Creativity Quote by Pete Townshend

Townshend’s line lands like a backstage aside that accidentally captures a turning point in pop history: four minutes, now laughably ordinary, once felt like an act of defiance. The joke is in the scale. He calls it “the first really long record” and then immediately undercuts the grandeur with “I think it was four minutes,” a shrug that exposes how cramped the old rules were - and how quickly those rules became invisible once artists started breaking them.

The intent isn’t to canonize Dylan as a lone genius so much as to mark the moment the song stopped behaving like a product designed around radio convenience. In the early-60s singles economy, length was logistics: jukeboxes, DJs, attention spans, the physical limits of a 45. “Like a Rolling Stone” didn’t just run long; it insisted that a pop single could carry novelistic bile, a full narrative arc, and a sound big enough to feel like a room changing shape. Townshend is tipping his hat to that permission.

There’s subtext, too, about rock’s arms race toward seriousness. Townshend (who would soon stretch songs into mini-operas with The Who) frames Dylan’s four minutes as the crack in the dam: once you can do four, why not six, ten, an entire side? The wry uncertainty - “I think” - also signals how myths form in music culture: history gets remembered as legend, and legend gets measured in minutes.