The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [4]
Taken together, the forty interviews in this collection form a cultural history of our times, as narrated by the most important people of our times. You’ll find here rock & roll pioneers like Tina Turner, Ray Charles and Johnny Cash. You’ll find the crucial voices of the Sixties: Lennon, Jagger, Dylan, Townshend and Jerry Garcia, some caught at the start of their careers and others sharing the perspective of several decades of ups and downs. You’ll find the great songwriters of the seventies (Neil Young and Joni Mitchell), the Eighties (Bruce Springsteen and Bono), the Nineties (Kurt Cobain) and today (Eminem). You’ll find great directors like Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Clint Eastwood and Spike Lee. You’ll find writers who helped shaped generations of readers (and Rolling Stone itself), like Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe. You’ll find cultural heroes who rarely granted interviews, like Johnny Carson, and great interviewers who had the tables turned on them, like Oriana Fallaci. And, not content to speak with presidents, we also spoke with God, in the person of the Dalai Lama.
Times have changed. You can no longer stroll up to Pete Townshend after a show and ask if he has time for an interview. But one thing remains the same: The Rolling Stone Interview is still the most intimate, penetrating, and perceptive conversation going.
Jann S. Wenner
New York City
September 13, 2007
PETE TOWNSHEND
by Jann S. Wenner
September 28, 1968
The end of your act goes to “My Generation,” like you usually do, and that’s where you usually smash your guitar. You didn’t tonight—why not?
Well, there is a reason, not really anything that’s really worth talking about. But I’ll explain the pattern of thought which went into it.
I’ve obviously broken a lot of guitars, and I’ve brought eight or nine of that particular guitar I was using tonight and I could very easily have broken it and have plenty more for the future. But I just suddenly decided before I went on that if there was anywhere in the world I should be able to walk off the stage without breaking a guitar if I didn’t want to, it would be the Fillmore.
I decided in advance that I didn’t want to smash the guitar, so I didn’t, not because I liked it or because I’ve decided I’m going to stop doing it or anything. I just kind of decided about the actual situation; it forced me to see if I could have gotten away with it in advance. And I think that’s why “My Generation” was such a down number at the end. I didn’t really want to play it, you know, at all. I didn’t even want people to expect it to happen, because I just wasn’t going to do it.
But Keith still dumped over his drum kit like he usually does.
Yeah, but it was an incredible personal thing with me. I’ve often gone on the stage with a guitar and said, “Tonight I’m not going to smash a guitar and I don’t give a shit”—you know what the pressure is on me—whether I feel like doing it musically or whatever, I’m just not going to do it. And I’ve gone on, and every time I’ve done it. The actual performance has always been bigger than my own patterns of thought.
Tonight, for some reason, I went on and I said, “I’m not going to break it,” and I didn’t. And I don’t know how, I don’t really know why I didn’t. But I didn’t, you know, and it’s the first time. I mean, I’ve said it millions of times before, and nothing has happened.
I imagine it gets to be a drag talking about why you smash your guitar.
No, it doesn’t get to be a drag to talk about it. Sometimes it gets a drag to do it. I can explain it, I can justify it and I can enhance it, and I can do a lot of things, dramatize it and literalize it. Basically it’s a gesture which happens on the spur of the moment. I think, with guitar smashing, just like performance itself; it’s a performance, it’s an act, it’s an instant and it really is meaningless.
When did you start smashing guitars?
It happened by complete accident the first time. We were just kicking around in