Baba O’Riley. The Who. 1971. Decca.

 First I fell in love with playing records then with the radio. I remember alternating between a pair of album rock stations, isolated from the rest of the world, on summer afternoons then again at night after everyone had gone to bed. This had to be the mid seventies because Born To Run was in heavy rotation, playing so much of the time. The song sounded old, from another generation, and I heard it so often that I eventually thought that it was going through a commercial revival, something to do with American Graffiti, maybe. Two other songs that I can remember receiving a lot of airplay around this time were Help Me by Joni Mitchell (Warner Bros 1974) and Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams (Warner Bros 1977). I fixated on those two because I had an older sister who was just then transitioning into adulthood and I was convinced that, deeply embedded within the lyric of both songs, were clues that I could one day decipher for help in developing the proper codes for a personal conduct and style of living. I would have to make adult choices for myself, no doubt, but I listened carefully to the messages coming at me through FM radio (dancing with a lady with a hole in her stocking struck me as especially thrillingly perverse and mysterious). During the 1972-73 school term I broke out in eczema which became progressively worse until my parents made the decision to pull me from school, and arranged to have school work brought home to me so that I wouldn’t fall behind (the doctor told my parents that I was a high strung and anxious kid and I tended to over perspire from hands and feet in high stress situations. He recommended that I stop watching horror films.). I can’t remember very much of my time away from school only that when I returned to the classroom my feet weren’t yet completely healed, and I was mortified with the sandals I was told to wear. Recurring illness taught me  that nature can, without warning, reduce us to an animal state so far removed from a supposed divine descendancy that it eventually began to erode in me all trace of a numinous spirituality. It made me acknowledge my growing impatience with, and my disrespect for, the Church of my parents, and to see the two qualities as part of a larger discomfort with the restrictive values that drive ecumenical dogma. The intensity of those early eczema outbreaks—together with the promise of freedom playing from the radio speakers—illumined a disposability process of Christian faith. To the tune of the most familiar Lowery organ riff of them all I began ridding myself of mine. The significance of hearing Baba O’Riley already in its iconic place as an AOR radio staple was feeling yourself a part of the record’s intended audience. The Who, headline performers at Woodstock, were hyper aware of the powerful scale of rock’s mounting international reach, and built that magnitude into the song, and falling in love with it in its infancy in the mid seventies made me aware of how I might fit in the world. It broadened my awareness of the scope of life. More importantly, it vastly diminished the imaginative need for a phantom life force greater than humanity itself because, as we learn from the best rock and roll songs, humanity is the greatest constructive force there is. Even if it does break your heart.


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