Pete Townshend probably regrets the day he ever wrote the line "I hope I die before I get old."

Sure, it seemed like a good idea when Townshend was 20 and just about everybody on the other side of 30 looked like hopeless squares with no chance of understanding what angry rockers like the Who had to say and play.

But now Townshend is 54 years old, and still wrestling with one of rock's eternal questions: If this music is really a young person's game, then what's an older man to do?

If you read the rock press, the answer is most certainly not to keep on touring and putting out music when your glory days are a decade or two behind you. The online music rag Addicted to Noise recently asked readers whether dinosaurs like the Who wouldn't really be doing us all a service if they just closed up shop for good. The very tone of the question told you the expected answer.

The thing is, as central as the age issue has always been to rock 'n' roll, it's also always been based on a faulty premise. Rock has never been exclusively, or even mostly, a young person's game — Chuck Berry was in his 30s when he wrote the first teen anthems — and as the Who's latest tour and Hanson's debut album demonstrate, we'd all be better off if we just threw the whole age discussion out with the trash.

While critics are busy writing off the Who's "Quadrophenia" tour as a bunch of old hacks going through the motions, and alternarock hipsters are putting down Hanson as a prefabricated kiddie group, both bands are making powerful, emotionally satisfying rock music that's got nothing to do with how old they are. (You'll also notice that most of the complaining is coming from folks who haven't bothered listening to either one; cynicism and stereotypes are great for liberating us from actually thinking, aren't they?)

The Who has given us plenty of reasons to not pay attention in the past. The band's 1982 "farewell" tour turned out to be the first of many, including a dreadful 1989 tour that even the band admitted was just a way to make money. It seemed as if the Who had ceased to care about their music; the concerts then (including a stop at Alpine Valley) showed a band going through the motions with a slick, Vegas-style greatest-hits revue that shed no new light on the music. Even Townshend later said he felt like it was "the Who on ice."

So when the Who started touring with a semi-theatrical version of "Quadrophenia" last year, even

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