“Reconnecting with its audience”: the album Pete Townshend wrote to save The Who
By the early 1970s, there weren’t many bands that could get much better than The Who. They may not have flaunted themselves as the greatest musicians in the world, but having the sturdiest rhythm section in rock and roll breathing life into the songs Pete Townshend wrote made every single one of their albums feel like a major event before they had even heard the full thing. But Townshend knew that there was a disconnect that could happen if the band didn’t hunker down properly.
Because when you think about it, the operatic years of the band almost put them in a box too much. Tommy is always going to be regarded as one of the gold standards for what a rock opera should be, but the massive pressure that the band were under to make another one was bound to take a toll on Townshend. And especially when he got the first idea for Lifehouse, his attempt to tell the exact same story slightly differently wasn’t going to work.
The character of Bobby in the supposed storyline was intended to be deaf, dumb, and blind to the world from a sci-fi perspective, being put in a suit that closed him off from the rest of normal society. That album may have very well been ahead of the curve in many respects back in the late 1960s, but given that the world would be better off if Townshend didn’t have a nervous breakdown, Who’s Next was what would have to do.
If they were going to do the whole thing over again on their next proper release, it would never work if they simply rewrote another classic. Townshend felt the need to get back in touch with their roots, and while an album like Quadrophenia was every bit as sophisticated as Tommy was, it was one big love letter to their Mod days, telling the story of a kid who’s torn between his love for his youth and whether or not to leave it behind.
“I had this unfolding idea about trying to save The Who from itself by reconnecting it with its audience; and also hopefully for the audience to reconnect with The Who.”
Pete Townshend
And for a band that had started almost a decade before, this was a fairly gutsy move. The punk revolution was on its way in, but that hardly mattered to Townshend, managing to keep the same kind of spirit in his music without having to cower to what the garage rockers or the progressive masterminds had to say behind the scenes.
So despite one of the biggest bands in the world, Townshend knew that there was something important about getting Quadrophenia exactly right, saying, “I had this unfolding idea about trying to save The Who from itself by reconnecting it with its audience; and also hopefully for the audience to reconnect with The Who. To be absolutely honest, they didn’t get it. [Manager] Kit Lambert felt we needed it, but nobody else seemed to give a fuck.”
In fact, that kind of theme had already been what Townshend was hinting at when making songs like ‘Baba O’Riley’. He had spent years trying to talk about the waste going on in youth culture, and now that he had the ear of the public, he wanted to make sure that he could point in the right direction in whatever way that he could.
But the genius behind Quadrophenia is that it does end up being so open-ended. ‘Love Reign O’er Me’ does show Jimmy on a rock in the middle of the sea at a crossroads in his life, but whether or not he chooses to make something of himself or drown himself in the cold waters below is up to the listener.
