When Pete Townshend’s touring days with the Who came to an end earlier this month, there was no final guitar smash as a punctuation mark for the British rock giants. Which is a surprise, considering that he’s been breaking electric guitars for as long as he’s been playing them.
Born in West London in May 1945, Townshend was raised in a family in which musicality was expected of him. His father, Cliff, was an alto sax player in the Royal Air Force's dance band, the Squadronaires. His mother, Betty, was a singer with the Sidney Torch and Les Douglass Orchestras. The couple also owned an antique store, which provided the means for young Pete to get his first proper guitar.
He tells Playboy that, after failing at playing his father's clarinet — “I couldn’t make a sound” — his father suggested he try guitar. For some reason, his grandmother was given the task of making the purchase.
“My grandmother was — let me put it politely, because she is my beloved, beloved grandmother — clinically insane.
“Somehow she was elected to buy me my first guitar, and the one she chose was one of those you hand on the wall of an Italian restaurant. A cheap Italian restaurant.
“When I complained, my father said, ‘When you can get a tune out of this I’ll buy you a good one.'”
Some time later, a much better guitar showed up at the Townshend's antique store. Despite his father's earlier offer, it was left to Pete to buy the guitar, using money saved from his paper route.
Unfortunately, it didn't take long for him to destroy it. Appropriately, it happened in front of his pal John Entwistle, who — as the Who's future bass player — would see him destroy many more guitars.
“I was 13,” Townshend recounts. “John Entwistle and I were rehearsing together in the front room of my house. My grandmother came in shouting, ‘Turn that bloody racket down!’
“I said, ‘I’ll do better than that,’ and I got my guitar — this was a good guitar that I had paid for myself with money I earned from a paper route — and smashed it to smithereens.
“I said, ‘Now will you fucking get out of my life!?’ and she stomped out.”
The consequences of his actions quickly dawned on him.
“I looked at John and said, ‘What now?’”
The ever-reserved bassist was quick with an appropriately dry — and practical — response.
“He said, ‘Another paper route, I think.’”
Townshend says that, from that moment forward, smashing a guitar was never out of the question.
“Once I had done it, it was always there as a possibility,” he explains. “If ever I wanted to deal with any kind of hidden rage, I could always take it out on the guitar. I could always trigger the same little bit of psychotherapy.”
Decades later, after guitar smashing became a key part of the thrill of a Who live show, Townshend refused to apologize for his actions. After all, he said, he ever shared other guitarists' affection for the instrument.
“Young kids that buy their first really good guitar end up in a love relationship with it,” he said. I've never had that.”
By the time the Who went on to play their first U.S. show, the need to repeat such violent feats night after night posed problems. Townshend found the answer in glue
“When we first came to New York, we did a thing called The Murray the K Show and we'd play four times a day,” Townshend told Jimmy Fallon last year. “I only had one guitar, so I'd have to break it and fix it four times a day. In the end, it was more glue and string [than anything else].”
By 1989, a year in which Townshend had hand-picked Atomic Rooster's Steve “Boltz” Bolton to be his co-guitarist for a tour as he struggled with tinnitus, his sense of rage, and the need to break guitars like they were nothing to satiate the red mist, had yet to quell. Bolton says he smashed a Takamine acoustic to pieces right before his eyes for one small error during a run-through of "Pinball Wizard" at rehearsals.
However, Bolton walked away with some more positive memories and a few of Townshend’s greatest guitar secrets up his sleeve.
And though those destructive days are now, at 80, behind him, he's made cryptic clues about what the future of both the Who and Pete Townshend, the solo artist, which may involve using AI to appease his fans. That came just weeks after he admitted to falling out of love with playing live.
He's since revealed he had to get sober again, after a 30-year streak, ahead of the Who's final tour.
