'Quadrophenia' - The Who
As adolescence dragged me kicking, screaming and crying into adulthood, 'Quadrophenia' provided the only music that knew how to stoke my rage; music and lyrics that I clung to like a frightened cub clinging tightly to it's mother. This music pierced my conscience, it screamed at me, told me to run away, run as fast as I could from the depression, loneliness and confusion that had suddenly snatched me from my idylic childhood.
How vividly I remember those tearful summer evenings, when I would sneak out of my parents house and wander for miles, clutching my stolen bottle of vodka, my precious personal stereo, and my beloved 'Quadrophenia' tape. Where I went and who I met I would never truly know.
Fuelled by the neat vodka, I would run around in the dark, crying at strangers, weeping under bridges, trying so hard to understand the confusion and misery that had taken me prisoner, often crashing flat on my face on the hard pavement. But always with Pete Townshend's lyrics and dazzling guitar riffs spinning and thudding through my brain.
"L-o-o-o-v-e, rain on me, rain on me?"
How I ever got home I'll never know. I remember waking up in the mornings, I remember the vomit, the blood, the vodka-burnt lips, the shaking and the pounding headaches that would last for days. I remember the stomach churning guilt when lying to my mother about where I'd been.
Maybe I identified with the film, maybe just the lyrics; I just didn't know anything anymore. Except that this album 'cared' for me, the music understood me and what I was going through. My bedroom in those days was usually thick with the odour of sleep, loneliness and dead tears, but always filled with the tinny, bashing sound of my personal stereo at full volume, spilling those beautiful, hard songs into my head, one after the other, over and over and over again.
"I went back to my mother, I said, 'I'm crazy ma, help me!'
She said, 'I know how you feel, 'Cos it runs in the family.'"
I was lost in that nasty little vodka-sluiced gutter for a number of years; adrft, directionless, and dangerously lonely. Listening to those same songs today makes me want to forget my early adulthood, not remember it. Yet without them I know things would have been much worse. So I would just like to say, "thanks, Pete". Thanks for being by my side when I was alone and when I needed you most. God bless.
