Pete Townshend is 75 today, born on May 19th, 1945. In The Who song “My Generation” Be careful what you hope for. Practically since he wrote it, Pete Townshend has been answering questions about the line declaring, “I hope I die before I get old.” Here’s what he had to say about it at a 1989 press conference in New York.
“The only thing now is that looking back on those words, ‘I hope I die before I get old,’ I really know now that that will happen — that will happen to all of us — and in a sense, in a lot of ways, it has already started, that process. Certain bits of me, which were operating extremely well when I wrote those lines, don’t function quite so adequately today.”
