Never Too Old to Rock : The Who, Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney once thought 25 was too old to rock. So what changed their thinking and will audiences accept them as they approach 50?

Pete Townshend remembers vividly the incident 24 years ago that inspired him to write “My Generation,” the song that contained the line, “Hope I die before I get old”--a phrase that became the battle cry for a generation of disenfranchised youth.

His band, the Who, still hadn’t released an album, but the group did have a recording contract and Townshend, just 20, had enough money to make his first big buy--a sparkling Lincoln Continental convertible.

He was living in a modest flat in an exclusive area of London, a neighborhood of bankers and diplomats. He was often hassled by the landlord because he didn’t have a proper bed and his clothes didn’t fit in with the neighborhood and he played music l-o-u-d.

“I was so tired of all that attitude, that God-awful snobbery that it just seemed to explode in me one day when I was driving (near the flat),” he said, during a break in a Who video taping recently at a sound stage just outside of London.

“A woman in a car opposite me stopped in traffic and looked over at me, real condescendingly, and said, ‘Hmmm, driving mummy’s car, eh?’ And I felt this rage, like ‘No, this isn’t (expletive) mummy’s car. This is my (expletive) car and I’m going to get a bigger one some day and drive it right through your (expletive) head.’

“If I had been more careful, I would have spoken about attitude in the song rather than age, but all we could see at the time was that it was older people who had the power and we had to get it. I was speaking for all of us.

“We were in a sense revolutionaries--our generation, trying to change things and I was just writing about it . . . like a journalist. Now, I guess, I have to deal with some of the questionable hypocrisies of my own youth . . . the sexism of it, the age-ism of it.”

Townshend thought time was against him in 1965. He, like most of his contemporaries, believed that a rock ‘n’ roller couldn’t maintain credibility much beyond 25 because rock music belonged to young people. Paul McCartney recalls that time: “It was all one: being young and loving rock.”

But, something changed their minds during the last quarter century.

For a whole crowd of “gray beard rockers” are now asking rock audiences, including the teen-agers that comprise the bulk of the concert-going market, to accept them as they approach 50.

Yes, 25 years after the Beatles first visited America, the Stones, the Who and McCartney will launch what amounts to a second a British rock invasion.

It’s not just a test of box office appeal, but of artistry. Will the music that has been hailed for more than two decades connect emotionally and intellectually with today’s young audience? Or will the shows simply be an exercise in nostalgia?

McCartney sees the irony in what’s happening.

During a break in rehearsals for his fall American tour, the 47-year-old ex-Beatle smiles and asks, “I wonder what Pete (Townshend) thinks now about that line: ‘Hope I die before I get old’?”

Even McCartney, however, remembers thinking in the days after the Beatles became regulars at the Cavern Club in Liverpool the early ‘60s that 25 was the outside age for being in a rock ‘n’ roll band. “The reason 25 stood out for me was that Frank Ifield (a British pop star of the time) was 25 and he seemed too old to ever be in a rock band,” McCartney said. “But by the time we were 25, we were at the height of our Beatlemania powers, so it seemed like we could go another five years or so.

“Then 30 arrived and we all felt pretty good still . . . looked all right . . . so 35 started to be the marker. By 35, I was into Wings and 40 seemed to be the end. Now, I’m not sure. Maybe 50?”

Rock’s original bad boys, the Rolling Stones, are old too, and going on an ambitious stadium tour this fall.

Keith Richards is the only member of the band who never thought of rock ‘n’ roll in terms of a limited timetable.

“My heroes were the great American blues artists . . . people who were in their 40s and beyond, people who seemed absolutely ancient . . . until you heard their music and then they seemed so fresh and alive,” said Richards who, like Mick Jagger, will be 46 in December.

“They made me think it was possible to play music as long as you were physically able. That’s why I have never felt self-conscious about being on stage at 30 or 40 . . . the way, I believe, Pete Townshend, and, I know, Mick (Jagger) have. . . . No one told Muddy Waters that it was time to get out. He rocked until the he died.”

The Who arrive first. The band--including original members Townshend, singer Roger Daltrey, 45, and bassist John Entwistle, 44, will play more than three dozen stadium shows on a tour that began this weekend in Toronto.

The tour--which includes Aug. 26 and Aug. 22 stops respectively at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and at San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium--will also include benefit performances of the Who’s rock opera “Tommy” on Tuesday at the Radio City Music Hall in New York and Aug. 24 at the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles.

The “Tommy” benefits will generate part of the estimated $6-million that the Who will donate to charity on the tour which is expected to earn the band about $30-million.

