Song of the Day: The Who – Baba O’Riley

In 1978 the Who put on a concert for a select audience of 300 fans at Shepperton Studios, which was filmed by first-time director (and Who superfan) Jeff Stein for his documentary/career retrospective The Kids Are All Right. Among the tracks performed were a couple of the classics from Who’s Next, surely one of the greatest albums ever recorded: Won’t Get Fooled Again, and today’s selection, which everybody wants to call “Teenage Wasteland”, but is actually the enigmatically titled Baba O’Riley, a dual tribute to spiritual guru Meher Baba and American minimalist composer Terry O’Riley, each among Townshend’s major spiritual and artistic influences at the time (the synthesizer intro is, essentially, classical avant-garde minimalism). The lyrics have to do with the libretto for Lifehouse, the visionary rock opera that Townshend drove himself all the way ’round the bend trying to complete, before the project was abandoned and its finished songs were gathered together for what became the ultimate Who record, all of them, sadly, save Pure and Easy, the work’s philosophical core and one of Pete’s finest compositions, which appears not on Who’s Next but on one of Pete’s solo albums. You can read about the madly ambitious, quasi-mystical, borderline batshit crazy Lifehouse in this prior blog post:

The lament for the “teenage wasteland” occurred to Pete while remembering both the dense debris field left behind by the crowd at the Who’s famous 1970 Isle of Wight concert, as well as the godawful, rainy, muddy mess that was Woodstock, where just about everybody seemed to be high on acid, including Pete himself, who’d been dosed unwittingly by a cup of coffee that was, like just about every other available consumable, spiked with the stuff (the rosy memory of Woodstock cherished by we Boomers nowadays rather ignores that it was, on the ground, a bit of a fiasco, and a drug-fest that involved numerous overdoses and more than a few emergency medevacs). You can read here about Pete’s impressions of the human zoo that confronted the band as they took to the stage at 5AM on a Sunday, and looked out over the madding crowd neck-deep in the muck of Max Yasgur’s trampled farm:

He hated it. So did Roger Daltrey, who didn’t see much peace, love and understanding by the time the festival was wrapping up, and wasn’t himself much of a flower child anyway (he said, with calculated understatement).

I’m grappling, as I write this, with the idea that the raucous, hugely energetic performance attached above is just four years shy of its 50th anniversary. Some part of me seems to imagine that the band still exists, and those four young men remain just as they were, the best damned rock n’ roll outfit on the planet, perhaps coming soon to a town near you. Of course, Townshend and Daltrey are now old men, Pete 79, Roger having just turned 80, while Keith Moon and John Entwistle are gone. It’s sad to note that the concert at Shepperton was Keith’s very last with the band; he overdosed only three months later.

Ah, but they were in fine form that night, weren’t they? Recreating the songs from Who’s Next had proved difficult on stage, especially level-matching and synching properly with the pre-recorded synthesizer tape loops that Pete felt were essential (and indeed, it’s hard to imagine Baba O’Riley without them), but by 1978 they had it down to a science. Jeff Stein caught them here revelling in the last, highest moments of their greatness, fully at their performative zenith, Pete still windmilling, Roger still swinging his microphone at the end of thirty odd feet of cord, Moon still thrashing away maniacally, and Entwistle still masterful on bass, holding it all together, looking stalwart and unperturbed as the others storm about the stage. This is one of their best performances of one of the greatest songs of the modern era, and you can go right ahead and deride me for being one of those antiquated Boomers always muttering about the good old days, go ahead, you can’t upset me, because I know I’m right about this much: nobody ever did it better than these guys, and nobody ever will.

I’ll leave you with this, from the same show, at which the band was also pioneering the use of laser lighting for dramatic effect. This is, in my not at all humble opinion, the greatest live performance of the rock ‘n roll era, not just on account of its energy, but because the song is extraordinarily complex, and the band executes it perfectly, perhaps even better than they did in the studio. Amazing: