Happy Birthday is a collaboration album by Pete Townshend and friends including Ronnie Lane, pressed and released in 1970 by Universal Spiritual League. The album was originally released in February 1970 (in commemoration of Meher Baba's birthday on February 25) as the first in a series of tribute albums dedicated to Pete Townshend's spiritual mentor Meher Baba. Only about 2,500 copies were pressed in the original 1970 issue. The album was reissued in similar numbers in 1977. Later albums by Townshend and friends dedicated to Meher Baba included I Am, With Love, and Avatar (a compilation of the previous three albums, later released as Jai Baba). Several songs from Happy Birthday and I Am reappeared in the 1972 Townshend solo album Who Came First.
Famous quotes containing the words happy, birthday and/or townshend:
“It is only when we are very happy that we can bear to gaze merrily upon the vast and limitless expanse of water, rolling on and on with such persistent, irritating monotony, to the accompaniment of our thoughts, whether grave or gay. When they are gay, the waves echo their gaiety; but when they are sad, then every breaker, as it rolls, seems to bring additional sadness, and to speak to us of hopelessness and of the pettiness of all our joys.”
—Emmuska, Baroness Orczy (1865–1947)
“Some days your hat’s off to the full-time mothers for being able to endure the relentless routine and incessant policing seven days a week instead of two. But on other days, merely the image of this woman crafting a brontosaurus out of sugar paste and sheet cake for her two-year-old’s birthday drives a stake through your heart.”
—Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)
“But neither steele nor stony breast
Are proof against those lookes of thine,
Nor can a Beauty lesse divine
Of any heart be long possest,
Where thou pretend’st an interest.”
—Aurelian Townshend (c. 1583–c.1651)