Word: guitars
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...their early days, the four received a great deal of notoriety for smashing their instruments at the end of each performance. It was, at first, a flashy, frightening and finally exhilarating thing to see. Drummer Keith Moon blew up his drum kit, and Townshend rammed the neck of his guitar into his amp, while Daltrey slammed his microphone against the stage and Entwistle held tight to his bass, playing stubbornly on like a shipwreck's lone survivor trying to keep dry in a leaking lifeboat. There was too much discussion about how all this was rock's reflection...
...armor piercing. "The Who sound came from us playing as a three-piece band and trying to sound like more," Entwistle told TIME's Janice Castro. "I play standard bass, but I combine it with long runs where I take over the lead while Pete bashes out chords." Townshends guitar style?a sort of flywheel progression from rhythmic chords to melody and back again, all performed with whirling arms, splits, slides and high jumps?attracted as much attention as his songs. An early Townshend tune like My Generation, with a chorus od stuttered definace...
Daltrey got the band together. At 15, he left school in London, took a job as a sheet-metal worker that he held for five years. He also made his own guitars and formed a group called the Detours. On the street one day, he spotted "this great big geezer with a homemade bass that looked like a football boot with a neck sticking out of it," and recruited Entwistle on the spot. Soon after that, Daltrey decked the Detour's lead singer and took over the vocals himself. Now the Detours needed a rhythm guitar player. Entwistle mentioned...
...greatest bloody triumph of my schooldays was when Roger asked me if I could play guitar," Townshend recalls. "If he had ever said, 'Come out in the playground and I'll fight you,' I would have been down in one punch. Music was the only way I could ever win. But I've despised him ever since...
...realized The Who was the thing, the reason I was successful. I didn't fight any more ... for a couple of years." Townshend, however, was not trying as strenuously to keep to the path of nonviolence, and, after one disagreement in the recording studio, brained Daltrey with his guitar. Daltrey responded by punching Pete into the hospital...