Happy 60th Anniversary to The Who’s debut album My Generation, originally released in the UK on December 3, 1965 and in the US (as The Who Sings My Generation) on April 25, 1966.
The Who are remembered as innovators. Their major contributions to rock history are the incorporation of synthesizers, the exploration of progressive song structures, and the rock opera. This work brought them enormous crowds at music festivals, opera houses, and most recently, ballet. They pushed the definition of what rock music could do.
Which makes listening to the group’s debut LP a bizarre exercise. On My Generation (released as The Who Sings My Generation in the United States), we find The Who as working musicians, playing the songs they’d brought to London clubs. They are not trying to change the face of rock and roll—they’re trying to get the kids to dance. The R&B-inspired vocals and heavy take on blue-eyed soul sound like a band wearing a costume (which, admittedly, they were, as they tried to replicate American music). The Who are giving the kids what they want, before they had the ambition to break new ground in the hopes that people would follow.
This was a common route for British Invasion bands. To get to Let It Bleed (1969), the Rolling Stones had to release a string of blues records. Before Revolver (1966), The Beatles were covering Chuck Berry. Later, Led Zeppelin got to epics like “Stairway to Heaven” after establishing their bona fides on blues classics. There’s an inflection point in each of these artist’s careers where they become their own masters, where audiences were so enraptured with their take on R&B that they could turn their unique spin into a whole new sound.
But My Generation was before that. It has two James Brown covers (with vocalist Roger Daltrey laying the accent on a little too thick), R&B-inspired backing vocals, simple romantic lyrics, and tight song structures. A band that would later spend all of Quadrophenia (1973) explaining the challenges of fitting into the mod scene is, well, desperately trying to fit in with the mod scene.
The standout feature of My Generation is its abrasiveness. Even when meeting genre conventions, the early Who find a way to extract the edge that would define later work. In the instrumental break to one of the Brown tunes, “Please, Please, Please,” guitarist Pete Townshend’s initially melodic solo devolves into a series of distorted thunks, eschewing the clean, expressive themes we’d expect from blues guitar.
Listen to the Album:
On “Much Too Much,” drummer Keith Moon’s calamitous fills add tension to the cadences near the end of the song, a technique that would further develop on “So Sad About Us,” from A Quick One (1966). Or there’s “The Ox,” the frenzied instrumental album closer that finds Moon hammering away under frantic runs from guest pianist Nicky Hopkins and more of Townshend’s guttural guitar work. Part grunge, part psychedelia, “The Ox” is a bizarre way to end a record that is trying to prove The Who’s bona fides as a soul act.
Because, well, the R&B of it all is only part of the goal here. The Who were marketing themselves as a band that the kids could dance to, relate to—and part of that involved the soul music that was popular at the time. But it also involved capturing the anger and confusion that came with growing up in Britian in the shadow of a world war, the loss of superpower status, and stiff upper lip Britishness. Just as American R&B is embedded in the historical context of Black American life, The Who’s Maximum R&B embodies the frustration of British youth in the 1960s.
Which, of course, is how we get to the title track. “My Generation” has a lot of things: the famous lyric “I hope I die before I get old,” John Entwistle’s inimitable bass solo, a proto-punk progression, and a wave of feedback to close out. It is both musically and socially singular, a perfect marriage of form and content. Its partner song, “The Kids Are Alright,” details the camaraderie of that generation; behind the outward defiance of the title track, there is trust within that crowd of kids in the clubs. Pete Townshend is not frustrated with British society on behalf of himself; he is pissed on behalf of the only people who seem to understand and support him.
But beyond its actual content, the influence of “My Generation” is found in the list of artists who have covered it—Patti Smith, Oasis, Green Day—groups that have captured uniquely generational alienations and senses of community. Each generation is born into an unfair world and is told to get with the program; each generation finds a way to challenge those who messed it all up before us and to dance with those who feel the same way that we do.
So, while My Generation sounds dated to modern ears, that’s the point. It is speaking to a very specific group of people at a very specific time. Once those burdens fell off The Who’s shoulders, it was time to make grand artistic statements. But My Generation was doing something else—a project more immediate, concrete, and political.
Listen: