What the song is about
The line everyone knows is the one that is most often misread. “Teenage wasteland” is not a rallying cry. Townshend has explained where it came from twice, and both stories are bleak: the field at the 1969 Isle of Wight Festival, left buried in rubbish after the Who played, and what he called “the absolute desolation of teenagers at Woodstock”, where the crowd was strung out on acid and, in his telling, twenty people suffered brain damage. The song is a verdict on the counterculture's aftermath, sung by someone who was in the middle of it.
The irony was not lost on him. “Some listeners considered the song a teenage celebration,” he said. “‘Teenage Wasteland, yes! We're all wasted!’” That reading has stuck for fifty years, which is why the song is played at stadiums, in Lakers player introductions and before UFC fights, none of which is what a song about a ruined field is for.
The verses belong to a character. In Lifehouse, the science-fiction rock opera Townshend intended as the follow-up to Tommy, the song opened the story: a Scottish farmer named Ray sings it as he gathers his wife Sally and their two children to leave the land for London. “Out here in the fields” is literal. So is the journey away from them. The opera collapsed, eight of its songs were rescued for Who's Next, and the farmer's song became the album's first track without the story that explained it.
Why it is called Baba O'Riley
The title never appears in the lyric, which is the main reason people call the song “Teenage Wasteland”. It joins two of Townshend's obsessions of the time: Meher Baba, the Indian spiritual master he had followed since 1967, and Terry Riley, the American minimalist composer whose looping, pulsing keyboard pieces are the direct model for the song's opening.
The two names are also the origin of the sound. Townshend's plan for Lifehouse was to feed a person's vital signs and personality into a synthesiser and let the machine generate music from the data; the first subject was to be Meher Baba himself. When that proved impossible, he recorded the pattern on a Lowrey Berkshire Deluxe TBO-1 organ using its marimba-repeat feature, which is the pulsing figure that opens and underpins the whole record. It is often described as a synthesiser part and it is not, quite: it is a home organ's built-in rhythm trick, and one of the most recognisable openings in rock.
How it was made
The band cut it at Olympic Studios in London in May 1971, produced by the Who with Glyn Johns, working from a nine-minute demo Townshend had built at home. Early versions ran to around thirty minutes; what survived was edited down to the “high points”, which is why the finished five minutes feel like a suite: organ pulse, the piano and drums crashing in, Roger Daltrey's verses, Townshend's own vocal on the “don't cry” section, and a closing violin jig played by Dave Arbus of East of Eden, who was drafted in for the session.
Who's Next came out in August 1971 and opened with the song. It was issued as a single only in mainland Europe that autumn, backed with John Entwistle's “My Wife”; in Britain and America it was never a single at all, and it became one of the band's most-played songs through album radio alone. It reached No. 11 in the Netherlands in 1972, and No. 55 in the UK forty-one years later, after the Who closed the London 2012 Olympics with it.
Where you have heard it
Everywhere, which is part of the misreading. It was the theme of CSI: NY for nine seasons. Big Audio Dynamite II sampled the organ for “Rush” in 1991, and High Contrast's “The Road Goes on Forever”, built on the same loop, counted down both the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2012 Olympics before the Who themselves played it, with Daltrey changing the line to “Don't cry / Just raise your eye / There's more than teenage wasteland” for the occasion. Pearl Jam cover it so often that a Rolling Stone readers' poll ranked theirs the eighth-greatest live cover. When fans on Twitter noticed that One Direction's “Best Song Ever” follows its structure, Townshend said he was a fan of the single and glad to have been an influence, as Eddie Cochran had been on him.
The Who's performance of it at the Concert for New York City in October 2001 is one of the most-praised sets of that night. It sits at No. 159 on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs, in Time's All-Time 100 Songs, and among the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll. It is certified Platinum in the UK and Italy.
Who are The Who?
Formed in London in 1964, the Who were Roger Daltrey, Pete Townshend, John Entwistle and Keith Moon: the loudest band of the British Invasion, the first to smash their instruments on stage as an act, and, with Tommy (1969), the inventors of the rock opera. Who's Next is the album that came out of the failed second one, and it is usually named as their best. The site also explains “My Generation” and “Won't Get Fooled Again”, the other Lifehouse survivor that closes the same album.
Watch
There was no promotional film in 1971. The performance below was shot at Shepperton Studios on 25 May 1978 in front of an invited audience for Jeff Stein's documentary The Kids Are Alright; it was one of Keith Moon's last performances with the band, three months before his death.
The 1978 Shepperton performance from The Kids Are Alright, on the band's VEVO channel.