Hitting the streets on November 8th is a new three-disc DVD collection of live performances of The Who. The first disc features an all-star version of Tommy from The Who's 1989 reunion tour, and the third disc is a collection of The Who's greatest hits, performed live on that tour and in 1996.

For purely personal reasons, I'm concentrating this review on the second disc, which a 1996 live performance of Quadrophenia, The Who's follow-up to Tommy, which introduced many Americans (and continues to do so to this day) to the Mod movement of early-to-mid-1960s England. It was a favorite album of mine growing up in the 1970s, and in many ways, I prefer it to Tommy. Maybe because while the Mods who make up its background were so impenetrable a cult, the coming of age story of Jimmy, its teenage multiple personality title character is universal.

Who Were The Mods?

Of all the many fads and counterculture movements of the 1960s, to Americans, the British Mod movement was the most opaque. Perhaps the best overview came from rock journalist Dave Marsh in his definitive Who biography Before I Get Old: as he describes it, Mod wasn't just a case of early 1960s British teens adopting the Brooks Brothers-dominated Ivy League dress code of America in the 1950s. It was a rebellion in style driven by the simple fact that it wasn't until the end of the 1950s, that post World War II rationing ended in Britain, and their era of conspicuous consumption could finally begin--much as America's had a decade prior.

Simultaneously, the Mod movement was also a rebellion against the leather-clad "Rockers"; another subculture of young British males, who were inspired by Brando in The Wild One to buy a Triumph or BSA and don the appropriate leather jacket. Rockers loved '50s American rock & roll such as Gene Vincent; Mods worshipped at the altar of Motown--hence the early Who's famous "Maximum R&B" moniker.

New DVD Is The Definitive Live Quadrophenia

Along with Who's Next, which salvaged the songs from Pete Townshend's first, abortive follow-up to Tommy, Lifehouse (which would only come to fruition in 1999), 1973's Quadrophenia is the definitive sound of The Who in the studio. As an album, its production, even listening to day over 30 years later, leaves Tommy in the dust. Like Lifehouse, Quadrophenia originally failed when presented onstage, but as a collection of songs, worked fantastically.

But the 1996 live multimedia concert version of the Quadrophenia on The Who's new DVD is an absolute triumph. On the commentary track, Roger Daltry explains that because he had the memories of the 1989 Tommy shows still fresh in his mind, didn't want to simply do another "Who and all-star guests" tour. Instead, he and Townshend, along with director Aubrey Powell (who appears in a separate bonus segment on the disc) created a film to project behind the band and their backing musicians that combined shots from the 1979 movie version of Quadrophenia, with newly filmed footage of Alex Langdon, a young actor in the role of Jimmy, the eponymously "quadrophenic" star of the production. Langdon appeared as both narrator and as star of the footage.