The Stones will follow with another, even larger stadium tour this fall--as many as 60 dates. Like the Who, the Stones, already guaranteed between $65-million and $70-million for the tour, will also be featured in a pay-per-view television special. McCartney will probably be on the road about the same time as the Stones, though playing indoor, 15,000- to 17,000-seat arenas.

And they are merely the high points in what is turning out to be--in the words of one sarcastic record-store sales clerk here--”the year of the greybeards” in rock. The Allman Brothers, Doobie Brothers and the Jefferson Airplane have also reformed, and such other veteran acts as the Beach Boys, Grateful Dead, Chicago, Elton John, Steve Miller, the Monkees, the Bee Gees and Ringo Starr will be on the road.

Not everyone is pleased by this emphasis on the past.

“I think it’s shameless,” said an agent who asked not to be identified, referring chiefly to the Stones and the Who. “They’re coming back for the money and that makes a mockery of everything a band like the Who once stood for.

“I respect Keith and Pete when they do solo shows because that is saying, ‘Come to see me for what I am doing now.’ But that’s not what they’re saying in these tours. They’re saying, ‘Come see me for what I did 10 or 20 years ago. The Who don’t even have a new album. I also hate the way it takes radio time and concert dollars away from deserving new acts.”

Lest anyone wonder, however, if there is an audience for these veteran rockers, initial ticket sales for several Who shows on the East Coast were so strong that additional dates were added in several cities.

Together, the Who, Rolling Stones and McCartney tours should generate between $250 million and $300 million in box office, merchandising and closed-circuit TV receipts, according to industry insiders. (See Pop Eye on Page 68.)

Marc Paul Geiger, who works for Triad Agency and represents such college and alternative rock favorites as the Cure and Love and Rockets, emphasized the multilevel appeal of the shows.

“These acts are perfect for the market today because they appeal to both your basic young rock fan and older fans who comprise the adult contemporary market,” he said.

“Adult contemporary used to be applied to wimpy pop acts, but that’s now the market that enables Tracy Chapman or Edie Brickell to sell 2 (million) to 3 million albums. It is an extension of the rock ‘n’ roll market. . . . People who grew up on the Stones are into intelligent rock, intelligent lyrics. This market has grown six fold.”

But why do rock fans who weren’t even born when Townshend wrote “My Generation” want to see the Who?

“It’s like in England when the Queen Mother comes out,” said Denver concert promoter Barry Fey, who is handling four of the Who shows. “She gets more affection than anybody else and what you are dealing with here is the royalty of rock ‘n’ roll. Kids have grown up hearing these bands and wanting to see them. It’s like when I did an old-timers baseball game here (in Denver) and I had Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays and Joe DiMaggio . . . the line for DiMaggio’s autograph went out in the street. The kids never had a chance to see him play, but they are the legends.”

Also nostalgia?

“No,” Fey said. “That’s the strange thing about it. It’s not like going to see the Four Tops or someone. These bands are still current, the music still connects. To me, the music that came out of the late 60s and early 70s is so far superior to anything that is out there today. These bands are like your ‘Citizen Kanes’ and your ‘Gone With the Wind.’ They may be 40 years old or whatever, but they still speak to people. It’s the same with this music. Somehow the fact that the people making the music are old enough to be their parents doesn’t matter.”

Greg Steele, guitarist in Faster Pussycat, a Los Angeles-based hard-rock band, agrees. Steele, 25, has the kind of band that supposedly will have a harder time getting attention this year because of the “greybeards” tour. But he doesn’t resent the veteran bands’ return.

“Thank God those bands are still around,” he said. “I’d love to have seen Hendrix. A lot of the stuff we’re doing now comes straight from these bands. So many generations have grown up with that music and (identified with it). There are some bands now that are 15 years younger than the Stones and the Who, but they seem more out of touch.”

Bill Haley was the first casualty of being too old to rock ‘n’ roll. Haley became the first national star of rock when his spirited recording of “Rock Around the Clock” was spotlighted in “Blackboard Jungle,” a 1955 film about juvenile delinquents in a metropolitan high school.

Teens were no doubt surprised to find that Haley was a large, somewhat chubby man with a spit curl down across his forehead--someone who looked more like their father than their contemporaries. But they were too enthralled with “Rock Around the Clock” to worry about Haley’s looks.

After “Rock” spent two months on top of the nation’s pop chart that summer, Haley scored quickly again with two more Top 10 singles, including “See You Later, Alligator.” “Alligator,” however, would prove to be his final Top 10 hit. Two weeks after the single entered the national Top 40 in January of 1956, Elvis Presley arrived with “Heartbreak Hotel” and Haley became obsolete overnight.

Elvis was everything that Haley wasn’t. He was young, sexy and mysterious. He looked like one of the teen-agers, not their parent. Elvis was 21 at the time. And Haley, the man who was deemed too old? He was 29.

McCartney doesn’t appear to have gone through a mid-life crisis in rock. Even in the Beatles days, he wrote songs--from “Eleanor Rigby” and “Penny Lane” to “Yesterday”--that seemed to speak as easily to adults as to teens.

His post-Beatles work, too, often seemed to reflect the gentler and more intimate concerns of a family man than the sexy aggression of the Stones or the social commentary of the Who.

But key members of the Stones and the Who did go through a mid-career crisis. Keith Richards, in fact, believes the issue of “age” led to the temporary break-up of the Stones after the group’s 1986 album, “Dirty Work.”

“My feeling is that Mick (who recorded two solo albums and did a few live shows with other musicians) thought the Stones were becoming old-fashioned and he wanted to go out on his own and show he could compete with whoever was in the Top 10 today,” Richards said late last year during an interview in Los Angeles.

“So, what does he end up doing? He just does four songs or whatever from his two solo albums, and spends the rest of the time doing Stones songs with this (substitute) Stones band with some chicks dancing around.

“To me, that’s a step backward. That’s old-fashioned. The thing I said to him at the time was, ‘You’re Mick Jagger. You are diminishing yourself by doing that.’ . . . I felt he had let the band down and himself. It was like 25 years of integrity going down the drain.”

And, sure enough, Jagger--who once said he didn’t want still to be singing “Satisfaction” at 30, ended up last year on his solo tour singing that 1965 hit at age 44.

Still, he seemed like a man who had been liberated--from what may have been his own insecurities about his role in contemporary rock and, quite possibly, what he may have come to view as his Stones shackles.

Jagger had frequently seemed on the last Stones tours to be playing down to the curious, teen-age crowd that was seeing the “legendary” band for the first time. In Japan, he showed a renewed sense of style as a performer and more maturity as a singer. So, he may be returning to the band with a new sense of confidence.

For Richards, there is plenty of life in the Stones as long as they keep coming up with new music, not just playing the old hits. “Rock ‘n’ roll is still only about 32 years old and it is still getting over its (pre-occupation) with teen-age themes. The Stones are in a good position to help it grow up.”

Like Richards, the Who’s John Entwistle, also claims never to have worried about being too old to rock.

“We weren’t after the screaming girls, like the Beatles and the Stones,” Entwistle said, during another break in the video shoot. “We wanted to be famous for our music, not our clothes or our faces. So, we didn’t present ourselves as teen-age heart-throbs.

“Our audience always kept expanding, too. Ever time we went on tour, there would be a new, young audience waiting, so there never seemed to be a gap or a rejection. The only time I think about how old I am is when I look in the papers in England because they always seem to mention your age and how much your house costs every time they mention your name.”

However, Roger Daltrey, the Who’s flamboyant singer, said he “didn’t think life itself existed much past 25” when he started in the Who and he did worry for a while during the ‘70s how long he could continue to strut around stage singing songs like “My Generation.”

But he said he felt the power of the music was enough to keep the group credible. “To me, the best Who music lives on just like a great book or film,” Daltrey said, during another break in filming. “I’ve always felt very strongly that Pete (who writes most of the Who material) came up with music that both captured an era and a point in life that people can identify with today.

“I’m sure some people must think it is stupid for us to sing ‘My Generation’ today, but the truth is our generation hasn’t gone away. They are are still alive and they are still incredibly valuable to a lot of people. For people in that generation, it reminds them today of a time in their lives and they still give them strength.”

For Pete Townshend, the architect of the Who sound, however, the mid-life rock crisis was nearly fatal.

Townshend is one of rock’s most thoughtful and candid figures, someone who speaks as forcefully as he writes. Along with Dylan and the Beatles, Townshend probably has done more than anyone else to stretch the music beyond the simple teen perimeters of the ‘50s.

There is both a deeply philosophical and spiritual undercurrent in his music, strains especially evident in his post-”Tommy” work with the Who and in his several solo albums. (see review of Townshends’ new album, “The Iron Man” on Page 58).

Townshend has been such a symbol of strength in rock that it was shocking to long-time Who fans to see him almost end up a casualty of the rock lifestyle, a fate suffered by Who drummer Keith Moon, a classic live-hard, die-young figure who succumbed to a drug overdose in 1978.

