Quadrophenia (1979)

UK, 120 minutes
Director: Franc Roddam
Writers: Dave Humphries, Martin Stellman, Franc Roddam, Pete Townshend
Photography: Brian Tufano
Music: Who
Editors: Sean Barton, Mike Taylor
Cast: Phil Daniels, Mark Wingett, Philip Davis, Leslie Ash, Garry Cooper, Toyah Wilcox, Sting, Ray Winstone, Kate Williams

The year after the death of Keith Moon was a brave and busy one for the Who, and not always full of good news: they toured, released two movies, and played a show in Cincinnati to a crowd that had just trampled 11 people to death. Nobody knew how bad that was until later—the band was not informed until after the show. These surviving members—Roger Daltrey, John Entwhistle, and Pete Townshend—were starting to bear the weathered look of epic rock 'n' roll destiny, their tragic low points matched by ecstatic highs we already knew. For a minute, the future looked limitless. In retrospect now it looks more like the beginning of their long goodbye, still ongoing. Quadrophenia was the narrative film they released that year, as a kind of matching piece with the galvanizing documentary The Kids Are Alright.

Based on the band's double-LP concept album Quadrophenia, a rock opera from the mid-'70s, the movie focuses on Britain's mid-'60s Mods and Rockers rivalry, which coincided with the rise of the Who. The conflict between Mods and Rockers is neatly encapsulated here in a scene where two young men try to sing signature songs loud enough to drown out the other ("Be-Bop-a-Lula" for the Rocker and "You Really Got Me" for the Mod). It's a Who movie through and through, produced by them, featuring their music, and with Pete Townshend contributing to the script. I'd say it's a little longer than it needs to be, just slightly bloated, but it fits neatly into a standard satisfying rock 'n' roll frame as a coming of age story. There's an outsider who finds himself at the margins, discovers the pleasures of what is at those margins, and soon enough gains the sad understanding that all ecstasies at the margins are unsustainable. Then it's a matter of living with that.

27. Who, "My Generation" (1965)

(listen)

This one surprises me still every time I encounter it again. It never made the radio where I was, though I recall hearing it show up on oldies stations now and again, always fresh and exciting and sudden. I'd known about it from reading Nik Cohn's Rock From the Beginning when I was 15, which made it absolutely one thing I was intent on tracking down immediately. Cohn wrote: " ... the Mod was trying to justify himself, wanted to lash back at everyone who'd ever put him down, but he'd taken too many pills and couldn't concentrate right. He only stammered. He was mad, frustrated, but he wasn't articulate; he couldn't say why. The harder he tried, the worse he stammered, the more he got confused. In the end, he got nowhere: 'People try to put us down / Just because we get around, / Things they do look awful cold, / Hope I die before I get old.'" Cohn got that all about right, and certainly it did the job of setting me into action, which is the effect that the best rock criticism should have. Even in 1969 it wasn't easy to recognize the staying power of one of the great lines of rock 'n' roll, "Hope I die before I get old," which we can see now will likely survive all of us (even as we think we are clever by turning it around and hoping now that we get old first, as many of us have). Cohn also neglected to talk about how brash and galvanizing it sounds. It's not exactly noisy, there's plenty of open spaces in and around the racket, and the guitar even sounds acoustic, at least in the early going. But the way they're playing, as if abusing and beating up their instruments, hitting everything so hard—it really gets your attention.

Tommy (1969)

"We're Not Gonna Take It" Probably the first album I ever lusted after and eventually acquired solely on the basis of reading the overheated recommendations of a rock critic, the beginning of a lifelong habit for better or worse—I think in this case it must have been Nik Cohn's Rock from the Beginning. I admit that at first I found the vaunted "rock opera" a bit disappointing—when hasn't that happened as a result of the overheated recommendations of a rock critic? But over the years it has held up surprisingly well. Often under the charge of furiously strummed acoustic guitar and sweet harmonies, with Keith Moon's spastic and majestic drumming practically submerged in the mix, it's not nearly the noisy proto-metal headbanger you might expect from all the hoopla, endless live versions, and abominable Ken Russell movie. Poised just before the band basically raised the curtain on recorded versions of exactly that with the vastly more assaultive Live at Leeds, this sounds practically like a folk exercise in this day and age and is effectively their transition point from the goofy Kinks wannabe popfare of Sell Out and the like. And its moment is a lovely one. Calling it an "opera" in any kind of way at all is your basic misnomer, of course, in spite of its "Overture" (5:21) and "Underture" (10:09). But so what? It got my attention anyway, pretensions and all. And if I rarely take a listen to it any longer, doing without for years and even decades at a stretch, that only underlines the surprise and pleasure over how good it still sounds.