***Music, Books and Psycho Space Robots is a regular column published on Primary Ignition by Kevin Kenealy, staff writer and Nightmare Fuel Provider. The views expressed therein are his, and do not reflect those of the staff of Primary Ignition.***

Photo from washingtonpost.com.

If Pete Townshend, guitarist for The Who, was a cartoon figure, he would be the Tazmanian Devil. You never know what to expect from him. In a Septembert 28, 1968 Rolling Stone interview with Jann S. Wenner, he talks about how he came into playing music, how he began and stopped smashing guitars and his work on the Tommy album.

Townshend admitted in the interview that he doesn’t consider himself a guitarist, but more like a visual artist. “I don’t talk guitar talk. I just throw the thing around,” he told Wenner. Townshend said he was frustrated early that he couldn’t play the notes he wanted to play on the guitar. He said he could hear them in his head, but he couldn’t never bring them out on his guitar. To make up for it, he became this acrobat on stage – throwing his guitar around, treating his guitar like it was a prisoner of war.

Actually, the smashing of the guitar began as an accident. At a club early in his career, he threw his guitar up a little too high and it hit the ceiling and broke. People thought it was a stunt as he quickly grabbed a spare and picked up where he left off. The accident quickly became part of his act where Townshend would smash his guitar along with Keith Moon knocking over his drum set at the end of each Who performance.

But at one particular perfomance at the Fillmore, Townshend decided not to smash his guitar, admitting to Wenner that it has started to get to be a drag to smash his guitar with all the pressure to live up to the act.

This is why Townshend was a real performer. He wasn’t going to try to be something he wasn’t. He knew he couldn’t play the guitar, so he smashed the crap out of it. Yet, he didn’t want to become a circus act and when he noticed too much pressure was on him to become one, he stopped. Like the Tommy opera, he set himself free of being deaf, dumb, and blind. He was a man who was told by his own father that “looks aren’t everything” because he had a big nose. He took the encouragement to take up playing the guitar, and made the unattractive, attractive as he moved himself into stardom.

Townshend was not someone to conform. What made him great in rock’s history is that he realized his strengths and didn’t pretend to be labeled something he wasn’t. Townshend knew who he was. Perhaps that’s why he asked, “Who Are You?”

Front page image from ClashMusic.com.