Friday Nov. 16

     I first saw the Who kick up "Quadrophenia" in 1996, Madison Square Garden, and though not a teenager any longer, I was in my teenage heaven. (Never thought I'd see it; the Who had done it a long time ago, failed with it, and put it to bed. Audiences familiar with "Tommy" and "Who's Next" found the narrative incomprehensible and the new songs foreign; the technology of the era did not permit the staging and sonic sophistication we routinely find today. Unlike "Tommy," the standard to which it was held, "Quadrophenia" spawned no hits. But, but, but ... "Quadrophenia" hit every target for me. It is all about a specific time and place - Brighton England, mid-'60s - and a battle between rival tribes, the Mods and the Rockers - and the identity quest of one Jimmy, a bloke whose personality is split four ways. (Didn't hurt that we shared the same name.) He's looking for love or lust, some power and control. He has a maddesire to fit in, he's battling his parents, he's observing this fast and fun world around him, asserting his manhood, hoping for some sort of redemption. Now, that wasn't exaclty my world but ... close enough at 17
    Pete Townshend has called it "probably the best record that The Who made. And it's back, live with the Who as they stand now (Townshend, Roger Daltrey plus many other sidemen) one more time, at TD Garden Friday Nov. 16. 
   Memories: I caught the first of six sellouts at MSG. It was an expertly synchronized rock extravaganza -- supporting video (some from the 1979 Franc Roddam film adaptation of "Quadrophenia"), between-song, looking-back narration/ explanation by (now) fortysomething Phil Daniels, who played the film's protagonist Jimmy; powerful emotional enhancement via an A-level, "Oz"-like light show; and an ultra-tight musical performance from the troupe, which included a four-piece horn section, three female backup singers and percussionist Jodi Linscott, a former North Shore-based musician. There were cameos from Gary Glitter - yeah, I know, I know - as the campy, mike-stand-swinging, pompadoured Godfather, and Billy Idol, as the Mod leader Ace Face, who is later revealed (and reviled) as the bellboy, a toady at a resort hotel, a poseur of a rebel, the embodiment of hypocrisy.
   Jimmy, Townshend's archetype of the mid-'60s pill-crazed, pop-crazed mod, lived again. Breathed fire. Spat cockeyed wisdom and nonsense. The piece retained its punky punch and epic sweep, its quick-hits and larger statement about youthful alienation, escape, and possible maturity.
     What makes "Quadrophenia" resonate today, so long after its inception, is its powerful, universal theme and its killer songs, many of them simultaneously bombastic and introspective. Inner angst meets arena rock; power chords mesh with quasi-operatic singing; sentimentality runs headlong into stridency. It's no wonder that Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder cites "Quadrophenia" as a seminal album.
   In "Doctor Jimmy," the cockiness and bravado come front and center. The future is pondered during the instrumental "The Rock." The conclusion follows in "Love, Reign O'er Me," where Jimmy may find some solace in the rhythm of the sea, even if he contemplates suicide. (In the film, he appears to ride his scooter off a cliff.)
     Jimmy battles all sorts of dragons, both real and imagined: quadrophenia (schizophrenia doubled), a Who fixation, a growing sense of the world's hypocrisy, a sense of the ups and downs of drugs and drink. He fights with his folks, flirts with the girls, has a brush with suicide, finds (temporary?) redemption down by the sea. Daltrey danced with unintentional irony during the "I'm wet and I'm cold/But thank God I ain't old" line. "The Rock" and "Love Reign O'er Me" combined to be the ultimate cathartic, cleansing tower of rock power. After the degradation and disintegration comes . . . something more pure. This was classic Who: music about youth, made as youths, made as adults, played now for us as adults who haven't totally grown up.
Tix: $127-$57.
Show starts at 7:30 with Vintage Trouble, a soul-rock band who, a friend says, ble 624-1050w Joss Stone off the stage.

What I wrote about Keith Moon and his bio, The Life and Death of a Rock Legend By Tony Fletcher Spike/Avon, 608 pp., illustrated, $30

On Sept. 6, 1978, the last night of his life, Keith Moon went to a London party hosted by Paul McCartney, celebrating the movie "The Buddy Holly Story." Moon snorted a bit of cocaine beforehand, but drank surprisingly little at the party. Still, he was slurry -- the result, it turned out, of a prescription drug called Heminevrin, used in the treatment of alcoholism. The drug mimicked alcohol's effects; used with alcohol, as it shouldn't be, it multiplied them.

