CAN YOU SEE THE REAL ME? “October 19 was the anniversary of the release of [the album version of] The Who’s rock opera Quadrophenia, a movie I loved in high school. This would have been normal, I guess, for a teenager in the mid-1970s, but I was in high school around 1990, when Vanilla Ice and the New Kids on the Block were riding high on the charts.”

I loved Quadrophenia as well.  To celebrate the 35th anniversary of its film version’s release, I wrote a lengthy post last year exploring the twin early ’60s British cults of mods and rockers and how they were born via what Tom Wolfe calls “Information Ricochet,” and how in turn the mods led to a very different — yet entirely related — film full of angry young men dancing the night away in suits and ties, Saturday Night Fever.