We, the audience; (part 1) a touch of grey – boomers grow up and grow old

Pete Townshend, at the tender age of 23, wrote an anthem for his age called “My Generation.” One of the most controversial lines in the song had the Who’s lead singer Roger Daltrey stuttering, “Hope I die before I get old.” One music expert recalls; “when I last saw the Who, with Pete and Roger both facing their 60s along with the other members of their g-g-g-g-g-generation, they still did the song. It says a lot about baby boomers.”

“When the Who first sang the lyric, ‘Hope I die before I get old’ it was a generation gap anthem,” asserted Sun-Sentinel book editor Chauncey Mabe, “meaning ‘Hope I stay young until I die of old age.’”

Would the music business be where it is without the boomers, the post-World War II generation born approximately between 1946 and 1964? Author and former Mercury Records president Danny Goldberg calls himself “a baby boomer and an aging hippie.” This would describe many of the people who work in the record business, and indeed, the people who work for, and especially lead, most businesses. These are the people who have the skill, talent, and experience.

In addition to forming the foundation of the record business itself, the baby boomers are the original rock audience, and to a lesser extent rock’s driving creative force (though not its innovators – that would fall to the generation before). If not for the baby boomers’ embrace of rock, it might have been small, localized phenomenon, and the record business might have never grown to its present proportions. As historian Donald J. Mabry asserted:

Rock ‘n’ roll became the dominant musical genre in the United States in the 1950s because young people between the ages of 13 and 19 listened to the radio, bought rock ‘n’ roll records, and watched American Bandstand on national television in the afternoon and movies which featured rock ‘n’ roll music.

NYU professor Herb London claimed that “a revolution in sensibilities,” the core of which was rock and roll, happened in America during the 1950s, to the benefit of the baby boom generation. According to London, the rock revolution rivals such political upheavals as the French Revolution (although it was less bloody). The revolution, he argued, followed all the classic sociological stages of a “proper” revolution – incipient change, reform, active revolt, equilibrium, reaction, and restoration. As one reviewer put it, Professor London characterized rock as the litmus paper of contemporary culture.

Clearly, the baby boom caused a major social upheaval. Suddenly, questioning authority, social mores, and the status quo went from verboten to an almost mandatory right of passage. Boomers could do this based on sheer numbers – between 1940 and 1960 the number of live births nearly doubled.

Of course, while this enormous percentage of people happen to be the same age, it didn’t necessarily make them a consolidated, monolithic bloc. For example where the extremes of youth culture, like the liberalism of “the movement,” did not represent the majority of young people by any stretch of the imagination, it did set in motion the counterculture of music, drugs, long hair, free love, and not respecting authority for authority’s sake that played an important role in what our society turned into, creating an overt generation gap and giving the masses of youth a voice it had never known before.

Baby boomers continue to make up an enormous percentage of the population. By 1990, when America began to feel the full impact of the tail end of the baby boom, boomers born over the course of 18 years accounted for more than 30 percent of the population, but the age group’s self-referential gestalt outweighs even their sheer numbers. As much as they are self-aware as individuals, boomers also enjoy the power of being boomers, of having the sheer strength of numbers behind them. Dartmouth economist Joyce Manchester wrote in 1988:

The baby boom generation is now in the prime of its young adult years, ranging from 23 to 41 with the biggest cluster around 31. The behavior of this cohort as it swarms into the labor force, clamors for home ownership, and borrows to finance commodities as well as children has far reaching effects on the economic patterns in the United States.