FROM WON'T GET FOOLED AGAIN: THE WHO FROM
LIFEHOUSE TO QUADROPHENIA Quadrophenia:
The Stories Behind the Album's Sound Effects, Cover Design, and Booklet
The Who finally began their Quadrophenia
sessions at Ramport on May 21, about nine months after Townshend had
first discussed the opera in the press. Work was certainly serious by
June 3, when they transferred material from eight-track to 16-track.
Though Daltrey had said in the April 26 Rolling Stone
that they would have a new LP out by June, that was now an
impossibility. The recording console still wasn't ready; the producer
would pretty much fade out of the project; and they were using an
engineer with whom they'd never before worked. Yet within only a couple
of months or so, they had the basis of a classic double album.
As good as The Who's performances for Quadrophenia
were, there was more to be done than simply blending their tracks when
it came time to mix the album at Pete's new home studio in
Goring-on-Thames. More than any other rock album, perhaps (though Pink
Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon,
also released in 1973, gave it a run for its money), Quadrophenia made innovative and
purposeful use of a multitude of sound effects to set its mood and
accent various aspects of the lyrics (and hence, in this case, story).
Most of these were not sound effects lifted off other recordings, as
The Beatles had done for many of the tracks on which they used such
snippets (often from the library of EMI's studios on Abbey Road). Most
of them were taped, in the field as it were, specifically for the LP.
These are not mere novelties or gimmicks. They are
essential to the overall impact of the opera, almost as if they're part
of the non-musical soundtrack to a movie on record. Beach noises and
wave crashes are a big part of this, but so are the grim newscast
report of a mod vs. rocker riot as a kettle comes to a boil; the roar
of a stadium crowd near the end of 'The Punk Meets the Godfather'; the
rush of a passing train at the end of 'I've Had Enough'; the chanting
striking workers in 'The Dirty Jobs'; the bleat of a train whistle near
the start of '5:15' (recorded at Waterloo Station after the engineer
had been bribed five pounds to blow it as his train pulled out, in
violation of regulations); and, most wittily of all, the distant sound
of the first few lines of The Who's own classic record 'The Kids Are
Alright' after 'Helpless Dancer,' simulating the sound of hearing a
band in the dancehall. It reminds us that the group were a part of
Jimmy's life too, if somewhere off in the background.
"It's not a story, more a series of impressions of
memories," explained Townshend in NME
when the album was released. "The real action in this is that you see a
kid on a rock in the middle of the sea and this whole thing explains
how he got there. That's why I used sound effects: to establish
atmosphere. Some of the sound effects, I've tried to manipulate
impressionistically. It's something that's new to me and I'm not
particularly good at it, but I'm glad I did it."
"I recorded most of 'em myself," says Ron Nevison.
"The biggest project was the sea. I took Ronnie [Lane]'s truck down by
myself on a weekend down to Cornwall, only because I had vacationed
there previously. I knew where I wanted to go, I had a perfect spot,
and it was a great day. I put four microphones out, and recorded
quadraphonic sea sound (of course, I only got to use stereo). So I set
up four [Neumann] U 87s, two on the rocks and two in the back, waited
for the tide to come in, spent about three, four, five, six hours, I
don't remember. When the tide went out, I recorded a bunch of sea
noise. That's the sea that you hear throughout the album, especially at
the beginning.
"I recorded the rain a couple of different places. I
went out to Wales on a rainy weekend, in a tent, and I took a really
high-quality stereo recorder. I was hoping to get thunder, but you
can't wait for thunder. It's not something you can program. So I ended
up getting a lot of rain. Then I also recorded rain at Ramport on a
rainy night. I always had the recorder ready in case we got thunder,
but we never did. So I ended up having to use thunder from archival
footage."
You can't exactly program sea waves either, and Rod
Houison, credited (with Nevison and Townshend) for sound effects on the
LP, says some special engineering was called for to get what they
needed. "I was down with Ron doing the sea stuff," he recalls. "Here we
are down on Cornwall on probably the quietest sea day that you've ever
imagined, and we're trying to get surf that's gonna be breaking not
only around us, but behind us, against some kind of imaginary cliff.
