How many guitars did Pete Townshend break? The Who’s guitarist started smashing them by accident

For a brief time in mid-1960s Swinging London, smashing up your prized guitar was de rigueur among the fashionable Mod groups of the day. The capitals top gun slingers would even try to outdo each other: Hendrix would douse his Fender Strat in lighter fuel then set light to it and watch it burn, Jeff Beck went through a number of guitars and amps and was coaxed to reenact the destruction by Antonioni in Blow Up. But The Who’s Pete Townshend is credited with being the pioneer guitar destroyer.

US guitars: the holy grail

Townshend famously went through dozens of expensive American guitars - Fender Strats and Telecasters, Gibsons, Rickenbackers - all valuable guitars only available through import from London’s exclusive Denmark Street music emporiums. In fact up until June 1959, it was impossible to buy American-made instruments in the UK due to a trade embargo and even when it was lifted, all imports were subject to tax and duty. For any musician in the UK, acquiring an American guitar was anything but simple.

A Rickenbacker 330 would have cost around $300 in 1965 - equivalent to around $3000 today. Much to their manager’s horror, the Who’s wild guitarist would get through several of these guitars every month - whacking them on the stage floor until they shattered or ramming the neck into amps. The ones that could be salvaged were taped back together.

Part of the stage act

He explained at the time, “Our sound appeals to Mods in that it caters for aggression. For example, when, for a brief period I stopped smashing guitars on the stage, because it was costing a lot of money. Kids started shouting out, ‘Smash your guitar Pete!’ And getting quite annoyed that I wasn’t. To a large percentage of boys who had come to see the group, not girls, Geezers… they’d paid their money to see me hit my amplifier with the guitar”.

After Townshend had taken out all of his anger on his guitar, singer Roger Daltrey would collect as much of the broken pieces as he could find and the instrument would usually be glued back together for the next gig. That was relatively simple for a solid-bodied Fender but not so simple for fragile, hollowed-bodied Rickenbacker - Townshend’s favorite choice of guitar.

Instead, he would assemble the broken parts on the bedroom wall of his Wardour Street - his own personal pop art display. It’s impossible to gauge how many guitars Pete trashed - one report estimates 35 just in 1967. Bearing in mind that his axe-rage antics date back to 1964, the number is probably in the hundreds. Some pieces occasionally turn up at auction and there are examples on display at the Hard Rock Cafe and Victoria and Albert museum.

“Who said I broke beautiful guitars? Who said they were expensive? Who said I really broke them? What do you know? What’s it got to do with you? They’re my fucking guitars!”

Pete’s Rick goes through the ceiling

The first guitar to feel Townshend’s wrath was a 1964 Rickenbacker Rose Morris 1998. In September 1964, he accidentally shoved it through a low ceiling at the band’s Railway Tavern residency and decided to destroy the rest of it in disgust.

The band’s manager Kit Lambert persuaded Pete to do it again a few months later at a gig at the Olympia Ballroom in Reading - he’d invited a couple of music journalists down and had been regaling them with takes of the Who’s wild, anarchic stage show. Another £400 Rickenbacker bit the dust but Lambert and his hack friends missed it as they were at the bar.

Many of Townshend’s guitar-smashing tantrums were captured on film and by 1965, drummer Keith Moon was joining in and obliterating his kit - once, for a TV appearance on the Smothers Brothers, even going as far as to install mini-explosive charges into the toms, which he absent-mindedly forgot to mention to the rest of the band.

Townshend continued to trash his gear right up until relatively recently. The last guitar he smashed on stage was in 2007 - a Gibson acoustic which annoyingly went out of tune. According to Pete’s former guitar Technician, the late Alan Rogan, “He’ll use them until he’s killed them, mildly murdered them then he’ll pick up the next one in the line”.