(From Melody Maker, 1965)


Keith Moon: Pete had written out the words and gave them to Roger in the studio. He'd never seen them before...so when he read through them the first time, he stuttered...Kit [Lambert] said (Oxonion accent): "We leave it in, we leave in the stuttering." When we realized what'd happened, it knocked us all sideways. And it happened simply because Roger couldn't read the words.

(From Rolling Stone, 1972)


Pete Townshend: Spontaneous words that come out of the top of your head are always the best. I had written the lines of "Generation" without thinking, hurrying them, scribbling on a piece of paper in the back of a car. For years I've had to live by them, waiting for the day someone says: "You said you hoped you'd die before you got old in that song. Well, you are old. What now?"

(From Rolling Stone, 1971)


Pete Townshend: We don't mean it now...[but] we did mean it. We didn't care about ourselves or our future...even about one another. We were hoping to screw the older generation, screw the Rockers, screw the Beatles, screw the record buyers, and screw ourselves. We've been most successful on that last account. We really didn't want to end up jabbering in the pop papers about our hang-ups; we wanted to die in plane crashes or get torn to pieces by a crowd of screaming girls. It all began to change when Paul sang "When I'm Sixty-Four."

(From Melody Maker, 1970)


Pete Townshend: I never wanted to write a big rock song like "My Generation." "Generation" was so big, it was almost Wagnerian. [Originally] I wrote it as a talking blues thing, something like "Talking New York Blues." Instead of New York, this would be "Talking 'Bout My Generation." Dylan affected me a lot. In fact, "Generation" started off as my folk-song single.

(From New Musical Express, 1971)