That was Pete's idea – just find a rocky outcrop, put four mikes out
there, and get the water to rush by and then crash up the cliff behind.
"We stuck out these enormously expensive mikes, and
there was this trickle of water. Ron said, 'We're gonna be here days!'
So he cranked up the mike gain to get the water to sound as if it was
actually more than a trickle. But every now and again you'd hear this
'ruff ruff.' There was not a thing in sight; just sea, and that was it.
Then we found that three quarters of a mile away was a dog. That's how
much we had to crank up the gain in order to get the sea sound. Later,
I think it was the next day, all came clear and we got some decent
surf. Then it was a toss-up: 'Well, who swims? Because somebody's gonna
have to go out and get four very expensive microphones quickly.' I was
elected, so I did it."
Closer to home, Nevison went to Hyde Park's famed
Speakers' Corner and was shown off the property, unaware that taping
was not allowed. He wasn't supposed to tape the brass band (used to
link 'The Dirty Jobs' with 'Helpless Dancer') in London's Regent's Park
either, "but this time I was smart. I hid the microphones in like a
bag, and just stuck the heads of the microphones out to pick up the
noise."
Townshend himself joined the fun by spending
evenings on the Thames at his Goring-on-Thames home recording birds
taking off from the water, at one point dropping his tape recorder and
mike into the river. "We went out on a dinghy with an outboard motor
and recorded lots of little outboard motor sounds and walking,
footsteps, just bits and pieces that we used," recalls Jon Astley,
later to be involved in producing and remastering/remixing many Who
releases, and who was at that time Townshend's brother-in-law. "I was
just a
student at the time, so it was very exciting. They helped the story
along, which is great. When the guy's walking on the beach, you hear
the pebbles; you get immediately the picture in your mind of where is
and what he's doing." Pete also walked around London recording street
noises for possible use, in stereo no less.
Houison went beyond the line of duty to get the
blaring train horn that follows Daltrey's scream on 'I've Had Enough,'
actually stepping onto the tracks himself. "I had a couple of Neumann
microphones, and my first attempt was standing by a very fast railway
line which wasn't too far from Goring," he remembers. "I was standing
about 15-20 feet from the train. The trains would hurtle by, and all
they sounded like was a bit like a jet passing. So I thought, okay,
we're gonna have to get the guy to sound his horn as it passes. Now,
trying to actually bribe somebody to do that is completely impossible.
So there I was with my headphones, and these things would appear just
about 90-100 miles per hour around this bend, and we'd step onto the
line. You would then get [mimics an engineer sounding his horn]. So
obviously, that became a train rather than a jet passing."
The greatest stroke of ingenuity was reserved for
the newscast of the Brighton riot, read by an actual BBC radio
announcer, John Curle. "He was a very revered and well-loved
announcer," recalls Houison. "We bought various what we called
medium-wave simulators, which didn't work. It never sounded quite
right. So in the end, Pete bribed this guy to actually read the actual
paragraph on the 6:00 news, or whichever news it was. And he in his
very official voice said, 'down in Brighton,' or whatever. We recorded
it off a genuine radio down at Goring-At-Thames and that worked
extremely well. As I remember it was recorded live from the AM radio in
my XKE Type Jag parked outside the studio. All the AM simulators of the
day didn't sound real enough." (Richard Barnes thinks that John
Walters, the BBC radio producer who'd commissioned Keith Moon to do the
four-episode 1973 summer comedy show A
Touch of the Moon, probably helped with obtaining clearing the
usage of the BBC announcer and other sound effects, accounting for why
Walters is thanked in the LP credits.)
Didn't that broadcast sound a bit curious to
millions of other listeners, announcing mod riots on live radio that
certainly weren't happening in 1973? "Yes, absolutely," Rod responds.
"Immediately afterwards, he gave an explanation. A bit like [when]
Orson Welles's War of the Worlds
[was broadcast in 1938]. This guy was so well respected that he could
do something like that. As far as Pete was concerned, it had to be this guy, because of his
very recognizable and respected voice." The whistle that rises and
descends in the background "was in fact a kettle with the old fashioned
removable whistling spout."
