Baba O'Riley

The first part of the title comes from Meher Baba, who was Pete Townshend's spiritual guru. The second part comes from Terry Riley, an experimental, minimalist composer Townshend admired - many of the keyboard riffs and sound effects on Who's Next were a result of Riley's influence. According to the Who's Next liner notes, Townshend wrote it as his vision of what would happen if the spirit of Meher Baba was fed into a computer and transformed into music. The result would be Baba in the style of Terry Riley, or "Baba O'Riley."

The title is not mentioned in the lyrics, so the song is often referred to as "Teenage Wasteland." The "Teenage Wasteland" section was a completely different song Townshend combined with his "Baba O'Riley" idea to form the song.

Pete Townshend spent a few weeks in his home studio putting together the part that sounds like a synthesizer on a Lowry organ. His goal: to create "a replication of the electronic music of the future." When he took the tape of his recording to engineer Glyn Johns, he expected Johns to alter it, but Johns left it as is, insisting it was perfect.