Baba O'Riley

Townshend wrote it for Lifehouse. The title honors Meher Baba and Terry Riley. He had planned to feed Meher Baba's vital signs into a synthesizer, and instead recorded a Lowrey Berkshire Deluxe organ using its marimba repeat. The song grew from a nine-minute demo. Glyn Johns told Mix that the Lowrey through a rotating speaker is the instrument heard, and that Dave Arbus's violin overdub was Moon's idea.

Townshend tied its imagery to the litter left at the 1969 Isle of Wight Festival and the desolation at Woodstock, and noted the irony that some heard it as a celebration. It was a single in several European countries, coupled with My Wife. Rolling Stone ranks it number 159 among the 500 greatest songs.

Covers and live

Pearl Jam regularly cover it. Big Audio Dynamite II sampled the keyboard in Rush in 1991, and High Contrast's The Road Goes on Forever samples it. It was played at the Concert for New York City in 2001 and opened the 2012 Olympic closing ceremony. It has been played about 840 times live.