Mixing all of this stuff together was not easy with
1973 technology. "The biggest thing I remember about the mixing [is],
we had a lot of sound effects," remarks Nevison. "We were on 16 tracks.
Can you imagine, with all the synthesizer, all the vocals, all the
effects, and everything? We didn't have room to put everything onto the
16-track. So Pete got hold of a couple of these cartridge players that
they used in radio stations for commercials. We had two machines – he
had one and I had one – and we would load the sound effects. In other
words, you'd click a button, and it goes off, and then the next one
comes up, and then you hit the button again and the next one goes off,
like commercials [which, as a footnote, The Who had actually inserted
as links throughout their great 1967 LP The Who Sell Out]. So we'd load
them in in the order that we had in the mix. He'd have like three or
four on one side, and I'd have three or four on the other side. And
when we wanted thunder, or we wanted a train whistle, we'd just like
hit the button, and sound effects would come out. And that was how we
achieved all the sound effects, 'cause we didn't have room for them on
the recording."
As an unfortunate side (not sound) effect, Nevison
points out, subsequent mixes for CD don't "have some of the qualities
that we put in there, because we had scattered all that stuff on
cartridge machines. The train whistle is gone from '5:15,' even though
I think I was very careful to archive all of the sound effects on
quarter-inch tape. They probably should have been stored with the mixes
and everything else. But because stuff wasn't on the 16-track, they
would have lost some."
Continues Ron, "Then once the whole thing was mixed,
the next thing was cross-fading from one song to another, which was a
tricky thing. Each side of [the] four sides of this record had like 100
edits in it. One time I was spooling through one side of the record and
the edit came apart, and the whole thing went on the floor. Luckily,
nothing was injured. We were freaked out, but a splice had come apart,
so we just carefully picked it back up, and certainly it was cool. But
the whole Goring thing was just Pete and I, the two of us, mixing. I
don't even think there was an assistant there, just the two of us did
it. For maybe three weeks we were there." Adds Houison, who built the
studio, "We had upwards of maybe 12, 13, sometimes 15 machines running
in the room at the time on the mix. There were endless amounts of
effects running. Setting up the room used to take forever."
There would later be complaints that the mix wasn't
all it could have been, and particularly criticisms that Daltrey's
vocals weren't prominent enough. "The thing that disappointed me about
that album was the production," Roger told Crawdaddy, "because there's so much
on the album, but you can only hear it with the cans on, and that's not
what albums are about. An album has to have a sound that makes people
leave it on when they're having conversation. We narrowed the market
with Quadrophenia by making
an album you have to sit down and listen to. Most people don't have
that kind of time."
In the January 2003 Uncut, Daltrey was more explicitly
critical. "My main regret on that album is the recording process," he
groused. "Ron Nevison, who was the producer [sic] at the time with
Pete, recorded it with echo on the vocal which can never be removed
now. It just makes the vocal sound thin. It was the biggest recording
mistake we ever made. The echo diminishes the character as far as I'm
concerned. It always pissed me off. From day one I just fucking hated
the sound of it. He did that voice and I've never forgiven Ron for it."
"I have to say that the mix still holds up for me,"
Nevison counters. "I did talk to Pete a few years ago, and he still
likes the mix that we did. Pete and I did what we thought sounded
right. This happens in almost every project I've ever done [and Nevison
has done many, including engineering for albums by Led Zeppelin and The
Rolling Stones, and production for numerous others]. Not everybody's
happy with all the mixing you do. In this case, as an engineer, I
followed Pete. Pete was the producer. If I thought he was making a
mistake, I would speak up. But it wasn't about Roger. It was about The
Who."
As strong as it was, Quadrophenia's music could not
convey the full depth of its driving concept on its own. That would
particularly be true outside of the UK, where the mod movement wasn't
nearly as well known, and especially to the all-important North
American audience, to most of whom mod was a rumor at best. And just as
there was no other album where sound effects were as important in
fleshing out the music, there was no other album where the physical
packaging was as important to making its message more easily and widely
understood. Pete Townshend would indicate to Disc that this was done primarily
for the American audience, probably in accurate hopes of making the
very British story more easily comprehensible to Stateside listeners.
