Bob G. ретвитнул
“Baba O’Riley” by The Who is one of the greatest rock anthems of all time, opening the 1971 album Who’s Next. Written by Pete Townshend, the song emerged from an ambitious project that was never completed: the rock opera Lifehouse, which was intended to be the sequel to Tommy.
The title combines two major influences on Pete at the time: Meher Baba, the Indian spiritual guru whom Townshend devoutly followed (Baba), and Terry Riley, the American minimalist composer whose electronic experiments fascinated Pete (O’Riley). According to the album notes, Townshend imagined what would happen if Meher Baba’s vital signs and personality were fed into a computer and it generated music: the result would be “Baba in the style of Terry Riley”—that is, Baba O’Riley.
The famous intro with that hypnotic arpeggiated pattern wasn’t created by a synthesizer, but by a Lowrey Berkshire Deluxe organ that Pete programmed in his home studio using the “marimba repeat” function. He spent weeks creating that futuristic-sounding sequence. When he took it to engineer Glyn Johns, Johns left it as is because he thought it was perfect. It is one of the first instances where a keyboard is used as the main rhythm in a rock song, not just as an embellishment.
The lyrics reflect the disillusionment of the hippie generation following festivals like Woodstock and the Isle of Wight. Pete saw the fields littered with trash and young people exhausted, drugged, and lost, which inspired the famous chorus “teenage wasteland.” It speaks of escaping the city, of burnt-out youth, and of the search for something deeper, all mixed with Meher Baba’s philosophy on the illusion of life and spiritual connection.
On the recording, the final section featuring the energetic Irish jig violin is played by Dave Arbus (of the band East of Eden), a friend of Keith Moon’s. The idea for the violin came from Moon himself. In live performances, Roger Daltrey usually plays it on the harmonica. The song lasts just over five minutes, but originally Pete had a version that was nearly half an hour long, which they edited down to keep the most powerful parts.
A song that is undoubtedly just as powerful today as it was in 1971.
English
