Pete Townshend’s scrapped project that inspired ‘Baba O’Riley’
Coming out of the 1960s, Pete Townshend was on a high of musical creativity. After setting the world on fire with The Who throughout the previous decade, Townshend began his creative peak with the album, putting together a lavish concept album about the trials and tribulations of a deaf, dumb, and blind boy becoming numb to the world around him. Although Townshend may have had grand plans for his first rock opera, he had something even more incredible in mind for the follow-up.
Rather than carry on with a traditional album of songs, Townshend thought that his strong suit was in creating various rock operas, telling different stories across the runtime revolving around a different batch of characters. Although Tommy had a succinct story from beginning to end, Townshend thought that the next project, Lifehouse, had the potential to outdo what he already created.
When talking about the storyline to Classic Albums, Townshend thought the next step in the group’s musical evolution was to further the story, saying, “How can I make my character deaf, dumb, and blind without doing it again? He will live in the future, and I will put him in a suit, and he will experience different forms of life. He’ll live couch potato life, the lives that brainwashers want him to live”.
Although Townshend had the makings of songs already prepared for the opera, the rest of the band weren’t as eager to go along with his latest vision. Instead of the story that flowed from beginning to end, Roger Daltrey remembered never quite grasping what the final story of Lifehouse meant, thinking that it made a better list of musical ideas rather than a massive operatic piece.
With the rest of the band struggling to find their place in this new project, Townshend would almost have a nervous breakdown while trying to make the album, ultimately scrapping the concept in favour of working on another single album for The Who. While Who’s Next would contain the odds and ends of what was supposed to be featured on the original version of Lifehouse, ‘Baba O’Riley’ would be the cornerstone track from the project.
Opening with the glorious fanfare of synthesisers, the opening track was Townshend’s overture for the project, telling a brief summation of every teenager who wants to find some answer to life beyond the futuristic suits they are forced into daily. Melding the names of guru Meher Baba and composer Terry Riley, Townshend’s melody was about people trying to escape through music.
The rest of Who’s Next also takes various parts of the Lifehouse concept to new heights, like the massive bombast of ‘Getting In Tune’ before building to a triumphant climax at the finale with the eight-minute-long ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’. Despite Lifehouse never coming to fruition, Townshend would eventually release various demos from that time entitled The Lifehouse Chronicles, featuring the song under the working title ‘Teenage Wasteland’. Although Townshend had already carved out a place in rock and roll history with the release of Tommy, it’s a shame fans didn’t get to hear what his follow-up rock opera would have been with ‘Baba O’Riley’ at the forefront.