The Who were not strangers to elaborate gatefold
sleeves, Tommy having been a
six-panel production with a cover design by Meher Baba acolyte Mike
McInnerney. While Quadrophenia
would have the four-panel design more common to gatefold double LPs, in
other respects The Who, and particularly Pete Townshend, realized that
more was needed. The left panel of the inner gatefold featured a
Townshend short story/narrative of sorts in Jimmy's voice, running to
more than a dozen paragraphs. Not only did it explain, more or less,
what Jimmy was up to in the days leading up to his epiphany on the
rock, but it was told in a half-articulate manner as reflective of his
scrambled psyche as the songs were. Nor was it devoid of irreverent
self-mocking humor, most memorably in the unsentimentally realistic
description of The Who as Jimmy saw them onstage, with a guitar player
who "was a skinny geezer with a big nose who twirled his arm like a
windmill. He wrote some good songs about mods, but he didn't quite look
like one."
The gatefold's short story, Townshend fretted in Rock magazine, was "a little
strained because it's put together around the album itself. It's a
little bit of character building put in to let you know just how
uneducated the character was, but also the fact that he was all right
besides that. That was really all that was for, but I found it quite
hard to write. You can see I went incredibly heavy on a sort of Catcher in the Rye thing to get it
across."
Better yet was the 44-page LP-sized booklet, which
aside from a couple lyric sheets was devoted entirely to
black-and-white pictures by Who's
Next photographer Ethan Russell. No captions, no explanatory
text – just shots of "Jimmy" (played by Terry "Chad" Kennett, who'd
been spotted by Townshend in a pub on Cecily Street near the studio)
riding his scooter, hanging out with the mod gang, working as a
dustman, walking and sleeping on the beach, taking a boat to the rock,
riding the 5:15 train, and even watching the real-life 1973 Who posing
in front of London's Hammersmith Odeon. The very first shot of "Jimmy,"
on page three, shows him riding the scooter in what appears to be an
especially dismal neighborhood, smokestacks spewing in the background;
this is in fact the very street on which Ramport Studios was situated,
as Daltrey asserted in Rolling Stone.
More effectively even than the short story, the
booklet made the mod experience graspable to those too young or remote
from Britain to have lived through it first-hand, almost as though the
photos were stills from a film of the opera. Crucially, it also did so
without glamorization. Quite the contrary ¬– if the stereotypical
image of the Swinging Sixties is in glowing Technicolor, this is the
gray, grim, but more realistic flipside, down to the close-up of a
disgusting half-finished meal of chips, peas, eggs, toast, and sausage
(a particular favorite among US fans unfamiliar with the delights of
proletarian British cuisine). "I don't know whose idea [the booklet]
was, probably Pete's, but it was fucking brilliant," enthuses Richard
Barnes. "It could be questionable that he got an American photographer.
Americans don't understand mods. But on the other hand, it was quite
good, 'cause Ethan didn't have any preconceived ideas."
However, as John Atkins rightly speculates in The Who on Record: A Critical History,
1963-1998, it's difficult to believe Russell or (more likely)
Townshend had not seen the obscure 1970 British cult film Bronco Bullfrog. For that movie's
tale of down-and-out East London teens has a black-and-white bleakness
quite similar in tone to the photos in the Quadrophenia booklet. This could be
dismissed as coincidence, but a couple of scenes from the movie so
strongly foreshadow specific Russell shots that wonders. Particularly
striking are similarities between Bronco
Bullfrog's shot of its hero's smashed bike and the image of a
smashed scooter on page 22 of the booklet. Another Bronco Bullfrog sequence shows its
hero walking on his own through London's ghostly Greenwich Foot Tunnel,
which runs underneath the length of the River Thames; on page six of
the booklet, Kennett/Jimmy strolls alone through the exact same tunnel.
Indeed, some elements of Bronco
Bullfrog are echoed, though not as strongly, in the story of Quadrophenia itself. Both feature
misunderstanding parents, a gang of directionless working-class youths,
and a waterside anti-climax where the protagonist seems to have run out
of options. But such is the dead-end mood of Bronco Bullfrog (set at the end of
the 60s rather than the mid 60s) – no pills, beachside riots, or
rock'n'roll are even on hand to alleviate the boredom – that it makes
Jimmy's predicament seem a bit glamorous in comparison, not least
because Jimmy's scooter is way more flash than the anemic one
put-puttering in the film.
