Salon.com > The Who http://www.salon.com Wed, 22 May 2013 00:22:48 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Pete Townshend: “I wasn’t trying to make beautiful music” http://www.salon.com/2012/10/19/pete_townshend_i_wasnt_trying_to_make_beautiful_music/ http://www.salon.com/2012/10/19/pete_townshend_i_wasnt_trying_to_make_beautiful_music/#comments Fri, 19 Oct 2012 18:14:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13045793 Pete Townshend, guitarist and principle songwriter for the Who, opens his new memoir, the inevitably titled “Who I Am,” with an act of destruction, not creation. It’s June 1964, and the band is playing one of its first gigs in West London. The set list is mostly R&B covers, and 19-year-old Townshend is making an unholy noise on his Rickenbacker when he “feel[s] a terrible shudder as the sound goes from a roar to a ratting growl; I look up to see my guitar’s broken head as I pull it away from the hole I’ve punched in the low ceiling.” Rather than stop the show, he smashes more holes in the ceiling and splinters the neck. “I hold the guitar up to the crowd triumphantly,” he writes. “I haven’t smashed it; I’ve sculpted it.”

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