"I hope I die before I get old" -- I remember the first time I heard Roger Daltrey sing that ironically immortal line from the Who's "My Generation." It was 1965 and I was thirteen years old. I was hanging out, as I invariably did, at the local record store on Bleecker Street in New York's Greenwich Village, where I grew up. I was much too shy to talk to Richie, the stunningly hip guy who ran the store, except on the rare occasions when I miraculously had the money to buy something. But I always lurked in the background, flipped through the bins and, most of all, listened.

On this particular afternoon, Richie was playing the first Who album, The Who Sing My Generation, which had just come out, for a friend of his. As I recall, he dropped the needle -- this was back in the days of vinyl, remember -- straight onto the title track. The barrage of the opening riff gripped me, no doubt about that. But it was the vocal that ripped my head open. "People try to put us d-down/Just because we get around." Wait a second -- is that guy stuttering? By the time I formulated that thought, I heard it again: "The things they do look awful c-c-cold/I hope I die before I get old." At the time, it seemed that about once a week I heard something that forever changed my world, but even by that standard, this was monumental. The Who became one of my favorite bands, maybe second only to the Stones.

I was reminded of all this when I recently went to see the Who at the Jones Beach Theater on Long Island. The show was simply incredible. Stripped down from the bloated lineup that had characterized the Quadrophenia tour a few years ago, Daltrey, guitarist Pete Townshend and bassist John Entwhistle were supported only by drummer Zak Starkey (who did an impressive job of replacing the late Keith Moon) and keyboardist John "Rabbit" Bundrick. The fire and force of their performance echoed the great Who shows I had attended in the Sixties and Seventies, shows that are among the best I have ever seen. I couldn't have been happier.

But the Who meant something very different to me this time around. When I was young, the Who perfectly caught my anger and my grueling sense of physical discomfort. While the Stones and Beatles always seemed Olympian, remote and somehow perfect, the Who (like the Kinks) seemed very much like me -- nervous (that stuttering), vulnerable and really pissed off. When, while discussing his adolescence in 1968, Townshend told Rolling Stone that "This seemed to be the biggest thing in my life: my fucking nose, man," I knew that I had found a soul mate. As for "I hope I die before I get old," that just seemed like a weird redundancy to me. I believed to the very core of my soul that getting old and dying were exactly the same thing.

They're not. Watching Townshend stand on stage in the middle of a great rock & roll show and calmly, even gently, explain to a fan who wanted him to smash his guitar that "I'm fifty-five" was inspiring. That about an hour later he smashed the guitar to bits -- because he felt like it, not because the audience expected it -- made the gesture even more powerful.

In 1967 when I saw the Who for the first time -- sporting their frilly shirts and Edwardian jackets -- I could not have conceived that thirty-three years later I would see the group again with equal pleasure. That thought would have been meaningless to me then. Since that time I've not only seen the band many times, but I've had the thrill of interviewing Townshend twice. He was great in every way -- even his good-natured chiding of me for a negative review I'd written in Rolling Stone of the Broadway production of Tommy. When he told me that he'd taken that review and discussed it with the director, I really felt flattered. It seemed like an impossible experience for the kid who had listened in amazement to "My Generation" in a record store so long ago.

That kind of intelligence, poise, graciousness, generosity and confidence is what I try to learn from Townshend these days. He hasn't always achieved greatness, but he often has and, most important, he's never stopped trying. Not willing to either burn out or fade away, he's experiencing his age with all the fire he brought to his youth -- and with other significant virtues he's picked up along the way. His passion hasn't abated, and he didn't need to die to prove it -- just to live and play.