Originally intended, according to Russell's memoir Dear Mr. Fantasy, to be 18 pages,
the booklet took on a life of its own. "Pete rang me up and said, 'I'm
having ever so much trouble with this fucking cover because everybody's
got their own idea of what mods were,'" Barnes remembers. "We're
getting nowhere, and we've been on it for weeks. We've not shot
anything, no one can agree on anything. Why don't you come in and
art-direct it?'" So it was that Richard was tasked with helping to cast
the kids and find the appropriate scooter and wardrobe, verifying
"clothing details, attitudes etc" with his unpaid assistant Linden
Kirby, a 60s mod thanked simply as "Linden" in the LP credits.
"I thought, 'Why should I know?,'" he admits. "But I
went and got hold of some mods and asked them. I suppose because Pete
said, 'Barney's going to [do it],' they all did what I said. If I said
'they wore this' – not in my view, what I was told by my advisors –
that's what they wore. So in a way it was good, 'cause Ethan then
wouldn't be involved with dressing up the kids and getting them looking
right. 'Cause he wouldn't have a clue." Yet as Barnes stresses, "Ethan
did a wonderful job, and I thought we got those kids looking just like
fucking mods. Not particularly top mods, but just everyday straight kid
mods. The main guy we got to do it, this guy Chad, he was brilliant.
And we got Paul, Pete's [much younger] brother, 'cause he looked like a
young Pete." Most of the kids were recruited from the run-down
working-class neighborhood around the street on which Ramport was
situated, Thessaly Road.
"We were just left alone to get on it with it, it
was brilliant, Barnes resumes, though they did have to get permission
from the local authorities to pull off the shots of the gang wrecking
and overturning a car. "It was quite a long shoot. We went to lots of
different places, and sort of did one or two scenes a day. Nobody
queried the budget. We ended up buying the clothes. I had a fucking
chauffeur-driven car driving around location to location. We spent a
lot time in Brighton, and we broke into the West Pier, which is boarded
up – the dangerous one, which is the more beautiful Victorian pier –
and took pictures. I think we climbed over the padlocked fence and
barbed wire. I spent a whole afternoon in a bookshop looking at porn
pictures for that boy's bedroom."
The shooting almost came to a premature end,
according to Russell's memoir, when Kennett had to appear in court on
charges of stealing a bus. The photographer had to testify that the
20-year-old was essential to the project before they were free to shoot
the final sections of the booklet in Cornwall, Russell only learning
that Kennett couldn't swim after taking the picture of "Jimmy" jumping
off a boat. The Who's management told Russell that a half-dozen
trainloads of paper were ordered for the booklet, in what was turning
out to be a very expensive release, even aside from the considerable
studio and production costs for the music alone. "I think there was a
shortage of silver that was used in film in those days in the world at
the time he was taking the pictures, 'cause he took so many fucking
pictures," laughs Barnes. "He took fucking millions of shots. They had
a whole vault of pictures." And sadly, according to Richard,
"They're all lost, they're all disappeared."
If the hope was for the booklet to illustrate the
mod experience to American audiences in particular, The Who probably
succeeded to an extent that has yet to be fully acknowledged. Despite
subsequent speculation that the LP underperformed in the US, in part
because of Stateside listeners' inability to understand its cultural
context, many fans eagerly absorbed the basics from both the music and
the packaging. "I was 12 years old when Quadrophenia came out and, as a
fairly sheltered pre-teen living in Los Angeles, I had no knowledge of
the mod scene beyond my already-established love of The Who and The
Kinks," remembers Barry Smolin, now the host of the Sunday night The Music Never Stops program on LA
radio station KPFK. "Despite this ignorance, I was immediately
captivated by the music on Quadrophenia,
both its power and ambition. The lyrics contained many references I
didn't understand at first hearing ('zoot suit, white jacket with side
vents,' 'my mother found a box of blues,' 'maybe a touch of seersucker
with an open neck,' 'G S scooter,' 'wartime coat,' etc), but through
context and inference I was able to make some sense of it on my own."
