#townshend

All good art cannot help but confront denial on its way to truth.

- Pete Townshend, The Who

The crowned king of smashing guitars is none other than The Who’s Pete Townshend. In a sense he was the godfather of guitar smashing on stage. The year was 1964. The Who were playing a small pub in London known as the Railway Tavern in Harrow and Wealdstone. At some point, Townshend’s Rickenbacker headstock hit the venue’s low ceiling, cracking it with a thud. When Townshend saw that none of the other band members seemed to notice or care, he decided to make it noticeable and smashed the guitar to the floor and against his amp, shattering it to pieces. And thus began a decades-long destructive affair between Pete and his many guitars.

Townshend would go on to smash more guitars on more stages in more countries the world over than any guitarist in rock ‘n’ roll history. He set the bar high on the act, performing it with an intensity and poetic presentation that bordered on dance. He would often raise his Gibson or Fender high over his head, holding it to the sky - a kind of sacrifice to the muse, to the crowd, to the moment. From there, the smashing took many directions. From bouncing the bottom of the body at the strap-button end off the stage over and over, to wielding it like an axe and chopping down a mic stand, to ramming it over and over into the drum stand or into a tower of speakers, Townshend made each guitar smashing an unforgettable moment for the audience.

In 2020, Roger Daltrey, the lead singer of The Who, perhaps with mischief in mind, said that Pete Townshend would creep around the stage collecting up all the bits of smashed guitars so he could glue them back together again. Which on the face of it wasn’t very rock’n’roll. It gets worse. According to Daltrey, to make it easier to repair his broken guitars, Townshend went to great lengths to smash them up as carefully as possible.

On the How to Wow podcast, Daltrey revealed the careful process behind Townshend’s destruction. “They were real guitars, but we worked out very cleverly that very rarely did the neck break. As long as the neck didn’t break, you could glue the body back,” he said. But Daltrey did charitably add that also pointed out: “It was costly in glue.” Fans of Townshend believed that Daltrey was deliberately trying to sabotage Townshend’s reputation. The pair interacted as little as possible during their time together and especially since the band broke up, doing separate interviews, having separate backstage areas at concerts and even recording entire albums without seeing each other.

However the story has a ring of truth to it. Pete Townshend once confessed inhis autobiography that, “The Who got paid 4000 pounds during those days, but we always smashed our equipment that cost more than 5000 pounds.“ Listen, it’s important to remember that even rock stars are people, and they have to deal with the same mundanities as the rest of us. Why Townshend had to glue all his guitars back together was because it was expensive to replace the smashed guitars and The Who were as frugal as they came.

October 21 1918, Paraćin--After a brief pause near Niš to regroup and allow the French to catch up, the Serbians continued their advance northward to liberate their country.  By October 21, they had engaged German rearguards near Paraćin, on the Morava around sixty miles south of the Danube.  Although the Germans put up a stubborn resistance, they were outnumbered and received little support from their Austrian allies, who just wanted to get their armies out of Serbia and behind the Danube, Sava, and Drina intact.  

Further east, the first French forces had reached the Romanian border on the Danube via Bulgarian railways on the 19th.  On the 22nd, the Allies sent a letter to the Romanian government, urging them to be ready to re-enter the war “about the middle of November,” in conjunction with an Allied push across the Danube.  The Romanians had quietly been preparing for such an eventuality since the Bulgarian collapse, but were wary that entering too soon would just lead to an even swifter defeat by the Germans than in 1916.

To the south, the first British troops also reached the Turkish border near Adrianople, finding only a single Turkish battalion guarding the border crossing.  The Turks, having realized the dire threat to Constantinople, dispatched Charles Townshend, the general captured after the siege of Kut in 1916, to send out the first peace feelers.  Arriving at Mudros on the 20th, he suggested the Turks would accept terms that let them keep Syria and Mesopotamia, albeit with a great deal of autonomy.  While the British quickly rejected these terms, they were completely fine with Townshend’s other stipulation, that the Turks wanted to negotiate solely with the British; after having been left out of the Bulgarian armistice, they were fine with shutting out the French from the negotiations with Turkey.

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