Word: baba
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...being entirely facetious. Who music can match the tough street impact of punk, especially as Daltrey dishes it out. At 35, he may be one of the oldest kids in the playground, but he is still one of the toughest. Townshend melodies like Pure and Easy, Baba O'Riley and Music Must Change have the structural sophistication of music that is usually presumed to be more "serious." They also have a visceral challenge, a rush that only Springsteen, among Who contemporaries, can rival...
...path into the music. The way to the center and out again is a good deal more complex and subtle. Townshend's obsessions are the audience, music itself and a certain evasive, almost evanescent kind of spirituality that has its roots in the teaching of the Indian mystic Meher Baba, to whom Townshend is devoted. Tommy, which became the most widely known Who work, was a two-record "rock opera" about a deaf, dumb and blind pinball champ who was raised into a kind of pop artifact and rock-'n'-roll godhead. It sold more than 2 million copies, bought...
...enough to lose sight of the fact that The Who stood in defiance of the Woodstock generation. "You've got to remember that Tommy was antidrug in 1969," Daltrey recalls. Townshend, who had been through his own phase with drugs, was not only using Tommy as a mirror for Baba's antidrug strictures but was also putting refractions of Baba's teachings into a rock context. Tommy ended by pulling the rug out from under false idols, directing the search for salvation inward and out toward the audience. What Tommy sang to his disciples, freeing them, was also...
...after Tommy but so far unrealized, is a futuristic tale about the rediscovery of music in a society that is totally programmed and controlled. Called Lifehouse, the piece was intended to be a kind of environmental theater event. Some of Townshend's best songs were written originally for Lifehouse: Baba O'Riley, with its synthesizer line running like cold water down the spine, mixing with an old Irish fiddle reel and the memorable lyric refrain, "Don't cry/ Don't raise your eye/ It's only teen-age wasteland"; the aching, almost elegant poignancy of The Song Is Over...
...political party, or shy away whenever the government frowns. A dazzling and from the government's standpoint most damnable exception is the weekly paper Le Canard Enchaîné-literally, The Chained Duck-which pursues scandal with all the gusto of a Gallic gourmet tucking into a baba au rhum. These days the Chained Duck is flapping its wings triumphantly, and no wonder: dangling from its bill is the meticulously aloof French President, Valery Giscard d'Estaing...