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where does smashing guitars fit in?



Having recently read Pete's various statements on when
he spoke to his Mother in 1991 about the very rough
period of his childhood, when she left him with his
Grandmother, I find Pete's anecdote below about guitar
smashing fascinating:

Interviewer: Is it true that you smashed your first
guitar in front of your grandmother?

Pete: Yeah. It wasn't actually the guitar. I smashed
up my amplifier. [The Who's bassist] John [Entwistle]
and I were rehearsing at home, and I didn't like my
grandmother. She'd bought me my first guitar, and it
was a piece of shit -- not electric, a kind of Spanish
thing that you'd put on the wall in a restaurant. And
I was angry at my father for letting her buy me my
first guitar. I said to him, "Dad, I wanted a guitar,
not this thing with two inches between the neck and
the string." And he said, "If you can get a tune out
of that, I'll buy you a proper one," but he never did.
So I was pretty angry at that woman. I knew that I was
a musician, and my father was a musician and I knew
that he should have taken a more active interest in
what I was doing. Anyway, it turned out that my
grandmother took the active interest. She bought me
this piece of shit, and she thought it meant that she
could criticize my work. One day, I was about 14, John
and I were sitting playing something together in the
front room, not very loud, and she came in and she
said, "Turn that bloody awful row down." And I said,
"Get out now or I'm going to kill you, you fucking old
bag." She yelled, "How dare you talk to me like that!"
So I picked up my amplifier [mimes grabbing a cabinet
and heaving it across the room] and threw it at her.
She ran to the other side of the door, and the
amplifier landed there in a big heap and it fizzed and
went off. And I'd just bought it. I'd worked
delivering newspapers for three years to buy it. And
John looked at me and said in that low voice, "That
was good. Done it now, haven't you?" [laughs]. But, I
got it repaired.

Interviewer: How did it feel to smash your first
guitar? 

Pete: Well, it was equally dumb, in a way. I was in
the middle of an experimental session of trying to
excite different noises from the guitar by feedback,
by banging it, putting it up against the microphone,
putting the feedback into the PA column. Then I
discovered that even if you held it up close to a
fluorescent lamp, things would happen. All those
things I was doing, but lots of banging and physical
stuff as well. Then I was in this club and I was
banging on the ceiling playing with my Rickenbacker.
They're delicately built instruments and there was not
a lot of wood in the thinnest part that flares out
into the head stock -- it was very, very narrow. So I
banged it against this low ceiling and it fell off. I
just literally went bam! and it fell off. A couple of
people sitting in the front row looked like they were
thinking, "That's what you get for being a show-off."
But I thought, "Right, I've been here before." I
suppose I saw my grandmother's face or something, and
if I'd really been in the right frame of mind, I
probably would have smashed the guitar right over the
guy's head in the front row and maybe killed him,
which would have been an interesting departure for my
career. Instead, I just decided to just finish it off
in a kind of a very carefully considered act of
artistic destruction, and I smashed it up. I realized
then that there was this incredible excitement in the
audience. And then I picked up my other guitar, which
was a 12-string, and finished up the show. That was
it, really. 

Ken in MD
"I do not want child pornography 
to be available on the Internet 
anywhere at any time." Pete
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