Word: quadrophenia
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...waning '60s, and then confounded even further by the buoyantly bonkers ministrations of Director Ken Russell, whose wildly successful 1975 film version of Tommy was like Busby Berkeley on a bummer. By that time, The Who was working on extensions both of Tommy's form and its themes. Quadrophenia (1973) was an even more ambitious, although less flashy, successor, a two-record chronicle of the desperate life and ironic resurrection of a poor London Mod kid in the early '60s. (It has just been released in a street-shrewd, roughhouse movie adaptation. The sound track, remixed by Entwistle, sounds even...
...kind of berserk street refraction of traditional English clubmanship. Having the right clothes and shoes was important. Riding the right motor scooter was important. Gobbling the right pills in the right quantities and listening to the right music were important. All this has been captured well in Quadrophenia; there is a kind of masquerade Mod revival in England right now. Townshend, however, points out that the original Mod movement "was about fashion, but that doesn't mean it was superficial. Fashion, in a sense, is description of events after the fact. And the Mods had great taste in music...
...from the audience. He was also dosing himself for disaster, and he began to undermine the group. During an American tour in 1975, he failed to show up for a sold-out concert in Boston and, Daltrey says, "Pete never forgave him." Townshend and Daltrey had wrangled bitterly over Quadrophenia, and during the first half of the '70s each member of the band had spent as much time on his own solo projects as he had on band activities. Each put out at least one solo album. By 1976 the band had effectively stopped touring, and there were rumors that...
Like John Osborne's Angry Young Man of the '50s, the hero of Quadrophenia is named Jimmy. Estranged from his family and bored with his London mailroom job, he has become a member of the mods, a loose, nationwide gang of motorbike dandies that sprang up with the Mersey sound. As the talented director Franc Roddam follows Jimmy and his cronies around, we watch a society being born. When The Who's pivotal song. My Generation, flips on at a boozy make-out party, the kids forsake their '50s dance steps for the tribal free...
...Daniels also has two funny and touching sex scenes. When Jimmy masturbates solemnly at home and later makes inexperienced love to a prized "bird" (Leslie Ash), the film persuasively demonstrates that even the revolutions of the '60s did not overturn the crucial rituals of postadolescence. In those moments, Quadrophenia offers not only historical drama but also the kind of human drama that is timeless. -Frank Rich