Generation Gap? What Generation Gap?

We're living in a Generation Continuum

Please stick around or scroll right down for a unique young take on “Won’t Get Fooled Again” at the end.

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On a Saturday morning a few weeks back, listening to the Rockenteurs podcast (though you can watch the interview here), I got to learn that the female voice I had heard 24 hours earlier, singing lead on a song on David Gilmour’s lovely new album Luck and Strange is that of David’s daughter Romany; I also learned that one of David’s sons sings backing vocals on the album and that another supplied some lyrics.

The following evening, I went to see The Vapors and Pajamazon at the Colony Café in Woodstock, where both the reformed, British former hitmakers, and the local power-punk rockers employed their respective front man’s son as a guitarist.

Just 24 hours after that, I hosted a public talk with 2 Tone Records biographer Daniel Rachel, which in discussing the (English) Beat brought me to thinking how the last time I had seen Ranking Roger alive, in December 2016, he had been fronting his UK version of The Beat with his son Ranking Junior alongside him.

Meantime, I was busy prepping the new Dear Boys single for release, which my own teenage son Noel had not only mixed for us, but had added/replaced one or two (of my) guitar parts because he was, frankly, better suited to play them. Suddenly, Wednesday rolled around, and I was back in the Rock Academy rehearsal room, along with my cast of 20+ kids aged 8-18, working on our then-impending 24-song tribute to The Who.

Somewhere along this steady run of intrafamily activity, I got the germination of this article, including the title you see up above, though in its original form, I was thinking of calling it Whose Generation?... Because, if you only know three things about The Who, chances are one of them is going to be for the line, “Hope I die before I get old.” It goes like this:

“My Generation” was recorded in 1965. Almost sixty years later, its composer, Pete Townshend, is 78 – “old” by any standard definition of age – and very much alive and well. This past week found him attending the opening of the Townshend Studio at the University now occupying his former “alma mater,” Ealing School of Art, having set it up by donating many of his vintage keyboards and other equipment. According to his web site, Pete “wanted to leave behind a legacy … for the next generation of his artists” at the school where back in 1962 he was introduced by Gustaf Metzger to the concept of Auto Destructive Art, a term he subsequently referenced to justify the Who’s nightly ritual of equipment smashing at the conclusion of their set, inevitably with that self-same “My Generation.”

There can be no doubt that the students at the Townshend Studio will be grateful. For as the video clip of “My Generation” up above (from our subsequent Rock Academy show of course) demonstrates, “kids today” have no compunction about listening to – and emulating - this music of 50 or 60 years ago. They love, they live for it. For many of his own formative years, my Noel listened to little else but The Who, and during his pre-pubescent busking period, frequently cleaned up on the mean streets of Woodstock (alright, the Village Green) by playing the likes of “Pinball Wizard” and “Substitute” and “Happy Jack” for weekend tourists. And that love is increasingly reciprocated from the older rock generation to the young. There’s a story to be told about the photo below, of Noel getting to meet Pete backstage at Wembley Arena in 2013, but there’s also a  question to be asked: who looks happier? It’s a close call.

And so I find myself reflecting on my own engagement with the younger generation. I am sixty now. 60. There, I typed it, again. It looks ancient on paper as a number. Like, truly ancient. My uncle was only 40 years older than me, and despite being a talented jazz pianist and an undying fan of the genre, even in my youngest memories of him he looked at least as old as I am right now. The combover hair, the tight suit and constricting tie at all times, the chicken-pecking spectacles… you’d see these 40–50-year-olds everywhere in Britain though the 1970s and you’d look down your own adolescent nose and think, “get out the way, old man.” Because they weren’t just from another generation, it seemed as if they were from another planet. I don’t suspect it was too different in the States.

Meantime, I’m fifty years older than a couple of the kids in that clip above and they seem to pay it no mind. One or two older students have even told me I’m cool (though only the teenagers, mind, and only when nobody is looking; perhaps it’s uncool to admit!) It begs the question…

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Whatever happened to the Generation Gap? When I first went to gigs, at the age of 14-15 in the late 70s the pub and club audiences would top out at around age 20. Anyone older than, say, 25, would generally stand at the back/bar for fear of being told to f*** off out of the way. Though Joe Strummer was an ancient 24 when it was released, The Clash had sung in “1977” of “No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones,” The Jam of “looking for new” in “All Around The World,” and Generation X had doubled down on their band name with their debut single, an evident play on the Who anthem, “Your Generation,” its follow-on words being “…don’t mean a thing to me.”

The generation gap, then, was real, but the concept of it certainly preceded me and my punk-new wave crowd. And you don’t need to be a philosopher to understand what fueled it, though there has been less discussion about why it has peaked and rescinded, as I am suggesting here that it has.

