The Who song Pete Townshend wants to play on his deathbed
As the 1960s were spreading out, rock and roll was starting to get progressively more intricate. In the wake of The Beatles laying waste to the pop charts on both sides of the Atlantic, every band in Britain was developing bands looking to play on the weekends, either going the route of the Fab Four with radio-friendly or delving into blues and R&B by way of The Rolling Stones. In the middle of both styles sat The Who, with a songwriter who was soon to become a legend.
When The Who first cut their teeth, though, Pete Townshend didn’t think the group would last very long. Breaking out of the Mod scene in London, Townshend figured that he would play in a band for a few years before continuing his education at college. Once he wrote the mind-bending clangour of ‘My Generation’, things started to move incredibly fast.
Using the fury of his youth and mountains of volume and distortion, Townshend had started to create the feeling of adolescent rebellion, amplified by songs about breaking free from ordinary existence. That wasn’t what Townshend wanted to do for the rest of his life, though. The three-minute single was fun, but there was always more to rock and roll in Townshend’s mind.
Assembling the song ‘A Quick One While He’s Away’ based on fragments of different song ideas, Townshend’s medley of tunes on The Who’s second album got the wheels turning in his head for a rock opera. Creating Tommy centred around a deaf, dumb and blind kid, Townshend had found his calling as a storyteller, tying together the darkest themes heard in a rock song with music.
As Townshend prepared to do it all again with Lifehouse, though, things began falling apart. Rather than one-up his previous effort, the band’s inability to grasp the concept led to Townshend scrapping the whole thing, leaving only the table scraps to appear on Who’s Next. If this were the table scraps, though, Townshend was on the verge of a creative breakthrough on ‘Baba O’Riley’.
Adopting the first primitive synthesisers, Townshend created a dramatic way to set the scene for his rock opera, complete with the pronounced stabs of his electric guitar roaring in. Although the song had a lingering question surrounding what the phrase “teenage wasteland” meant, Townshend was adamant about the song’s message, saying that had more to do with not wasting one’s life on what is being dictated to them.
Although Townshend would have regrets about not fulfilling his dream with Lifehouse, he did confess to never getting tired of ‘Baba O’Riley’, recalling, “There is this moment of standing there just listening to this music and looking out to the audience and just thinking, ‘I f–king did that. I wrote that. I just hope that on my deathbed, I don’t embarrass myself by asking someone, ‘Can you pass me my guitar? And will you run the backing tape of ‘Baba O’Riley’? I just want to do it one more time”.
Townshend was the only one thinking that he had made a breakthrough, either. Looking back on the production, frontman Roger Daltrey would rank Who’s Next as one of the greatest albums that the group ever made. While most will never know how Townshend’s vision could have been realised at the time, ‘Baba O’Riley’ remains one of the most stirring moments that rock and roll has to offer.
