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The stunt did steal headlines, mainly because Hendrix had sustained burns and had to leave the stage immediately.

After a few aborted efforts he whirled it around his head like an Olympic torch.” “That is how ‘guitar flame’ was born,” Altham remembered. “Why don’t you set fire to the guitar?” After a contemplative pause, Chandler told the production assistant to go buy lighter fuel. “You can’t keep smashing the guitar because people will just say you’re copying The Who and The Move,” Altham answered. While backstage at London’s Finsbury Park Astoria in late March 1967, Hendrix’s manager Chas Chandler posed a question to NME journalist Keith Altham: “How are we going to steal the headlines this week?”

The future rock legend had already tried his hand at garden-variety guitar smashing in the mid-1960s, but the gimmick was in danger of seeming derivative. But the band did turn guitar-smashing (and destruction in general) into flashy, ritualistic performance art, and other rock ‘n’ rollers were quick to take up the torch.įor Jimi Hendrix, that torch wasn’t totally metaphorical. Earlier musicians like Charles Mingus and Jerry Lee Lewis have both been credited with ruining instruments during concerts, and even Beethoven was known to play his pianos well past their breaking points. The Who-which stopped going by The High Numbers in November 1964-didn’t exactly invent on-stage destruction. “After that I was into it up to my neck and have been doing it since,” Townshend told Rolling Stone. With two wrecked guitars and an upended drum kit (courtesy of drummer Keith Moon, during another Railway Hotel appearance) now on their résumé, word soon spread that the group was a smash-happy bunch of boys. Though he got the go-ahead and carried out the mission with flair, the Daily Mail failed to hold up their end of the unofficial bargain.Ī little less newspaper coverage didn’t matter at all. Someone from the Daily Mail had told the band that another guitar smash would help land them on the paper’s front page, so Townshend checked with his manager to make sure they could spare the expense of ruining yet another precious piece of machinery. The second time Townshend mangled an instrument was actually for publicity’s sake. “I pounced all over the stage with it and I threw the bits on the stage and I picked up my spare guitar and carried on as though I really meant to do it.” “I proceeded to make a big thing of breaking the guitar,” Townshend recalled in a 1968 interview with Rolling Stone. He wanted a bigger reaction, so he made a bigger scene. Townshend was surprised and upset that the ceiling mishap had damaged his instrument, and the crowd’s failure to grasp the tragedy frustrated him. A hush fell over the room as the audience waited to see how he’d react.Īnd then they witnessed what’s widely considered to be the birth of the rock ‘n’ roll guitar smash. Those few inches seemed negligible until partway through the concert, when Pete Townshend inadvertently punched a hole in the low ceiling with his guitar headstock. One Tuesday night in September 1964, The Who-then performing as “The High Numbers”-arrived at London’s Railway Hotel and found that the usual platform of upside-down beer crates had been replaced with a slightly sturdier, slightly taller stage.