“Get Out and Stay Out” was recorded for the 1979 Quadrophenia film soundtrack and wasn’t part of the original album in 1973. That’s Kenney Jones on drums, Keith Moon having died a year earlier.
I have no idea why this song traveled through the bizarre labyrinth of my brain’s random music generator and greeted me upon awakening this morning.
Well, maybe I do.
Whether it was the glorious original or the film version, Quadrophenia WAS the soundtrack of my life in late 1979. This was a difficult time, and to be honest, I was a bit lost.
Quadrophenia tells the story of Jimmy, a confused kid with a four-sided personality disorder. Pete Townshend’s ability to convey simultaneous emotions of uncertainty, pride, anger, bliss and angst fit my mood perfectly in 1979, even if I was coming to the music somewhat late.
I believe the band was at its peak in terms of performing Quadrophenia and bringing life to Townshend’s ideas, and that’s why it’s my favorite album of the rock era.
As with Jimmy, it was all inside my head, and I needed to get over myself. Eventually I did, trying for once in my life to do well at school during the 1980 spring semester at IUS Southeast. I excelled, and it genuinely propelled me to climb out of the hole and see the merits of academic achievement. Without the pain, would this have happened? There’s no way of knowing, but it worked out in the end, and that’s all there is to it.
In late 1979 I was mourning a loss. You might reasonably assert that aggressive rock music hardly befits accepted attitudes about mourning, and yet it remains that almost any loss is capable of being interpreted as abandonment, however rational the explanation.
Someone or something leaves; sadness and anger are capable of colliding. Quadrophenia begins with a question: “Can you see the real me?” The album ends with an earnest plea: “Love, reign o’er me.” Loss and pathos, anger and belligerence — and in time, acceptance. It makes sense.
To awaken this morning to my life as it stands in 2024, a life radically (read: thankfully) different from 45 years ago, and to hear “Get Out and Stay Out” playing in my head, strikes me as a perfectly understandable and even “positive” emotion — we must always be positive, I’m told — in light of recent developments with teams, ex-friends and former workplaces (or with the specter of Dementia J. Trump looming over us all).
There comes a time when pleas, petitions and (dare I say it) prayers mean far less than a conclusion Occam undoubtedly would suggest: Just get out, and don’t come back no more.
Simple and eloquent, and the sooner, the better.
Previously:
Here’s the epitaph: “In the end, Pints&union didn’t deserve New Albany”