The Who leader has objected to the Moon analogy, saying his problems (including alcoholism) were personal rather than tied to an excessive rock lifestyle.

Still, he felt enough of a strain touring to declare on the 1982 “farewell” tour, “I know it would be reassuring to a lot of people my age for me to say, ‘I can keep going,’ but I can’t. This (life style) has messed me up. I nearly died. I had to pull myself together. . . . (Quitting touring) is an admission we (in rock are) all part of the real world.”

Sitting now in a production trailer outside the video sound stage, Townshend reflected on the question of aging in rock--and whether he and his fellow British rockers are pushing the boundaries of rock.

“I was very uneasy about going on the road again,” Townshend said, referring not only to ear problems that caused him to stand inside a wooden “shed” during rehearsals to block out the excessive noise, but also to questions of whether he would still be accepted on stage.

“There is this awful dichotomy that happens in the ‘80s world of rock ‘n’ roll, he said. “Performers are like women who give birth and our bodies go and their husbands don’t want them any more. It’s a kind of a perverse analogy, I know, but that’s how I began to feel in 1974, 1975. . . . A lot of us had given birth to this music, but I know I felt ugly. In fact, I think that’s one of the reasons I might have drank so much at one time. I wanted to hide . . . crawl away.

“Part of coming back is to combat the terrible ageism I see happening . . . just to say, ‘Listen just because someone is middle-aged is not to say they can’t recover.’ I am not talking about being able to do the things we did as teen-agers. I wouldn’t trade places with the guys in (a prominent young hard rock band) for all the tea in China. It would be fun to be able to play (guitar) that fast, but I just couldn’t do the booze and the crack and the women.”

Townshend--who has written a novel and worked as an editor at a London publishing house during his time away from the Who--said he had long thought about doing something in connection with the Who’s 25th anniversary this year, but he rejected as late as December the idea of a formal tour.

“I felt that my hearing problem made it impractical and the length of a tour that would be required to make the whole thing economical was untenable for me.”

The turning point was the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame dinner in January in New York.

“I just thought I was going to New York to induct the Stones, meet a few people and then go home, but it turned into an astonishing kind of event for me. I guess the (key thing) for me was Little Richard. I’ve never really been a big fan of Little Richard, but I was just an instant convert. He reminded me a lot of Keith (Moon), larger than life and he inducted the late Otis Redding and he did it with such class and style.

“Then the Soul Stirrers and the Temptations got on stage and were so proud of what they had done in music. Some of those guys were in their 60s or older and they were up there bopping around. They weren’t worried about how old they were. They were just going to have a good time. Seeing that simplified things for me.”

McCartney promises to do a few Beatles songs on his tour, though he’ll concentrate on material from his various solo albums, including the new “Flowers in the Dirt.” The Stones and especially the Who, however, are expected to serve up a lot of the familiar tunes from the ‘60s and ‘70s.

“The truth is we’ll be playing very few Who songs from later than 1972 because I’ve long maintained we were pretty much a spent force after that on record,” Townshend said. “That’s why I wanted the Who to end after the last tour.

“I used the money I made on the tour to buy my way out of the Warner Brothers contract so we wouldn’t have to make any more Who albums. I suppose I could have just stalled around and not delivered the albums, but I wanted a clean break. I thought it was a matter of honor because Mo Ostin and the other people at Warners had been wonderful to us.”

When Townshend talks about what he hopes rock fans get from the Who tour, he talks about the legacy passed on by his band and the other landmark groups that started in the 60s.

“I want them to look at who we are and put the jigsaw piece back in the puzzle so they can understand what is happening in their music . . . understand why Guns N’ Roses are Guns N’ Roses, understand why REM is what they are, etc. . . . to understand that all this is part of their heritage.”

He paused and looked around the empty trailer. Entwistle and Daltrey had already gone home and a driver was waiting to take him, too. It was nearly dark outside by now and he seemed suddenly melancholy.

“Another thing I’d like to show is that being chosen doesn’t necessarily lead to crucifixion. . . . When you are successful, either in a band or on your own, it is the public that choses you and sometimes the public will turn against you. Or sometimes fate turns against you and it can destroy you.

“There have been a lot of deaths in our (rock) community since we started, including some in the Who family. . . . Keith Moon, (former manager) Kit Lambert. There was an amazing amount of tragedy. But there are also survivors. When we step on that stage at night, we want to show that you can survive . . . that survival is good.”