years of drinking, and while The Who By Numbers and Who’s Next are great in their own right, you can hear Moon’s spirit starting to dwindle on those records until he passed away of an overdose.
In that one brief moment on Quadrophenia, though, no one could touch The Who. They had conquered the world of garage rock before, and now this was their moment to take rock and roll into more sophisticated territory one more time.
