Charles Shaar Murray on My Generation

[Brian Cady]

>From today's Sunday Times: 
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2101-2516122,00.html 

Going for a song 
Charles Shaar Murray on My Generation by the Who 


The first time I ever saw the Who, I was 14 years old and under the influence of the most powerful drugs I’ve ever taken. Unfortunately, there was no recreational aspect involved. A bout of classroom horseplay had led to a collision between my hand and a window, resulting in an injury that had opened up my wrist and left it looking like a special effect from a Korean horror movie.

So there I was in the hospital, loaded to the eyeballs with anaesthetic, awaiting only the final pinprick to put me under for surgery that would leave me scarred for life. In the distance, at the far end of the ward, a television set was blaring out Top of the Pops. Making their first appearance were a new group with their first hit single. The band were called the Who, and the song was I Can't Explain, which combined crunchy ersatz-Kinks riffing, swooping post-Beach Boys harmonies, demented drumming and the most articulate lyric about inarticulacy ever written. Is it any wonder that I ended up loving them for ever? Its sequel, Anyway Anyhow Anywhere, was even better, a sonic explosion entirely unlike anything done before. Pete Townshend's feedback guitar effects were so outrageous that the band’s American record company returned the master tapes to the UK, claiming that they were obviously faulty, and the drumming was the work of a lunatic who had fallen among people either too craven to stop him or sufficiently perverse to egg him on. 

Then came the coup de grâce, in the form of My Generation. There had been prefabricated yoof anthems before — ranging from the surly slur of Chuck Berry's "Don’t bother us, leave us alone/Anyway, we almost grown" to the risible save-our-youth-club bathos of Cliff's The Young Ones — but nothing had ever rendered my own adolescent inner turmoil more three-dimensionally than the noise the Who made on that record. Townshend, a former Young Communist, may have built an agenda around both mod angst and the notion of youth as a class in the Marxist sense, but despite the semi-veiled innuendo of "Why don’t you all f-fade away?”" — as perfect a line for discontented 14-year-olds as it was for the discontented 19-year-old who wrote it — and the monumental rage of "I hope I die before I get old", it was the cataclysmic roar of the music and the collapse of the very notion of structure it purported to mirror that made the difference.

Very few bands in all of rock — the Sex Pistols and Nirvana come to mind — are privileged to have created moments of such power and consequence. Despite all the movers and shakers who’ve since come and gone, few could match the Who’s expression of the inchoate, churning urges within my own g-g-generation. 


-Brian in Atlanta 
The Who This Month! 
http://www.thewhothismonth.com

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