The Real Me, The Who (1973)

It's a new year - and decade - so today and over the next few weeks people are contemplating how to become the person they were meant to be instead of the one they are right now.  What better day to feature this post by a guest blogger, my good colleague Chuck, who recently told me of his fixation with a treasured album, Quadrophenia, The Who's follow-up to their earlier, better known and more accessible rock opera, Tommy.  My only stipulation:  in keeping with the format of the blog, he had to pick out one song on which to focus!

Well, at first I wasn't sure if I could do that, since there are so many great songs on Quadrophenia depicting the emotional range and depth of the opera's protagonist, Jimmy, and carried off with incomparable vocal range, depth and ferocity by The Who's lead singer, Roger Daltrey. Quadrophenia has it all: throttling hard rock, elation, pain and envy, introspection, social commentary including '60s revolutionary zeal, humanity, love, poignant supplication wrapped in beautiful, lyrical melodies, and many points between.

It's the story of an English teenager and his social, musical, emotional and psychological state of being. The work is set in London and Brighton in 1964 and 1965, as the notorious Mods and Rockers battled for primacy in London's damp back streets and Brighton's resort beaches.  The opera's name is a variation on the connotative definition of the medical term schizophrenia, but in composer Pete Townshend's version reflects Jimmy's four distinct personalities, each said to represent the personality of one Who member.

I studied in England in my junior year of undergrad school (1972-73) after the war between those Mods and Rockers had wound down.  While I didn't discover Quadrophenia until I returned to the States, I did get to experience first hand the back streets, beaches, cultural setting and a slice of the view Townshend had conceived.

I now realize that I could select one out of the whole if I had to, and that would be the rocking The Real Me. It's the song that sets the stage for Jimmy, the first full piece following the overture, I Am the Sea.

Daltrey wails, "Can you see the real me," appealing to those around him ostensibly charged with his care: mother, doctor, preacher. It is teen angst-charged identity crisis taken to its logical postmodern point:  outward bursts of anger and pleading, countered by self-reflective musings. The setting is violent cultural upheaval and when splintered teen identity and alienation are layered over the social backdrop, the protagonist's plea is more than aching, more than plaintive - it's all that and, most of all, demanding, commanding: damn you, see the real me! 

As the song ends it seems to subtly sample the stuttering, stammering voice from the earlier song My Generation: "Can you see the real me-me-me."  A more pronounced stammer is picked up again and is used as a bridge in The Punk and the Godfather deeper in the work, but run through a wah-wah pedal - "me, me, my, my, my g-g-g-generation" - perhaps to again create a memory-like, ethereal reference to the earlier work.

Not often do we talk about a rock album as the composer's "most important piece" - instead we describe it as a great collection of songs, hardest rock, best licks, etc. but this is certainly Townshend's most important piece. Four personalities, four leitmotif, or even better stated, the protagonist's multiple identities reflected in the four musical themes woven through the entire work, as Jimmy's story unfolds.  It is a masterpiece.

Something in the Air, Thunderclap Newman (1969)

Pete Townshend apparently needed a hobby back in 1969 (guess releasing a groundbreaking rock opera the same year was not enough) so he created a band for some of his friends to record songs that he would try his hand at producing. That's the genesis of the classic 60s song Something in the Air by Thunderclap Newman.

The friends were pianist Andy "Thunderclap" Newman and John "Speedy" Keen, a drummer, singer, and former roadie to John Mayall's Bluesbreakers/Townshend chauffeur who had also written their 1968 song Armenia, City in the Sky, allegedly the only song The Who ever performed written by someone other than themselves.

Newman was a postal worker who wanted to hold on to his pension and simply enjoyed playing jazz in his local pubs of an evening. Nonetheless, Townshend intended to make him a star, and teamed him up with Keen, who wrote and sang the song in a distinctive falsetto, and the teenage guitarist Jimmy McCulloch to make up the group. Newman's amazing piano boogie break is one of its fine features. Townshend himself played bass and adopted the persona Bijou Drains. With its members having only just met each other at the recording sessions, it was an experiment that fizzled within the year with no further hits and one underrated album.

Although the song was #1 for three weeks in the UK, surprisingly, given the times, it never got past #37 in the US. Yet for me it defines that protest-drenched time before and during my senior year in high school, a year that would end with the shameful shootings at Kent State University and general mayhem around the country. Angst over the Vietnam war was at an all-time high. Just a few months later, more than half a million demonstrators would march on Washington, D.C. calling for withdrawal from the war.

I still remember the fellow student who was the first kid in school to have a brother killed in combat. We wore black armbands, and were ordered to remove them by our ex-Marine principal. Freedom of expression was hard to come by at Walnut Ridge High School. And probably at a lot of others.

Sunny Afternoon, The Kinks (1966)

One of the interesting aspects of the British Invasion was the inside look some bands provided into a society that was nothing like that of the U.S.

Sunny Afternoon, an acerbic satire by the Kinks on class and England's punitive tax system, was one of my favorite such inside looks. Some groups could be mistaken for any nationality, but you always knew where the Kinks hailed from.

Musically, the Kinks had their own peculiar rhythm and harmonies, personified by Ray Davies' nasal vocals. They started out as a hard-rocking band, but after a few years all that was put aside for songs that were typically vignettes of ordinary life or character studies that pinpointed the idiosyncracies of various strata of English humanity. Even the songs that sounded whimsical, such as Sunny Afternoon, weren't.

Some argue that it was precisely this nationalistic navel-gazing that was partly responsible for the Kinks failing to become as popular as other British groups. Nonetheless, in a 1995 interview with Pete Townshend commenting on influential British bands, he said, "I always think that Ray Davies should one day be Poet Laureate. He invented a new kind of poetry and a new kind of language for pop writing that influenced me from the very, very, very beginning."

Another treat I found, from 1968 - Days, from the European release of the album The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society - a lovely song I have absolutely no memory of.