Put simply, those generations that had fought or otherwise served their countries in the epic World Wars of the Twentieth Century, who had learned in the process the importance of discipline and order and the meaning of selflessness; those who took refuge in the relative stability of their post-war economies (though make no mistake, the US became a superpower and the UK became indebted to the US for its slow post-war rebuilding)… those were the parents who lost the plot when the novel concept of “teen” emerged in the 1950s both with the younger generation’s newfound spending power and with its extended school leaving ages and the opening up of Universities and colleges to the non-elites. And when rock’n’roll did not so much emerge as simply ERUPT! in the midst of this teen boom, right around 1954, those parents didn’t just lose the plot, they lost their minds.

In the mid-60s, the kids who had been born at the birth of teen started running away from home in great numbers, heading to the big cities (San Francisco the most alluring and subsequently overwhelmed, but LA and NYC took in thousands too) in the hope of finding a freedom sold as “peace and love” but which in reality was more like “poverty and drugs.” The Beatles wrote a song about one such archetype, the papers ran national headlines about it, and magazine culture explored the chasm in opinions between parents and kids on everything from Vietnam to drugs and, yes, music. In February 1967, one of those magazines, the American Look!, ran an article entitled “The Generation Gap” and so the phrase was coined.

By then it had already fallen to the musicians of the era, many of whom had been born in the waning years of World War II or shortly after their fathers returned from the front, to articulate this gap in words and music, and it’s tempting to believe that with “My Generation,” it was Townshend who got there first. As he told Guitar World’s Christopher Scapelliti in 2019, “The generation that fought in World War II had this sense that, ‘We gave you the right to exist, you little fuckers. All you have is the duty to thank us!’ And that we were responsible for their torture.”

Much of Pete’s career has subsequently been haunted by his seemingly hypocritical audacity of not living (or dying) up to that infamous line he wrote in The Who’s third single, for not pulling a Jimi or a Janis or, God forbid, a Keith Moon. It was the only line in all The Who’s canon that my own parents’ generation seemed to know, which means it was the one quoted in their media circles, and it’s one that I thoroughly misunderstood myself, even after I interviewed him in 1978 when, just 14 years old at the time, I allowed his crystalline explanation to sail right over my head. I dug it back up for a Substack transcript earlier this year, and realized that Pete had expressed the song’s intent perfectly that day. Here’s the exchange.

-Do you regret having written the “My Generation” lyrics?

No, I don’t regret anything.

-Do you reckon you’ve got old yet in that sense?

Yeah, I feel… I’m one of the few real rock ‘n’ roll grown-ups. I think one thing that being in the rock business has definitely taught me is, you’ve got to be honest, otherwise you can’t survive. As a human being you can’t. I couldn’t stand – despite the fact that he’s made some amazing records and is a wonderful singer - being somebody like Rod Stewart. Or Mick Jagger or anybody like that, or even Johnny Rotten. I mean, I’ve got to be me. You know, my values, I must say, are pretty conservative, and my attitudes are pretty conservative. “My Generation” was written when I was in a flat… Belgravia is where all the embassies are, and where all the Lords and Ladies live. The manager of my group bought me a  flat. As soon as we made it I moved out of my mum’s house – and that wasn’t a bad house, I had a room of my own, and a guitar, and an amplifier, and a car, the band was making money, I was making £12 a week free, which in ‘65 was worth about £30 now, and I had a college grant for going to art school. I never went, but I had the grant as well, which was about another three or four quid a week, and I was actually able to buy a big American car.

So, I had a car, a flat, and I don’t mean just any flat, I had a bloody flat in Belgravia, and I was sitting up there in this flat in Belgravia, surrounded by recording equipment, with a couple of hit records, and when I wrote “My Generation” those were the circumstances I was in. I was actually complaining if you like, about all these Ambassadors and Lords and ladies and stuff like that. And I just didn’t want to be like them. And what I was saying in “My Generation” was saying, “Rather than be like you, I’d rather die.”

And I feel very much the same now. I feel that if somebody put me on a rack and said, ‘Listen, either you’re gonna change and become the person that you feel is a right cunt, or we’re gonna kill you,’ I’d say, ‘Alright then, kill me.’ I mean, I don’t wanna become a member of the National Front, I don’t want to become a Lord, I don’t want to become any of those things. I feel that I’ve got my things to do and I want to be the way I am. And I feel younger now than when I wrote “My Generation.”

Pete Townshend: "I made rock 'n' roll do a little bit more."

Pete was all of 34 when he said those words, and I don’t know how he would say he feels today. But speaking for myself, as someone who would now qualify for the free rail card in the UK if I still lived there, I find myself living an almost incongruous, truly beautiful balance. In many ways, especially spiritually, I do feel more youthful than ever. Those Rock Academy kids have a lot to do with it for sure, apart from contributing to my tinnitus, but there’s something more: a certain freedom that comes with increased age. It’s the freedom that comes with making your own music when you no longer give a fuck about getting famous, and the militancy that can then go with it when you’re not worried about pleasing people you never really wanted to please in the first place. In many ways, my social values are more, well, socialist than ever.

