The Who songs inspired by Pete Townshend’s spiritual guru
Although The Who set out as a quintessential British Invasion rock band with provocative garage-style hits like ‘My Generation and ‘Can’t Explain’, guitarist and songwriter Pete Townshend would soon sculpt an identity for the band. Maintaining their explosive energy, courtesy of Keith Moon’s thunderous drumming, The Who popularised rock operas, starting with the tightly conceptual album of 1969, Tommy.
As a reflection on some rather unfortunate childhood experiences, Tommy presented Townshend’s passion for storytelling. While often grounded in true events and settings, the fantastical elements of the musician’s concepts are inspired by a childhood of escapism. Whether reading Dan Dare comics or Observer books, Townshend established a colourful and vivid imagination from a young age.
In a recent interview with Far Out, Townshend discussed his early attachment to books and storytelling alongside Peter Hogan, who used to run his Magic Bus bookshop in Richmond. “The Who were running out of ideas pre-Tommy, the rock opera,” Townshend revealed. “And that album started off as a mythic tale. It’s loosely inspired by Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha. But I was also reading lots of Sufi tales and mystical writings by Hazrat Inayat Khan. He wrote a book called The Mysticism Of Sound. A musician but also a spiritual teacher. All of that was flooding through my head.”
During the mid-to-late-1960s, Townshend also became enamoured with the teachings of the spiritual leader Meher Baba. Famed for advising Mahatma Gandhi, the Indian theologian believed in the concept of spiritual enlightenment. He believed the goal of each individual was to gain consciousness of their own divinity and sense the unifying nature of God in all things.
Speaking to Far Out, Townshend revealed that when he established Magic Bus in the late 1970s, the Baba movement became central to its orientation. “One of the main protagonists of the movement was an ageing actress called Delia De Leon,” he remembered. “She wanted us to have a bookshop which presented Meher Baba’s writings but also the writings of other mystics, like Hazrat Inayat Khan, Hafez and Rumi, the poets. But we had a bookshop to fill!”
Continuing, Townshend remembered how the books were categorised. “When I first went to look at it, it was divided pretty much into three: the esoteric stuff, the music stuff and the bits in the middle, which was all comics because of [Hogan’s] passion for it. I felt it was okay for me to not steal things but to borrow.”
He added that his “first arrest as a young boy was for shoplifting [Observer books] in a bookshop.”
The spiritual insights found in Tommy would become more lucid when it came to working on a follow-up. Townshend intended to consolidate 1969’s success with a second rock opera named Lifehouse. Sadly, the concept proved challenging to translate to Townshend’s multimedia plans and was duly abandoned. However, much of the material was recorded for release on the hit 1971 album Who’s Next.
Although Who’s Next didn’t follow a coherent concept, Townshend’s recently released graphic novel, Life House, reincarnated the original concept and shed some light on the songs’ meanings. With a strong spiritual presence and a depiction of enlightenment in the story, the influence of Baba is immediately palpable.
Originally titled ‘Teenage Wasteland’, the opening track on Who’s Next was retitled ‘Baba O’Riley’ in homage to Meher Baba and composer Terry Riley. Elsewhere on the album, ‘Bargain’ explores the idea of sacrificing material possessions in the name of spiritual enlightenment; ‘Too Much of Anything’, originally intended for Lifehouse and later released on Odds & Sods, also tapped into the idea of materialism.
After getting sober in 1982, Townshend discussed his on/off association with Baba. “For a while, I pushed him out of my life because I couldn’t live within those principles,” he said. “But in a way, I did it almost deliberately, and now I’ve come back in a full circle.”
Below, we list songs by The Who that were inspired by Pete Townshend’s spiritual beliefs as guided by Meher Baba.
Songs inspired by Pete Townshend’s guru:
- ‘See Me, Feel Me’ – Tommy
- ‘Sensation’ – Tommy
- ‘I’m Free’ – Tommy
- ‘Go to the Mirror!’ – Tommy
- ‘Baba O’Riley’ – Who’s Next
- ‘Bargain’ – Who’s Next
- ‘Too Much of Anything’ – Odds & Sods
- ‘Time is Passing’ – Odds & Sods