Adds Smolin for emphasis, "The booklet that came
with the LP, though, was what brought mod culture alive in my mind and
helped me visualize Townshend's imagery more concretely. The booklet
created a more evocative experience for a kid so far removed from mod
culture and the zeitgeist of that era in Britain – the way it looked
and felt and even smelled. I would listen to the album and stare at the
booklet for hours on my bed. The black and white photography, the foggy
gray atmosphere, the wetness of the roads, the dark sea, the fashions
worn, the haircuts, the posters on the walls – all of it came alive
visually, which, in turn, added to the impact of the music."
While Russell photos of a beach and a half-drowned
scooter were backdrops on the back cover and inner gatefold, the front
cover (shot on August 24, the same day as The Who posed in front of the
Hammersmith Odeon) used a striking rear-view picture of Kennett on a
scooter, cloaked in a jacket with The Who's insignia. Taken by Roger
Daltrey's cousin, Graham Hughes (also responsible for photograph on Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy, as well
as the front cover of Townshend standing on a floor of eggs on Who Came First), it also featured
four rear view mirrors on the scooter, each showing a reflection of
different men from The Who. Along with the use of the title lettering
for Quadrophenia on all four
sides of the cover, it was the LP's most visual representation of Jimmy
and The Who's "quadrophenic" personality, and perhaps more memorable
than any such reference in the songs themselves.
"We had to carry ... almost drive this scooter up
the stairs to my first floor studio," Hughes remembered in Anyway Anyhow Anywhere: The Complete
Chronicle of The Who. "The front cover picture was taken against
a special sky blue canvas. Roger thought of the idea of painting The
Who logo on the back of the kid's parka. I still hadn't figured out
where the group were going to appear, when the idea of the wing mirrors
suddenly dawned on me. I asked Pete, John, and Roger to crouch down and
stare into the glass while I shot each image. Keith had disappeared, so
I had to go down to Tara and photograph him separately in his
greenhouse to get the same effect."
As to why Hughes and not Russell got to do the cover
photo, Richard Barnes feels, "That's politics. That's because Roger
complained that it was all Pete's album, Pete's idea. The thing about Quadrophenia was that Pete didn't
involve the rest of the band in it like he did with Tommy. Really, Quadrophenia is Townshend's solo
album using The Who. He had involved John a bit in it; John had done
some recording of brass, because that's John's bag. But I don't think
he involved the others. There was also this thing that, roughly, they
took turns in doing the covers. It was kind of Roger's turn. I was
outraged, 'cause I thought Ethan had worked so hard and had got such
fantastic photographs, [though] I like Graham, I think he's a great
photographer. I thought it was a bit much, but Pete just accepted it,
'cause I think he realized that he was doing absolutely everything."
In a sense, Quadrophenia
ended up being, in a more low-key way, the kind of multimedia work
Townshend had hoped to create with Lifehouse.
There wasn't a film (though eventually it would be adapted into a
superb one), but the booklet was close to being one; there wasn't a
book (as Pete had been reported to consider doing for Lifehouse), but there was a short
story. The booklet, story, and cover art were much enhanced by the
12-by-12-inch format of the vinyl era, gaining an impact impossible to
replicate when the artwork is shrunk down to CD size. There was one
much hoped-for multimedia component of a sort, however, that didn't
come off.
Part of the reason that the album had been titled Quadrophenia was that The Who hoped
to issue it in quadraphonic sound. Only recently introduced for vinyl
releases, the format never would take off as stereo had, in part
because few listeners had (or were interested in getting) equipment
that could enable them to listen to quadraphonic recordings. The Who's
US label, MCA, "had adopted a certain system for this quadraphonic
bullshit, which is all it was," in Ron Nevison's estimation. "It was
supposed to be the next thing after stereo. But it was a bunch of crap.
They took the stereo and they folded in out-of-phase tracks. It wasn't
any kind of what we call discrete quad, where you have dedicated left,
left-right front, left-right rear [channels]."
