Townshend's guitar smashing means something different from Hendrix's

[Ro3b]

"I could sit up here all night and say, 'thank you thank you thank you' ... but it's one of them things, man, you know, one of these things, well, dig, I just can't do that. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to sacrifice something right here that I really love, ok?"

(And he kisses the guitar before he sets it on fire.)



"We went to see the Who at the Cavern. It was wall to f*cking wall of people. We muscled through to about ten feet from the stage, and Townshend was smashing his twelve-string Rickenbacker.

It was my first experience of total pandemonium. It was like a dog pile of people, just trying to grab pieces of Townshend's guitar, and people were scrambling to dive up onstage and he'd swing the guitar at their heads. The audience weren't cheering; it was more like animal noises, howling. The whole room turned really primitive--like a pack of starving animals that hadn't eaten in a week and somebody throws out a piece of meat. I was afraid. For me it wasn't fun, but it was mesmerizing. It was like, 'The plane's burning, the ship's sinking, so let's crush each other.' Never had I seen people driven so nuts--that music could drive people to such dangerous extremes. That's when I realized, this is definitely what I want to do." (Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton, quoted in Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, a great book that you should read.)



Yeah, I tend to overintellectualize things, but I thought the contrast was pretty interesting.

[Brian Krashpad]

Noyce.

I need to read that book.

[Spudman***]

And the perfect response to such an act...