Throwback Thursday: The Who in concert: False spirituality in some really strange places – Pete Townshend and Meher Baba

Welcome to this week’s “Throwback Thursday” installment. Today, we’re going to revisit a post that was originally published back on July 19, 2017 and has been slightly revised.

I was born at the tail end of the post-WWII “baby boom,” which means that rock and roll music was a big part of my early life. There’s no accounting for taste, but I was more into the breezy California folk-rock/country-rock sound of The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Poco, The Flying Burrito Brothers, and Crosby, Stills, and Nash than bands with a harder sound, but I was pretty much aware of all the big groups and the different musical styles.

The rock and rollers of the 60s and 70s certainly had their agendas. For the most part, their message was “peace, love, sex, and partying,” and not necessarily in that particular order. Most rock songs didn’t have any overtly religious themes. Rank hedonism seemed to be the idol of choice. But in the late 60s, some of the big name rockers began to dabble in Eastern mysticism, most notably George Harrison of the Beatles with his heavy involvement with Hare Krishna Hinduism.

I don’t listen to rock music much anymore since I’m an old fuddy duddy now and a lot of the song lyrics are antithetical to Christian belief, but I do like to take a Byrds CD for a spin every now and then.

One of the premier rock and roll bands of the 60s and 70s, The Who, came to Rochester this past Sunday. A good friend asked if I would tag along to the concert. I was never a big fan of The Who, but I thought it would be an interesting experience. So I sat in my collapsible camping chair from 8:30 PM to 11 PM in the cheap-seats grassy section of the venue while most of the 15,000 capacity crowd stood for 2.5 hours cheering wildly for The Who, or what’s left of it. Drummer Keith Moon died of a drug overdose in 1978 and bassist, John Entwistle, died of a cocaine-induced heart attack in 2002. So much for the rock and roll lifestyle. Guitarist and songwriter, Pete Townshend, and vocalist, Roger Daltry, carry on The Who legacy.

Halfway into the concert set, my ears picked up the mesmerizing synthesized Lowrey organ intro to one of the Who’s most iconic tunes, “Baba O’Riley” (aka Teenage Wasteland). So there I was, listening along to one of the few Who songs I really liked in the past. But then I picked up on the lyric, “…I don’t need to fight to prove I’m right. I don’t need to be forgiven.” What? I don’t need to be forgiven? What’s that all about?

I wondered about that lyric and ended up doing a little research on Pete Townshend and “Baba O’Riley” the following day. Come to find out, the song was written by Townshend in part as a tribute to Meher Baba (1894-1969), a Zoroastrian-Hindu spiritual master who claimed to be an “avatar,” i.e., God in human form. Townshend has been a devoted follower of false Christ, Baba, since 1967 and several of his songs reference his teachings. Baba taught, as many Eastern mystics do, that there is no such thing as sin as the Bible teaches, but that there is only a journey of several lifetimes (aka reincarnation) to higher wisdom and eventual deification (“God-realization”).

“Dogmas, creeds, and conventional ideas of heaven and hell and of sin are perversions of Truth, and confuse and bewilder the mind. “ – Meher Baba

I don’t care to sit in constant judgement of every single detail of this unbelieving world or to criticize Christians who enjoy a little secular music now and then. I got caught up in that kind of “circle the wagons,” bunker-mentality style of Christianity for eight long years after I first accepted Christ. But there are many God-defying agendas out there. We must be discerning. If you’re sitting in your SUV, singing along to your favorite classic rock radio station, you may just find yourself repeating Townshend’s “I don’t need to be forgiven” or John Lennon’s ode to atheism, “Imagine there’s no heaven, it’s easy if you try. No hell below us, above us only sky.” Do we really want to fill our minds with those messages?

For anyone who is curious about Townshend’s connection to false Christ, Meher Baba, see here.