Continues Nevison, "We started recording the drums
before we found out that we weren't gonna do quad. I didn't know what
the fuck to do, really. I had no clue. We started on four tracks, so I
just put the drums on four tracks, and mixed 'em out with the drummer
seated in the middle, with the snare and the kick in the middle. I
figured that at least that way, it would be centered, with the drums
out to the right and to the left, and the cymbals in the back maybe.
But it worked in stereo, and that's what I made sure of -- that the
four tracks, when mixed together, worked in stereo. So even though it
was in quad, it was really a big stereo.
"When we tried a test mix halfway through with the
album – when we finally got the equipment to encode these bullshit quad
tracks – we realized that the front-to-back separation was like 5dB
[decibels]. It was like a big giant mono." In other words, listeners
playing the album would hear far less difference between the channels
than could be heard in the four-channel mixes created in the studio.
They wouldn't be hearing anything like the mix as The Who intended it
to be experienced. Instead, there would be little to distinguish the
sound coming out of the two rear speakers from the sound emanating from
the two normal stereo front ones. As a point of reference, the
left-right separation between speakers on a typical home stereo at the
time would have been in the 70-80 dB range; by comparison, the
front-to-back quadraphonic separation of 5 dB was puny.
Resumes Ron, "Pete said, 'You know, I am not going
to do a quad mix that's worse than the stereo mix. Period.' And that
was it. He sent that memo to MCA. They were furious, I think, because
they wanted to launch their whole quad thing with Quadrophenia, [on] a Who album, the
follow-up to Tommy. The whole
kind of nine yards. And I was right with him, man. I thought this was a
bunch of shit."
At the home studio he built for Townshend at Pete's
property in Goring-on-Thames, adds Rod Houison, "Certainly everything
we built was based on quadraphonic sound. We bought four of everything.
Putting it on four-channel tape is one thing; that's very easy to do,
and you get beautiful effects and everything is nicely separated. But
how do you get that onto vinyl? That was where everyone was going, 'Oh
my god, this isn't going to work, is it?' But CBS said, 'Oh yes, we've
got this thing called an encoder-decoder.' So Pete said, 'Okay, well,
we'll buy one then,' and plugged it up. Pete and I were doing some
tests, and it was about a 3dB difference. 3dB's sort of nothing. It was
just laughable. Yes, it was very difficult to achieve quadraphonic
sound on vinyl. So that never really worked out."
Back to Nevison: "I think that in the end, the
quadraphonic thing that MCA and record companies were trying to do in
those days was gimmicky. It would have sold [a] decoder and two more
speakers and amplifiers. So you have your normal stereo, and then you
put it through a decoder and add another amplifier with two more
speakers, and you have quad. But what you have is mono, and we weren't
buying it. It would have been nice to have done a quad thing in 1973.
Wouldn't that have been fabulous. But it wasn't to be."
At the time of the album's release, Townshend also
found the technology not up to the task. "We're fairly happy with the
quadraphonic mixes we've done, but you know the problem with the
transcription down to disc," he told NME.
"It's all very well on tape, but when you try and get it down onto a
record, everything goes completely berserk. We were talking about a
January 1st release date for the quadraphonic version, but at the
moment it's a bit of a myth. Apart from anything else, I heard The
Doobie Brothers' quad album of The
Captain And Me and it just doesn't come anywhere near the stereo
version."
As late as the May 1974 Hit Parader, Townshend indicated
there would be a quadraphonic version of Quadrophenia: "We're going to do a
completely new album, practically. Because so much of the album is
actually in the mixing, the blending and everything ... For a while
we'll see our records as two editions, one in stereo, the other in quad
... one in a stereo mix, one in a quad mix. That has to be the way it
has to be because stereo at the moment is so much more mature and
advanced than quad is." The paragraph wasn't over, however, before he
was overcome by skepticism: "Every day they make an improvement in the
quad set-up; you know every day I get a piece of mail through from CBS
telling me that they've got another dB of separation from front to back
and that, you know, if we buy the new modified encoder-decoder we'll
get better results. And then the next week there's another modification
you can buy for another $40,000 which gives you another dB separation
front to back and a positioning encoder which puts all your 16 tracks
at various points — guaranteed positional separation and that's an
extra $40,000! It's a load of...," he trailed off.
