Pete Townshend
Forty-five years later, I’m still saying, “I told
you so,” to my oldest friend (to whom I
proclaimed The Who would become a rock
music institution). He and I have seen them in
concert many times over the years. Through
all the triumphs and failures, the public
squabbles, the aggression and violent equipment destruction, the rock-star excess, the
untimely passing of Moon and Entwistle, and
the unspeakable tragedy of 11 fans trampled
to death in Cincinnati, it has always been the
music of Pete Townshend and The Who that
spoke truest to me.
be honest, although I realize now it was a
fine little guitar, I wasn’t happy until I got
my first Rickenbacker in 1964. I soon got
myself a top model 12-string Rick, too.
It’s interesting to think that the Marshall
sound I helped Jim and his guys develop
was built around the very low output and
thin, surfy sound of the Rick. The sound I
wanted was Steve Cropper, but very loud.
The early Marshall with a Rick gave me
that. The semi-acoustic body and a speaker
stack feeding right into the guitar was what
allowed me to refine tuneful feedback.
Townshend has always been The Who’s chief
spokesman. His interviews are the stuff of
legend: intelligent, thoughtful, interesting,
eloquent, insightful, sometimes brutally
honest—occasionally playful, self-mocking
and petulant—but always fascinating. Pete
prefers doing interviews by email these days,
which ruled out any spontaneous questions
or conversation that might have occurred,
but I trust the reader will understand. During
the course of this exchange, Pete communicated at length about his preference for the
Stratocaster and Fender amps, his obvious
affection for acoustic and vintage instruments
from his collection, hearing loss, and more.
You may find some of his remarks concerning The Who, guitar smashing, and Marshall
amps a bit surprising. Here then, is the Pete
Townshend Premier Guitar interview. It was
a long time in the making. I hope you agree
the results were worth the wait.
Before the band was making money—we are
still in early 1964 in this story—I broke my
6-string Rick on stage engaging in art-school-inspired performance art. Roger said he could
have fixed that first broken Rick, but the word
spread so fast about how crazy I was that it
wasn’t long before the 12-string and about
four other Ricks followed before I started to
look for something stronger. During that time
the Who were touring Britain and Europe,
and guitars were expensive. My Rick 12,
for example, cost £385, that’s equivalent to
£ 5,925 today. With the dollar at 2. 4 back at
that time, my Rick 12 cost me $14,220. It
makes me a little angry when people question my artistic integrity in what I decided to
do on stage. I paid the price.
For years now, your choice of electric
guitar onstage has been the Eric Clapton
Stratocaster. Why that guitar in particular
after years using Gibson SGs and Les Pauls,
as well as other models?
I tried everything that I could pick up at less
than the price of a house. There are pictures of me with a Gibson 335, Strats, Teles,
Jazzmasters and Danelectros. What I was looking for was not a good-sounding guitar but
one that was strong. And so I used quite a lot
of Fenders. The necks never broke when I was
doing my destruction routine, and gluing the
bodies back together and rewiring helped me
one step closer to becoming a luthier.
A bit of history: The Who worked fairly solidly
from 1963 through to 1982, when I felt I had
had enough. Over the entirety of those years,
I had regarded my stage guitars as tools
rather than instruments. I never tried to play
eloquently, I didn’t practice much and I didn’t
work very hard on my sound. The Who was a
band devoted to a single function, which was
to reflect our audience, and for a lot of the
time we had no idea how we did that. I felt it
had more to do with my songs and the image
of the band than our musicianship. I would
never have been a Who fan.
I started in late 1962 with a simple, single-
pickup Harmony electric; I think it was
called a Stratotone. When Roger quit his
job as lead guitarist and became the singer,
he passed me his Epiphone with P-90s. To
When Jimi was in London, it just so happened
I was using a Strat, and he modeled his entire
amplifier rig, apart from a couple of special
fuzz boxes, according to my advice. So for a
while our sound was similar. But no one could
approach what he did with that rig, and I decid-
ed to concentrate much more on chordal work,
trying to give a beat backbone to Moon’s flail-
ing and undisciplined drumming. Pretty soon,
by accident, I discovered the Gibson SG with
P-90s, and because I was using a mix of Sound
City (later Hiwatt) and Marshall amplifier stacks,
I landed the Live at Leeds sound that stayed
with me almost all the way on from there—at
least onstage. Because SGs are fairly light, I
broke quite a few of them over my hipbone,
as well as in our finale, so occasionally I used
Strats for their sheer strength.
