After 60 years of shows, the Who finally called it a day this past September.
But as Pete Townshend just revealed, he didn't expect the group to last but two weeks when they started out in 1964.
Now 80, and fresh off the road from the group's farewell tour, the guitarist looked back on the group’s early days on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, where he shared the real reason he smashed his first guitar and the moment he realized the Who were built to last.
“The Who were a gang,” he explains. “I was at school. I was 16 years old. I was doing art classes in the summer and taking my final exams.
“This guy, Roger Daltrey, was the school bully. He'd been thrown out the year before. He's a year older than me, and he came up to me in the corridor, said, ‘You! I hear you play the guitar.' And I said, ‘Yeah.’ And he said, ‘Do you want to be in my band?’”
Townshend agreed, thinking Daltrey's could give a scrawny guy like him protection against other rough characters.
John Entwistle had already signed up to play bass in the band, and the teenagers got to work.
But while Daltrey might have harbored dreams of rock stardom, Townshend was less committed.
“I kept it secret, I didn't tell my arty-farty art school friends I was in this band,” he confesses. “Until one day there was this college dance thing and we were hired to do that, and all these fabulous-looking hippie art school girls were pretending to be Beatles fans and were screaming at me. I thought, This is great!”
Yet Townshend — who would go on to rub shoulders with Jimi Hendrix and push guitar amplifiers to their limits in a fierce battle of volume with Ronnie Wood — says it did little change his thoughts about a career in music.
“I thought of myself as a creative,” he reasons. “I wanted to be a painter or a sculptor and that the band would last a couple of weeks, maybe a couple of months. And that's why I accidentally smashed my first guitar; I didn't care. I thought, ‘Well, we'll be gone in two months and I'll just borrow some money from my dad and buy another one.’”
What changed his mind was hearing the group's first single on the radio.
“We had a hit record, ‘I Can't Explain,’” Townshend says. “I was driving my mom's little yellow van back to Ealing, where we lived in West London. I heard it on the radio, and that was it. I thought, Wow, I'm communicating. I have an audience. They were committed to what I was writing.
“Then I wrote ‘My Generation,’ which was just huge. I had an audience, and then in a sense, I left art behind. There was magic happening.”
By his own admission, the Who were never the most glamorous band — but they made up for it with instrument-smashing chaos. Musically, Townshend learned to leave lead duties to Entwistle, and, as a result, mastered a different art of guitar-playing.
The bassist’s death in 2002 had rocked the group, but Townshend has revealed how he and Roger Daltrey rallied in one of their darkest moments to get the band moving again.