With twenty-first century technology, it would seem
that 5.1 surround sound in particular would offer some intriguing
possibilities for creating mixes that, if not exactly quadraphonic,
could be presented with more multidimensional depth than was possible
in 1973. Here as with Who's Next,
however, less than ideal preservation of the source materials might
make that hard to realize. "He always felt it fell down in the mix when
he mixed it with Ron Nevison," says Jon Astley, who would later work on
the remastering and remixing of the album for CD. "I think the pressure
was on to get it done, it was a bit rushed, and they didn't really
check stuff. When we decided to remix it – it was actually my idea – a
lot of these quarter-inch masters we couldn't find. We had safety
[copies], but Polydor wanted to reissue this and said to me, 'Can't you
just use those?' I said, 'Well, they're inferior to the masters, and I
can't find the masters anywhere.' I was at MCA in Los Angeles.
"Eventually most of them all did turn up about five
years later. Despite being told probably five times, 'no, we haven't
got the Tommy masters,' five
years later – 'oh, we
got the Tommy masters.' I was
totally convinced they were there, and eventually they came clean. And
I said, 'Have you got Quadrophenia
as well,' and they said, 'Oh, we'll have a look. Oh, there it is.
Surprise surprise!' So it was a real pain in the ass.
"That was MCA going through a very, very difficult
time with some of their library people. A guy in L.A. told me one of
the guys that worked at the MCA library was taking home tapes and
cutting together his own little playback reels. When MCA found out
about this, they kind of went, 'Right. Anybody asks for a master, we
haven't got it.' They recovered all the tapes and built a little
editing room in the library where some bloke would piece them all back
together again. So over a period of time, they just denied all
knowledge about having masters while this was going on. I was told time
and again that the stereo masters were missing, which was the real
reason that we started to remix everything. And out of that came this
mix of Quadrophenia that Pete
said, 'Oh, that's the way it should have sounded.' So it was kind of
driven because we didn't have the original masters more than anything."
Continues Astley, "It would be nice to do a proper
5.1 of it, and actually the one I did with Andy McPherson of 'The Real
Me' is just stupendous, it just sounds incredible. We ended up doing
two tracks into 5.1, and then Pete decided he didn't want to go down
that route anymore. We were gonna do a super audio release, and super
audio versus DVD-A was going on, and I don't think anybody quite knew
which format was gonna win. So he just said, 'No, let's leave it for
now and see what happens.'
"But if they do do a remix [and] reissue a 5.1, Pete
would like to go back to his eight-track. 'Cause the whole thing about Quadrophenia, it was done in
eight-track, and then 16-track, and then 24-track. So by the time you
get to your stereo masters, some of the elements that were recorded
were already four generations old. Pete would like to rethink some of
the eight-track stuff that he did, which got bounced down onto one or
two tracks when it went to 16. So all those single violin tracks and
stuff can be exploded and put into different positions in the 5.1 or
the stereo mix. Quality-wise, they'll be a lot better than they were
when they got to 24-track. That would be a great project to get
involved in, and I think he has tried, and made some inroads into doing
that.
"It would have been great if they'd done it to
four-track, and then we could just lift out the four-track and hear it
in glorious sort of 5.1. I think Quadrophenia
in 5.1 would be an absolute masterpiece, because of all the sound
effects and the stereo panning. Pete always said that the guy who was
behind Dolby at the time kept hanging around the studio to see how they
were getting on with his matrix quadraphonic four-track recording that
they were experimenting with. Pete said he could see the wheels going
on in his brain about 5.1 Dolby encoding back then, in 1973."
Back in 1973, according to Ethan Russell's Dear Mr. Fantasy, there was one
final unexpected hurdle to be overcome before the masters for Quadrophenia could be delivered. By
chance, he took the same flight as Townshend when Pete traveled to Los
Angeles to personally deliver the tapes to The Who's US label. "At
customs the people from MCA Records meet Pete," reads Russell's
play-by-play account. "The customs man reaches for the tapes held under
Pete's arm. Townshend jerks them back and starts stamping his boots at
the customs man's feet. 'Not leaving my hands, mate. Not for a second.'"
