Word: townshend
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...many scenes that try to convey his sensitivity by showing him brooding on the beach at Brighton. The film's final section, a long chain of cathartic crises, is contrived. Still, Phil Daniels, as Jimmy, is both appealingly quirky and a good double for Who Guitarist Pete Townshend. 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...
There were times when The Who, and Townshend in particular, were unable to deliver. Sometimes, too, Townshend even questioned his own willingness to deliver. At times like these-around the release of Who Are You in 1978 and the death that year of Drummer Keith Moon at 32-a certain kind of frantic hopelessness sets in, and the fans respond with a terrible wounded fury, with their own dark suspicions that, as Townshend once wrote, "the song is over...
...storm center. But the unsentimental truth has proved to be that the lessons of geometry do not necessarily apply, and that in rock the whole is sometimes greater than the sum of its parts. The Who endure partly on their own wild momentum, partly on the strength of Townshend's compositions-some of the most brilliant, adventurous and lacerating in all rock-and partly on the indestructibility of the covenant with the fans, who will never let their band off easy...
...Townshend, 34, has been wrestling with the dynamic connection between his audience and his music ever since he wrote My Generation. One, indeed, is the life's blood of the other. Early songs like My Generation (with its stuttered chorus, "Why don't you all f-f-f-f-fade away") and The Kids Are Alright were youth anthems in the best sense, brash and savage declarations of independence. Even the rock opera Tommy, with its dazzling music locked in perpetual combat with a convoluted narrative, passed the palm to the audience as Tommy sang to his followers...
...tour is done now. In typically eccentric Who fashion, the concerts were staged only in the New York area, partly to plug a tough and raucous film version of Quadrophenia, Townshend's ambitious chronicle of the battles between the mods and the rockers in the back streets and beach resorts of 1960s Britain. Much more, though, the appearance seems like a testing of the waters that turned into a tidal wave. Word is that The Who will be back in the States come December, making a wider swing along the East Coast and through the Midwest, and demonstrating that...