don’t raise your eye

The figure that opens it was meant to be a man. Townshend’s plan for Lifehouse was to feed Meher Baba’s vital signs and personality into a synthesiser and let the machine make music out of the data. What ended up on tape is a Lowrey Berkshire Deluxe TBO-1 organ with its marimba repeat switched on, cycling a handful of notes in a mode borrowed from the minimalist Terry Riley — Baba plus Riley, hence the title, and hence an album that opens with a keyboard preset left running. It spends the next five minutes building towards something. I have never settled whether it arrives: the song withholds the climax it keeps promising, and then hands it to someone who wasn’t in the band.

In Lifehouse this was the opening number, sung by a Scottish farmer called Ray as he gathers his wife Sally and their two children to leave for London. The opera collapsed, the song survived — cut down from something near half an hour to the high points, by way of a nine-minute demo the band rebuilt at Olympic in May 1971. Daltrey takes the verses. Townshend takes the middle, the quiet part, don’t cry, don’t raise your eye, which is the only moment anybody on the record offers comfort. The wasteland was literal before it was a metaphor: Townshend has pointed at the state of the field after an Isle of Wight festival, and at what he saw of the audience at Woodstock.

Then the ending. East of Eden were recording next door, and Keith Moon went and fetched their violinist, Dave Arbus, to play over the outro. Arbus turns the whole modal machine into a reel and winds it faster and faster until the track crashes out. Onstage it became Daltrey’s harmonica, which is not the same thing at all. So take the album version, start it from silence, and wait for the fiddle to come in from the next room.