“Quadrophenia” crashed and yearned anew when the Who brought it to the Barclays Center on Wednesday night.
When Pete Townshend wrote “Quadrophenia,” his second major rock opera, in 1972-73, he was a young man looking back less than a decade, remembering the exhilaration and confusion of being a teenage Mod. It’s the story of Jimmy, whom Mr. Townshend describes in his autobiography, “Who I Am,” as a “whining little git.” He’s a foppish, brawling, amphetamine-popping, frustrated and ultimately lonely young man who ends up stranded between suicide and transcendence.
Nearly four decades later “Quadrophenia” holds a different kind of nostalgia: for the Who itself, when all four original members were alive and spirited, fulfilling Mr. Townshend’s immense ambitions. With “Quadrophenia,” Mr. Townshend was not just stringing together songs, but also composing on a larger scale. He conceived Jimmy as a composite of the band members’ personalities — tough, romantic, crazy, imploring — with recurring and eventually interlocking themes to represent them. There’s also contention within the songs, as they veer between power-chord brashness and wistful self-questioning. They’re constructed as narratives, not catchy would-be singles, and in the course of the opera they encompass a remarkable array of styles.
Onstage the music stayed almost entirely faithful to the 1973 album. The Who — with Pino Palladino on bass, Simon Townshend (Pete’s brother) on additional guitar and Zak Starkey on drums — was augmented with keyboards and brass, and the musicians seized all the music’s dynamics, from delicate to explosive. The most crucial players were Pete Townshend, who windmilled his guitar chords with gusto, and Mr. Starkey, who came close to recreating the eruptive drumming of Keith Moon.
The decades have taken more of a toll on voices. Pete Townshend has had to replace his youthful sweetness with more growls, while Roger Daltrey often strained and blustered, particularly in the later part of the show. But Mr. Daltrey still had some rock star moves, twirling his microphone on its cord and getting around to singing with his shirt wide open. (He also reserved some full-throated screams for the opera’s finale, “Love Reign O’er Me.”) Unlike a classical opera, vocal display is secondary in “Quadrophenia”; the surge of the music is paramount, and it was there.
The band set aside its re-creation of the album in “5:15,” letting Pete Townshend engage the band in an aggressive, bluesy jam, and patching in an extended bass solo by John Entwistle — shown on video — with Mr. Starkey rumbling and bashing along live. In “Drowned,” more awkwardly, Mr. Townshend added references to Hurricane Sandy.
Mr. Townshend credited this “Quadrophenia” staging entirely to Mr. Daltrey, who centered it on the Who and its era, leaving Jimmy’s story to the songs. The video backdrops often returned to images of the Who in its prime, its members posing like mates or smashing instruments onstage in bygone days.
Moon also made a video appearance, delivering his Cockney vocal on “Bell Boy.” There were also historical montages reflecting the band’s childhood years growing up in wartime, postwar and 1960s England, and later, in “The Rock” — the majestic and volatile instrumental in which the four themes reappear and finally merge — a compendium of crises up to the 21st century, matching one musical peak to Sept. 11. That was an overreach; “Quadrophenia” is an inward-looking character and generational study — periodically wondering, “Is it me for a moment?” — which is significance enough.
The Who finished the concert with hits — “Baba O’Riley,” “Behind Blue Eyes,” “Pinball Wizard,” “Won’t Get Fooled Again” — and ended with “Tea & Theatre,” from the Who’s 2006 album, “Endless Wire.” The Who’s two surviving founders were alone together onstage, reflecting, “A thousand songs still smolder now/We played them as one, we’re older now.” It was a vulnerable, ragged, honest moment.
nytimes.com
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