Moon and his girlfriend Annette Walter-Lax left the party early, around midnight. At home, she cooked him lamb chops. Then, says Walter-Lax, "He has his usual glass of water and bucket of pills." Moon woke up one more time, early in the morning, and demanded she cook him a steak. He ate and went back to sleep. That was it. An autopsy revealed 32 Heminevrin pills in his system.

And thus, Keith Moon, drummer for the rock group The Who, died before he got old. But not before he looked old. By the end, at 32, Moon resembled a caricature of his young self.

Tony Fletcher's "Moon: The Life and Death of a Rock Legend" is the literary equivalent of manic-depression, a condition from which Moon likely suffered. (Multiple personality disorder is another speculative diagnosis.) The youngest member of The Who, Moon was certainly the most dysfunctional member of that highly dysfunctional musical family. He was not, on the surface, a complicated man (his core philosophy was hedonism), but he was a sharply contradictory one.

Fletcher's long tome is hilarious at times -- as when Moon and his buddies cruise neighborhoods in his Bentley and announce on a loud PA, using proper upper-class diction, a warning from their "Conservative candidate for Parliament that a boatload of refugees was about to move into the neighborhood." You can't help but laugh.

But then it gets harrowing -- as when Moon tries to chop down the door to the bathroom to get at his wife, Kim, a la Jack Nicholson in "The Shining." There's the story of Moon being quite likely at the wheel of a car that ran over and killed a member of his entourage, Neil Boland. (Moon was legally cleared, but guilty in his own mind, Fletcher writes.)

Moon's life was one where the gleeful exuberance and casual miscreance of youth gradually hardened into something harsher and meaner, though not without charm. You can't pinpoint the moment the trajectory started to head downhill. And the fact is, through thick and thin Moon's humor often came poking through. He relished sending up the opulent rock-star lifestyle while he simultaneously indulged in it.

Moon saw life as performance art, every day a dress rehearsal. His humor could go over the edge. Throughout his life he favored Nazi regalia. He'd dress up as Rommel in jodhpurs, binoculars, knee boots, leather coat, and cap and march up and down the beach. Or show up like that at a business meeting. Moon was a megalomaniac; he was also the most humble and approachable of rock stars -- everybody's friend. He was generous, abusive, hypocritical. He had an overwhelming desire to get messed up. He snorted heroin once, didn't like it, got sick. But just about everything else was fair game -- he was forever swallowing handfuls of whatever he was handed. Pete Townshend, who declined to be interviewed for the book, wrote Fletcher: "show business and society . . . feed and rewards addictive and ultimately suicidal behavior." The author agrees. He is, in fact, quite balanced in telling the tale. It's not a simple, drugs-are-bad morality story.

Again and again, Fletcher cites Moon's insecurity -- his feeling unloved despite being loved by all. At least when he was sober, which he rarely stayed for long. Moon's ethos was "too much ain't enough." Add the obscene amount of money and fame, and the attendant perks, and you get a man whose routine consisted of hurling TVs out of hotel windows and de rigueur room trashing. Is it a rock star sending up consumerism and establishment mores or an example of sociopathic behavior?

Fletcher pays a great deal of attention to Moon's pre-Who life -- when the highs were natural and the music was pure. It is argued that the best time of his life may have been while playing with the Beachcombers, a competent but unremarkable cover group that gave Moon his first taste of rock 'n' roll as a career. Fletcher also does a fine job describing Moon's chaotic brilliance, noting the "frenetic roll through the endless seas of tom toms," Moon's notion of "leading from the back, filling up spaces that had always been left open, leaving gaps where usually lay the beat." Moon didn't like drum solos, but favored "continuous punctuation." Friend and admirer Jeff Beck had no clue: "I could describe a car crash easier." His art was like his life.

Moon died shortly after the release of The Who's album "Who Are You." On the cover, the members of The Who stood amid their gear, Moon sitting in a director's chair emblazoned with the phrase "Not To Be Taken Away."
 
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