I've been having a Baba O'Riley Marathon on Youtube

Cafe Society
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I can’t tell you why, I don’t know why, but I’ve been up for hours tonight listening to and watching many versions of Baba O’Riley, originally by The Who. There are versions of them playing it from back in the 70’s –this is the best version I found of the boys – when Roger and Pete still had their voices and Keith still had his life. They could surely still rock in 2007 at Glastonbury, But Roger just didn’t have the voice for it any more.

On to the scoring. It’s hard to improve on the original, but I took away points because AFAIK, they never ever did that incredible synthesizer part live – it was always a recorded track they played along with. That is why I give the award for Best Performance to Blue Man Group, who did it live here. Just an outstanding performance, with extra points for the great percussion, and the hot fiddling vocalist chick.

Second place (yet with the best visuals and stage dramatics) is, incredibly, a second performance by Blue Man Group. Not quite as crisp a recording, and it loses points for having Regis Philbin in it (a performance on the TV show* America’s Got Talent*).

I give a special award to The Dropkick Murphys version, for best vocal cover of Roger Daltry’s original voice track. A little lower and more gravelly, but still a real from the gut scream of lyrics.

Last and Least, there’s the Lamest Version by David Cook. A walking corpse of a song – practically turns a high energy rock anthem into a dirge.

A close second worst was the Windows Sound Effects cover version, produced entirely of looped standard Windows sounds and Windows synthesized voice for the lyrics. Honestly, I gave it a few extra points for amusement value and creativity, but in any objective sense it was the worst performance of all.

There are tons of cover version out there, way more than I expected because I imagine it is a very difficult piece to perform. But that doesn’t apparently stop people from trying.

I invite you to post links to your best or worst nominees. Or to ignore this completely, as sleep deprivation is driving me slightly nuts at the moment.

2

Might I recommend to the OP this very interesting early demo version of the song?

3

Pearl Jam is a pretty prodigious coverer of that song. There are many examples on YouTube of them playing that live. I’m not a big fan of the guitar attempting to sub for the synth in the intro in their version, but Eddie Vedder’s vocals are generally well-suited to the power of that song.

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Your favorite version from the 70s also appears on their film “The Kids Are Alright.” It’s worth a viewing if you have time.

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Houston '75

Disagreeable Henry at Little Mexico, Ada Ohio

Nash The Slash, 2010

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I wasn’t around at the time and I really don’t know anything about synthesizers, but I’m a big Who fan and it’s my understanding that the limitations of '70s technology made it impossible to perform the synthesizer part live. I heard an interview with Roger Daltrey where he said it took several minutes to get the synthesizer to produce a note, then several more minutes to get it to do the next one.

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I don’t know much about them either, but there were other groups in that general time frame who used them in live performance. And it certainly wouldn’t be an issue in concerts given 30 years later – the more recent videos still don’t put a synth player on stage.

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He may just not be visible in the videos. I saw the Who several times during reunion tours in the '90s and 2000s, and I’m certain they had a keyboard or synthesizer player onstage for at least some of those shows. I also know they played “Baba O’Riley”, although I couldn’t tell you whether the synth part was being performed live.

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Some of the Youtube videos of Who performances do show keyboard players on stage, but it is clear they are not performing the synth portion we’ve been referring to. Also, the Wiki page says that Townsend performed the synth track and he obviously couldn’t have performed that and also been on stage windmilling on his guitar. Plus the page says they never did it live, for whatever that’s worth.

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I don’t know that I’d trust Wikipedia to be 100% accurate on this, but since I don’t actually care whether the synth part was ever performed live I’m not inclined to research the matter any further.

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The “synth” part was actually an organ being run through a filter controlled by the sequencer of an ARP 2500.

I sold T-shirts and concert programs when the Who played Kansas City in 1976, and the sound engineer used an open reel tape of the keyboard parts of Baba O’Riley and Won’t Get Fooled Again to test the sound system. Loads of fun hearing those tones at concert level in a almost completely empty auditorium.

I shoot concerts of the kids of the School of Rock in Chicago and Kansas City. It’s a national after-school program for kids age 7 to 17 that gets them on stage playing concerts in real venues. Everyone in the school gets on stage in one of the dozen regular shows every year, the best musicians form a house band and gig around town, the best of those form an “All-Star” band with the kids from other schools, practice for two weeks and tour.

Here’s the 2011 Midwest All-Stars playing Baba O’Riley at Schuba’s in Chicago. It was a little shaky as they had some monitor problems, but the keyboard part is being played live. (The violin player learned it for this song - not bad for 2 weeks.)

The 2010 All-Stars did a better job with Won’t Get Fooled Again at Unwind in Kansas City, MO.

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Didn’t know Nash the Slash was still around. Thanks!

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Here’s an interesting version. Gary Sinise and his band playing Baba O’Riley.

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My brother and I were at this show at Sadler’s Wells February 25th, 2000. Even here, with a full orchestra, the “synth” part is coming from a tape. The huge cheer for the black girl singing the refrain is because this is the second try at the song at this show, and she screwed up so bad on the first one that Pete stopped the song and started it again.

By the way, Pete’s tinnitus is so bad he literally had to kneel down and put his head in the monitor speaker to tune his acoustic.

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I’ve just checked out all the videos posted here, as as far as I can tell the School of Rock kids are the only ones to try to actually play the “synth” part live. Credit to Blue Man Group for an interesting percussion interpretation.

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My favorite cover on YouTube is the one thinkgeek.com did to demo the various musical toys sold on their site. They called their version “Timmy O’Riley” to give it an extra touch of nerdiness.

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The Who have had a keyboard player to supplement their live sound since Rabbit joined them on the '79 tour, but the synth parts on Baba and WGFA have pretty much always been pre-recorded loops. Pete’s famous on-stage meltdown(s) in regards to backing tapes were later on during the early performances of Quad.

As to the original bit on Baba O’Riley, we’re never going to get the definitive story from Pete (at least he’s never likely to tell the story the same way twice!) In an interview he told the LA Free Press, " It was a 9-minute instrumental and I kept cutting it and cutting it; eventually I cut all the length out of it and it turned into a rock song, shoved some words on it…I think it probably would’ve been better as an instrumental."

In an interview for a radio special he said the process involved “*…recording random sections of stuff onto tape, re-recording bits of tape, cutting the tape up again, and getting rhythms from it. I could do it fast. Baba O’Riley has something like two or three thousand edits in it–the master tape goes by and it’s all white. It’s just sticking plaster from start to finish. What was very interesting is the stuff that I was cutting out, I was sticking together on a reel to keep it tidy. That piece is very interesting in it’s own right. But what I did then is, I put a piano over the top, a guitar, a vocal to make it sound a bit more like rock ‘n’ roll.” *

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My information is from the Classic Albums program on Who’s Next. Pete still had his 2500 and the organ, and the interview included the sound engineer who recorded it. It was the only interview I’ve seen where they took the album apart track by track, with the original multi-track master tapes.

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Actually, I just found the clip I was thinking of on YouTube. On Won’t Get Fooled Again he used an organ and an EMS Putney.

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That was the first one I thought of when I opened the thread. :smiley: