“Ohio” is not a long song, I’ll give them that. However, there are two sides to every story. I could not honestly relate to Kent State in May ‘70 because I was in the 5th grade when it happened. Just because they call me a baby boomer doesn’t mean that I could’ve related to guys being drafted, hippies & yippies, rock stars and their music, greasers & bikers, soldiers returning from Vietnam, dope, “free love”, women’s lib, etc., etc... No wait, I’ll take it back that I couldn’t relate to the music...Once I heard Jimi’s version of Johnny B. Goode and the live version of Little Wing from the “In The West” album, I just about swallowed the hook...And when the Beatles quit, I think it must’ve been a kind of a universal disappointment that I felt. However, I don’t think that in ‘65, Pete Townsend had me and my elementary school classmates in mind when he wrote “My Generation”!
Maybe Townshend was singing about his own generation, the generation of most of the big music and radical politics of that era, the ‘Silent Generation”, Hendrix, the Beatles, etc.