Today’s classic song of the day is a legendary rocker by the Who. Released as the lead track on the group’s 1971 album, Who’s Next, “Baba O’Riley” is famous for its repeating staccato synthesizer-like backing and the lyrics, “It’s only teenage wasteland.” (In fact, many listeners at the time thought—and probably some today still think—that the song’s name was “Teenage Wasteland.”)
“Baba O’Riley,” written by Who guitarist Pete Townsend, got its name from Indian spiritual guru Meher Baba and American minimalist composer Terry Riley. Baba influenced the lyrics and Riley influenced that staccato eighth-note rhythm track.
Townsend originally intended “Baba O’Riley” to be part of a science fiction rock opera follow-up to the Who’s 1969 Tommy. The new project was to be called Lifehouse and had something to do with a future society where everything had become programmed and how the primitive spirit of rock and roll could rescue humanity. As part of its development, Townsend came to believe that the personal profiles of all concert attendees could be fed into a computer, leading to a single musical note that would culminate in a mass nirvana that he called “a kind of celestial cacophony.” Yeah, this was in the late ’60s. There was a lot of that nonsense going around.
As you might suspect, Lifehouse proved impossible to pull off, but the group salvaged eight of its songs (including “Baba O’Riley” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again”) for Who’s Next and other future albums. Who’s Next proved a huge success, hitting #4 on the Billboard Top 200 album chart and #1 in the UK. It also spawned the singles “Won’t Get Fooled Again” and “Beyond Blue Eyes” and, in 2007, was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. It is, quite simply, one of the greatest rock albums of all time.
“Baba O’Riley” wasn’t released as a single but still became extremely popular, thanks in no small part to its being played over and over by FM radio stations across the country and around the world. The track was engineered, mixed, and produced by the legendary Glyn Johns, who also engineered sessions for the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, the Kinks, Eric Clapton, and more.
That synth-like rhythm track was actually created using the “marimba repeat” feature of a Lowrey Berkshire Deluxe TBO-1 organ. The band performed live in the studio to that track, without the benefit of the click tracks used in recording studios today. Given the primitive technology of the time, the calculated chaos of Keith Moon’s drumming, and Pete Townsend’s cascading power chords, it’s amazing that it all hung together. (The actual recording ran more than 30 minutes long; Johns edited it down to a more concise five minutes even for the album.)
And here’s today’s bonus video of the day, the Who performing “Baba O’Riley” live in Shepperton Studios on May 25, 1978, for the documentary, The Kids Are Alright. Invited guests for that performance included members of the Pretenders, Generation X, the Rich Kids, and the Sex Pistols. Damn, Moonie was fun to watch—and he stayed perfectly locked into that organ track!
