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Pete Townshend would be the last person you would lend your electric guitar to.
No offence to the great man but he does have a bit of a reputation, and it goes right back to the beginning of his career and those explosive performances with the Who during which instrumental destruction was de rigueur.
Simply, Townshend relished in smashing guitars, in speaking 4×12 speaker cabinets with the headstock of a Fender Telecaster, in relieving a Rickenbacker of its structural integrity. It was part of the show. In a sense, it was Townshend’s attempt to make the Who viral in an analogue era – and it works.
“The guitar smashing was basically marketing,” he told Guitarist magazine in 1990. “I knew it was going to work, but I had to use real guitars and that was because I am primarily a musician and I wanted it to be real.”
This, he explained, was a form of art – performance art, art as destruction or vice versa, a convulsion in “vengeance” at consumerist society.
Townshend learned early on not to get too attached to his musical instruments after saving up all the money from his paper round for his first “real guitar” only for it to get stolen after he lent it to the late Who bassist John Entwistle, whose mother compensated him with £3. “I think I swore then that I would never get attached to another instrument as long as I lived,” said Townshend.
Though Townshend would sound a note of regret that his Gibson J-200 acoustic guitar got ruined during the making of his 1989 musical, The Iron Man, he was as good as word. He admitted that he even smashed them out of the public eye, fury getting the better of him.
But where did Townshend get the idea? That urge to destroy – that volatility – was in him. That seems sure. He was an experimentalist.
The Who’s high-volume show embraced feedback almost as a means of provocation, drowning out the boors at the back of the show who had been drinking pints and were wanting to hear Cindy’s Birthday or some other chart-bothering fare. They were pushing the envelope.
Somebody had been doing something on the stage with a saw, and it was still there. He picked it up and said, ‘You can even saw at the bass’
Townshend’s guitar-smashing epiphany arrived one afternoon when he was a young student at Ealing Tech, watching a guest lecture from the late Malcolm Cecil, who was then a player with a growing reputation on bass guitar, but who would go onto become a longtime collaborator of Stevie Wonder’s and help introduce synthesizers to popular music in the ‘70s.
“[He] beat me to the punch,” recalled Townshend. “He went on to co-produce Innervisions for Stevie Wonder and he was bass player with the Johnny Scott Quintet. A girl in my class went out with the flautist and she invited Cecil to come and give a talk. Halfway through the talk he started to get carried away, saying, ‘There are lots of different ways you can play the bass; you can play it like this, or like that.’ And then he started to bang it.”
This was an early indication that Cecil would know what works for a crowd. His blood was up. He started looking around to see what else was at his disposal to underline his point that how you play an instrument does not need to have been mandated by what you read in the Mel Bay Modern Guitar Method series.
“Somebody had been doing something on the stage with a saw, and it was still there,” continued Townshend. “He picked it up and said, ‘You can even saw at the bass’, and he started to saw through his strings and we all stood up and cheered! It made a fantastic noise, and the fact that he was sacrificing his strings! And he just carried on sawing, right through the strings and through the belly of the bass!”
Townshend and his classmates were smitten. The campus was electrified by this display, by all these new possibilities. All bets were off. Things would never be the same again.
“The whole college was full of it, so that wall had been broken and it seemed perfect, natural for me, a couple of months later, to find myself doing the same thing.”
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