10 Most Iconic Keyboard Songs In Rock Music

At the start of the '70s, the synthesizers were still a fairly new invention to work with. While we tend to associate the futuristic sounds of synth with the MTV generation, it did have a few instances in the spotlight in the decade previous, like the flying sounds on Steve Miller's Fly Like an Eagle. If Pete Townshend hadn't come up with Baba O'Riley though, there's a good chance that we wouldn't be speaking about the instrument with such reverence today.

Since the follow up to Tommy was meant to be a lot more ambitious than just another rock opera, Townshend bought a synthesizer to weave some of his melodic ideas together. When working out other songs like Won't Get Fooled Again though, Townshend said that he wasn't even sure where the songs were going to go, just following the music and letting it carry him to another place. Which is funny because what we eventually got on this song was actually a mix of a sequencer and a few synth techniques that were chopped up, making you unsure of where the beat is until the grand piano comes in.

As forward thinking as Townshend may have been though, he wasn't quite ready to take this to the live stage in the early days, with the band playing to the track and getting into some hairy situations on tour when the tape would break in the middle of a show. Still, if Tommy broke ground for what rock was capable of at the time, hearing this for the first time felt like we were being led into the future.