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Pete Townshend used to break and fix his guitar four times a day: “In the end, it was more glue and string than anything else”
“Young kids that buy their first really good guitar end up in a love relationship with it; I’ve never had that,” says Townshend.
Image: Kevin Mazur / Getty Images
Does the idea of smashing guitars stir a profound ache in the depths of your rock ‘n’ roll lovin’ soul? If so, you might want to look away from Pete Townshend’s latest anecdote about how he used to break and fix his guitars a whopping four times a day.
While Townshend has since retired his over-the-top axe-destroying stage antics, the Who guitarist reveals in a recent appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon that unlike many of his peers, he’s never viewed the guitar as much more than an ordinary instrument.
“Young kids that buy their first really good guitar end up in a love relationship with it; I’ve never had that,” Townshend says [via Guitar World]. “I think a lot of people struggle to buy their first instruments and they build up a relationship with them.”
“In those days, every kid wanted to be Elvis Presley and they wanted the cheap guitars [that he’d play]. They were trash guitars; the kind of guitars your grandmother would buy you for Christmas; they’d be unplayable.”
“My dad was a professional musician and I said ‘Please – you buy me my first guitar,’” he recalls. “But he said ‘Your grandmother wants to buy you one.’”
“So my grandmother bought me my first guitar from off the wall of the Greek restaurant in Ealing where we lived. No one’s gonna tell me that that hunk of wood is sacred. Not to me.”
And when asked what happened to his guitars after he’d smashed them, Townshend replies: “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. I only had one guitar, so I’d have to break it and fix it [by gluing it back together] four times a day.”
“In the end, it was more glue and string [than anything else].”