Pete Townshend Saved My Life
How The Who's Quadrophenia brought me out of depression and made me more resilient.
In 1984, something happened that sent me into a spiral. I don’t know if it was a breakup (that was happening to everyone) or if it was just some hormonal shift that caused a weird chemical reaction in my mind. Whatever it was, it crushed me in ways I have only glimpsed in my older years.
I could go into a psychological backstory, but that is not the point. The point is, it happened.
I was voiceless.
Alone.
Suicidal.
Ignored.
It was my teenage years. A blur of depression, anxiety, drunkenness, parties, music, heartbreaks, and hazing. I gave it and got it—equal parts victim and criminal.
It was the 80s, so none of this had been documented. Without a camera in every pocket, we never thought getting caught or being humiliated forever after was possible. You did the thing; you got talked about for a few weeks or less, and then it faded, and something else came along to replace it. Only to a teenager who is going through massive depressive episodes and wild mood swings, this was impossible to believe.
It is now 40 years after the fact. I can’t possibly feel those feelings anymore. Nor would I want to. But I sure as hell need to deal with them.
Fortunately, as I tore at myself in self-hatred and sadness in the 80s, Quadrophenia entered my life.
I had owned the album for two years.
I played it infrequently; its storyline was too foreign to me initially: a young Brit named Jimmy in the early 60s, part of a youth subculture movement (mods), trying to find his way out of an existential crisis.
I just liked the sound of the big Keith Moon drums and the loud guitars, story be damned.
But as I withdrew into my bedroom world of records, cheap carpet, and headphones, I started to really listen.
“Is it me, for a moment?”
The rushing waves in the opening track transported me, the sound taking me to the shoreline, empty and desolate. I needed to be taken away, away from the guilt, anxiety, and voiceless world I was in. I didn’t know who I was or what I was supposed to be, just like Jimmy.
“The girl I used to love
Lives in this yellow house
Yesterday she passed me by
She doesn't want to know me now”
Yeah, I get it. I felt that way about everyone. Or, I should say, I was convinced they felt that way about me.
The music's anger and the lyrics' pleading should work against each other. But sometimes sadness is a close cousin to rage.
The Real Me is an opening salvo to prepare the listener for the story. It sets the stage for the turmoil about to unfold.
“Why do I have to move with a crowd
Of kids that hardly notice I'm around
I have to work myself to death just to fit in”
Jimmy, the protagonist and non-hero, fights with his family and who he is in society. But what is teenage society? I couldn’t answer it then, and I can’t now. All I could try to do was find a place that didn’t completely suck all the time.
Jimmy continues his journey. Actually, I should say Jimmy continues to exist.
“Every year is the same
And I feel it again
I'm a loser - no chance to win
Leaves start falling
Come down is calling
Loneliness starts sinking in”
You may be wondering at this point how the hell could this downer of an album possibly save your life? It's just a kid who wanders aimlessly and wallows in self-pity.
The funny thing about self-pity is that it only exists when you are around other people. Neither I nor Jimmy had that.
As the tale unfolds, Jimmy begins interacting with others, seeking a job, and traveling outside his immediate area. Movement equals growth. However, lack of movement has the opposite effect. This, for me, is where the salvation begins. In the depths of my depression and the depths of Jimmy’s isolation,
We see movement
We see action
We see anger and hope.
The introspection intensifies.
“I pick up phones and hear my history
I dream of all the calls I miss
I try to number those who love me
And find exactly what the trouble is”
But the insecurity still exists.
“I feel I'm being followed
My head is empty
Yet every word I say turns out a sentence
Statements to a stranger
Just asking for directions
Turn from being help to being questions”
When we hit the song “I’ve Had Enough”, the doors blow off. This is where I started to turn around. The depression, the sadness, the pity, and the loneliness suddenly become controllable. Jimmy realizes that the problems aren’t all with him but with everyone.
We are all pretenders, and we are all on the hustle.
“You were under the impression
That when you were walking forwards
You'd end up further onward
But things ain't quite that simple”
We’re in a fight. A fight for ourselves, for our own mind, heart, and soul, and our own existence, internal and external.
“Get a job and fight to keep it
Strike out to reach a mountain
Be so nice on the outside
But inside keep ambition”
This breaks me out. The idea that this malingering sorrow over my inept ability to speak to my depression is not a rock that lays on top of me but is a rock I can throw; throw it at the windows I stare out of. Break the fucking thing. Open it up and stick your head out.
Jimmy continues his travels, meeting heroes who aren’t, setting himself adrift in an ocean not to die but to be reborn. He may be drunk. He may be pilled up. But he is his own person. He realizes that nothing is as it seems. And that includes himself.
“I'm wet and I'm cold
But thank God I ain't old
I should have split home at fifteen
Why didn't I ever say what I mean?
There's a story that the grass is so green
What did I see?
Where have I been?”
The finale, “Love Reign O’er Me,” caps off the work with the perfect moment where all hope comes from love and all love is rain (reign.) The water, whether beneath our feet or over our heads, is the source of who we are.
We flow
We ebb
We sustain ourselves
“Only love
Can make it rain
The way the beach is kissed by the sea
Only love
Can make it rain
Like the sweat of lovers'
Laying in the fields’
This isn’t a call to a lost love. It’s a call to all loves everywhere who need solace and comfort. It is a cry of hope in the swirling madness of the sea as Jimmy sits alone atop a rock. But he is that rock, and he is that sea. He is both stable and undulating.
And that is the realization that saved my life.
I was not alone in this. There was another person out there who felt like I did and had the same longings and anxieties, the lack of self-esteem, the guilt of being “wrong” as a person.
And it wasn’t Jimmy. It was Pete Townshend.
Jimmy represents the thousands and thousands of kids, generation after generation, who struggle with identity and self-worth. But Jimmy is just that, a representation.
The true revelation is that it was written by a person whom I admired greatly, whom I looked up to and emulated—a person who was famous and flawed.
All of a sudden, I was real.
I was seen.
I was heard.
I wanted to be both tough and soft
Ambitious and forgiving
Understanding and forthright.
Pete Townshend gave me the tools through Jimmy to understand that it is possible to be all these things and feel like an outlier, not an outcast.
I wasn’t damaged.
I was unique.
I had to listen to the album several more times before it truly entered my consciousness. It was over a year before I escaped from self-harm and suicidal ideation. But this gave me the hope that it could be done.
By escaping into the waves of the sea and allowing myself to be cast adrift in a musical world that I never experienced, I found the starting point for healing. It was on a rock.
And I am that rock.
And I am that sea.
“A tough guy, a helpless dancer.
A romantic, is it me for a moment?
A bloody lunatic, I'll even carry your bags.
A beggar, a hypocrite, love reign over me.
Schizophrenic? I'm bleeding Quadrophrenic.”
Ethan Russell – art direction, photography
Pete Townshend - lyrics
Very articulate, thanks for sharing your story. I personally dont think 'Jimmy the mod' is a doppelganger for Pete. In truth, Tommy (from the rock opera of that name) is more of a representation of Pete. Just like the would-be messiah, Pete overcome early, family-based trauma and became a famous idol. Jimmy the mod is more of an anonymous lad, trying to find what is truly 'his' in this world while dealing with mental health issues. Since Jimmy has four separate personalities, he is a doppelganger not so much for Pete as an individual but the band as a whole - and maybe the Mods as a culture.