The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [5]
And I was expecting an incredible thing, it being so precious to me, and I was expecting everybody to go, “Wow, he’s broken his guitar, he’s broken his guitar,” but nobody did anything, which made me kind of angry in a way and determined to get this precious event noticed by the audience. I proceeded to make a big thing of breaking the guitar. I pounded all over the stage with it, and I threw the bits on the stage, and I picked up my spare guitar and carried on as though I really meant to do it.
Were you happy about it?
Deep inside I was very unhappy because the thing had got broken. It got around, and the next week the people came, and they came up to me and they said, “Oh, we heard all about it, man; it’s ’bout time someone gave it to a guitar,” and all this kind of stuff. It kind of grew from there; we’d go to another town and people would say, “Oh yeah, we heard that you smashed a guitar.” It built and built and built and built and built and built until one day, a very important daily newspaper came to see us and said, “Oh, we hear you’re the group that smashes their guitars up. Well, we hope you’re going to do it tonight because we’re from the Daily Mail. If you do, you’ll probably make the front pages.”
This was only going to be like the second guitar I’d ever broken, seriously. I went to my manager, Kit Lambert, and I said, you know, “Can we afford it, can we afford it, it’s for publicity.” He said, “Yes, we can afford it, if we can get the Daily Mail.” I did it, and of course the Daily Mail didn’t buy the photograph and didn’t want to know about the story. After that I was into it up to my neck and have been doing it since.
Was it inevitable that you were going to start smashing guitars?
It was due to happen because I was getting to the point where I’d play and I’d play, and I mean, I still can’t play how I’d like to play. Then it was worse. I couldn’t play the guitar; I’d listen to great music, I’d listen to all the people I dug, time and time again. When the Who first started we were playing blues, and I dug the blues and I knew what I was supposed to be playing, but I couldn’t play it. I couldn’t get it out. I knew what I had to play; it was in my head. I could hear the notes in my head, but I couldn’t get them out on the guitar. I knew the music, and I knew the feeling of the thing and the drive and the direction and everything.
It used to frustrate me incredibly. I used to try and make up visually for what I couldn’t play as a musician. I used to get into very incredible visual things where in order just to make one chord more lethal, I’d make it a really lethal-looking thing, whereas really, it’s just going to be picked normally. I’d hold my arm up in the air and bring it down so it really looked lethal, even if it didn’t sound too lethal. Anyway, this got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger until eventually I was setting myself incredible tasks.
How did this affect your guitar playing?
Instead I said, “All right, you’re not capable of doing it musically, you’ve got to do it visually.” I became a huge, visual thing. In fact, I forgot all about the guitar because my visual thing was more my music than the actual guitar. I got to jump about, and the guitar became unimportant. I banged it and I let it feed back and scraped it and rubbed it up against the microphone, did anything; it wasn’t part of my act, even. It didn’t deserve any credit or any respect. I used to bang it and hit it against walls and throw it on the floor at the end of the act.
And one day it broke. It just wasn’t part of my thing, and ever since then I’ve never really regarded myself as a guitarist. When people come up to me and say like, “Who’s your favorite guitarist?” I say, “I know who my favorite guitarist is, but asking me, as a guitarist, forget it because I don’t make guitar-type comments. I don