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