ABSTRACT
While 1950s rock ’n’ roll drew considerable attention for its visual dimensions, the rock groups such as the Who that emerged in the mid-1960s pushed the style and spectacle associated with the music into uncharted territories. One of the elements of the Who’s stage show that first gained the group notoriety was Peter Townshend’s (born 1945) ritual smashing of his guitar. In this 1968 interview with Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner, the first one he conducted for his magazine, a typically candid Townshend explains the context of the guitar smashing on a number of levels, ranging from serendipitous discovery to a compensation for his limited guitar skills. In earlier interviews, Townshend had also claimed that his guitar destruction shared an affinity with the “auto-destructive” art of Gustav Metzger, whom he had seen lecture while studying at Ealing Art School in the early 1960s.1 Regardless of where the inspiration lay, Townshend’s actions suggested a cultural shift within rock, as it began to blur the lines between showmanship, avant-garde pop and performance art. In the interview’s second half, Townshend addresses the importance of the working-class mod movement to the Who’s early success. The mods’s self-fashioned rebellious stance marked a dramatic shift from the 1950s, when the popular press routinely characterized rock ’n’ roll as a malignant force that had simply descended upon an impressionable and passive young audience. There was rarely any consideration that the audience itself might have a tangible influence on the music or the performers, many of whom were teenagers themselves. The emergence of mod helped shift the dynamics of this relationship, and in the 1970s spurred an intense academic interest in British youth subcultures that remains one of the strongest foundations of popular music studies.