But those values are both influenced and tempered by what I would prefer to call experience rather than old age. You have to live to be able to digest the progress of history. You have to have been brought up thinking you weren’t a racist to now know that you had been instilled nonetheless with incredibly damaging racial stereotypes; you have to have come of age thinking you weren’t sexist to know that, compared to the world we live in now, you were insufferably so, as was everyone around you but for the most enlightened. You have to have lived through the years of “the troubles” – British troops on the streets of Northern Ireland, and IRA bombs going off seemingly at random in the pubs and parks of mainland Britain  – to know that, whatever college students today might think, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is complicated, that two wrongs don’t make a right, and that the ongoing atrocities we witness and occasionally protest about from afar can and will only be resolved when both sides come to the table with a genuine understanding that they have to live together.

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In short, I relish a sense of maturity these days. I have finally reached a point where I believe I have some acquired knowledge, some learned information that I may be able to pass back down the generations. I feel like, were my tribe a village, I’d be a village elder. There’s a temptation here to echo what those older generations used to say to us – “in my day young people respected their elders” – but I have news for all your Millennial haters out there, and that is that young people these days do respect their elders. The generation gap expressed in the Quadrophenia song “Cut My Hair” still resonates, but only from a retrospective respect.

So yeah, let’s get back to music, and back to the Kids. I love that these Kids – and I use that term widely and positively, with a nod to another Who classic, “The Kids Are Alright” – respect older music, and with it the older musicians, just as I love that younger musicians welcome older people to their shows. Then again, the term “younger musician” is itself open to definition; music now is viewed very much as a possible life career rather than a mere flash in the pan of youth, and 25-year-old performers, especially in the States, are celebrated for being relative babies.

As such, I have a sense that as history continues to be written, the “generation gap” of the 1950s-1970s will be seen as an aberration, caused by the well-examined reasons I summarized above. Truth is, that even in the midst of this infamous “Gap,” there were always those who followed tradition; there were always kids who happily took a job in the family business; there were always those who wanted nothing more than the love and respect of their parents and who were fortunate enough to receive it.

But I have a sense that the generation continuum remains to be played out more fully. Just as those rock musicians from the 1960s, those who have managed to grow old somewhat gracefully – the David Gilmours and Pete Townshend of this world to name but two – have held on to the creative values that they successfully disseminated in the peak of their youth, so those of us who were part of the punk generation continue to grow old somewhat rebelliously. We are the ones who refused to don our parents’ suits and ties; who wore baggy shorts into our 50s; who preferred shaving our heads than employing the combover.

And while some amongst my own generation have become cartoon caricatures, attending punk nostalgia weekends at holiday camps, no different from the retro teddy boys we sneered at back in the 70s, there are plenty amongst us whose radar was forever shifted by what The Jam called a “youth explosion!” in “All Around The World,” who still search out and listen to new music, still go out to gigs (especially if they can see a Taiwanese psych-rock duo at their local club) and have learned not to give a shit if we don’t understand the music the real kids on the street are making these days because we know it was not made for us. Which is not to contradict everything that has come before, but to gladly accept that if you were lucky enough to have a youth of your own, you’ll respect the kids’ right to enjoy theirs, and they’ll respect you in turn.

Introducing (some of) the cast of the Rock Academy tribute to The Who, Sep 20 2024.

And then there is that beautiful multi-generational crossover, such as with the recent Who show I directed: one in which kids as young as 9 years old played music by people who are now 80 years old, directed by someone aged 60, all of it largely funded, encouraged and thoroughly enjoyed by parents whose ages, at a guess, range from late 30s up to mid-50s.

Obviously, directing the music of The Who had a special connection for me, and as such, and for all the difficulties we ran into with this show, including the complexity of the songs we took on for the experience of the cast that we had, I especially enjoyed how the students dressed up for it as we always encourage. It seemed like a particular mark of their enthusiasm that when it later came to Best of Season, where our five different shows get combined into one 25-song gig, many of them chose to wear their Who costumes again, even those who were in two different shows. The pictures below bring a smile to my face; I hope they do to yours.

We don’t officially film the Best of Season, but I asked a couple of parents to bring out their cameras anyway, knowing that the venue, the Woodstock Playhouse, would generate better sound than at our two dedicated Who performances a fortnight earlier, and the cast’s finale performance of “Won’t Get Fooled Again” was one for the ages. All ages. Yes, it was too fast (I swear it was not my count-in!), but that’s live music for you, especially when you’re a bunch of Kids (in that best sense of the word) and, unlike The Who, you’re not playing along to pre-recorded tapes that lock you in to the correct tempo.

I hope you enjoy the energy that you will see in the clip below.¹ That you too never allow yourself to grow metaphorically old. And that if you are lucky to grow physically old enough to believe you have some learned knowledge acquired along the way, that you have younger generation at hand, within your blood family, your tribe, or your wider community, to pass it on down to.

1. With great thanks to all the parents who shot video at the Playhouse for this post. The drummer, btw, is Leo Beaumont, the one I used for The Dear Boys’ single “Blink of An I.” He is still 14.