Quadrophenia
celebrated the 35th anniversary of its debut at the movies today, according to
Kathy Shaidle, who links to the film’s trailer, and an hour-long “Making Of” video.
I became
a huge fan of The Who in response to The Kids Are Alright, both the 1979 movie
and the soundtrack double album (an actual album, long before there were tiny
silver CDs), and its accompanying booklet filled with beautifully written
hagiography by British rock critic Roy Carr. (I just checked the author’s name;
it’s one of the few actual LPs I still own, complete with price tag indicating
it was purchased One Million Years Before CD at the Turntable record store in
Willingboro, NJ.)
I loved
the sturm und drang of the roaring original Quadrophenia album from 1973, and
played it endlessly (and still do from time to time). So when the movie version
of Quadrophenia followed the Kids Are Alright movie out of the gate, I eagerly
anticipated it. When I saw it, though, I had a very difficult time reconciling
that the music, sung by Roger Daltrey in all his hard rocking macho glory, was
built around Jimmy the Mod, a scrawny little 16-year old shrimp of a kid
puttering around on his Vespa scooter. For a guy who grew up among classmates
in suburban New Jersey who owned Camaros, Mustangs and Mopars, it was cognitive
dissonance in the extreme.
But
then, most of the iconography of the early 1960s British Mods initially seemed
impenetrable, except for two things: rationing and information ricochet. The
mods were a rebellion against the last stages of the postwar rationing
maintained by its socialist government, which hadn’t ended until the late
1950s, a rebellion built around what we would now call conspicuous consumption,
of American Brooks Brothers Ivy League clothes, Italian scooters and the La
Dolce Vita lifestyle depicted in Italian cinema, and American Motown music.
As
opposed to their arch rivals, the Rockers, who worshiped American 1950s rock
and roll, and the image that Marlon Brando cultivated in The Wild One.
And with
their rival obsessions over American culture, both the British mods and rockers
were enmeshed in what Tom Wolfe used to describe in the late 1970s and early
1980s as “Information Ricochet,” such as in this 1983 interview (with Ron
Reagan, of all people):
The
history of punk seems to go as follows: It was picked up by young English
people and used in somewhat the same way that Los Angeles teenagers used the
word rotten to mean good. Punk had a certain genuine quality at the outset in
England as a kind of version of the great gob of spit in the face of the class
system. So there was this elaborate glorification of things rotten, as in the
name Johnny Rotten. Then it was brought to this country in magazines. It had no
roots in this country whatsoever. Young people read about it, and the shops
existed before the phenomenon. It just caught on as a fashion. This is what I
think of as information ricochet. The Hell’s Angels, for example, didn’t exist
until the movie The Wild One. They looked at The Wild One and said, “Oh, that’s
the way it’s done.” So they took their own name and insignia and stuff, and
Roger Corman came by and said, “Oh, that’s the way it’s done,” and made a movie
called The Wild Angels. And the Hell’s Angels came by and said, “That’s a nice
idea; we’ll do that.” That’s information ricochet. Punk was developed the same
way, and the only genuine thing about it is a general impulse among people in
their late teens to thumb their nose at the ongoing attempts to make them act
like adults, which begin to seem like an imposition and rather boring. So you
glorify wanton, impudent violence.
Of
course, the information ricochet surrounding the mods and their story was
endless. As Franc Roddam, the director of the film version, notes in the making
of documentary that Kathy links to, he originally wanted to cast punk rockers,
to help make the film more accessible to young audiences in the late 1970s.
Roddam claims that Johnny Rotten had an excellent screen test, but he was
unable to get insurance on the musician, based on the Sex Pistols’ destructive
reputation. The film makers settled for Sting as supporting character, in one
of his first movie roles.
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