To Smash or Not to Smash: The Strange History of Destroying Your Instrument

It started as genuine artistic statement. Then it became a cliche. The line between the two is more interesting than you think.

Pete Townshend smashed his first guitar by accident. In 1964, playing a small club with a low ceiling, he jabbed the neck of his guitar upward and it went through the ceiling tiles. The crowd laughed. Townshend, embarrassed and then suddenly inspired, finished the job. He destroyed the guitar completely, then picked up another one and kept playing. The audience went insane.

He had discovered something. Not a gimmick, not yet. A language.

Where It Came From

The deliberate destruction of musical instruments did not begin with rock and roll. The avant-garde composer Gustav Metzger had been developing a theory of auto-destructive art since the late 1950s, creating works that contained the mechanism of their own destruction. Townshend attended a lecture by Metzger at art school in 1962 and absorbed the idea that destruction could be as expressive as creation, that the ending of a thing could be its most meaningful moment.

This is not the story most people know about guitar smashing. Most people know it as a rock and roll excess story, testosterone and volume and too much money. The art school origin changes the frame. Townshend was not losing control. He was making a statement about the relationship between the performer, the instrument, and the audience, about what it meant to give everything to a performance and have nothing left at the end of it.

The Who built guitar and amp destruction into their live show throughout the mid-1960s. Keith Moon destroyed drum kits. Townshend destroyed guitars. The violence was choreographed but not faked. The guitars were really destroyed. The feeling behind it was real.

Hendrix and the Ritual

Jimi Hendrix approached instrument destruction differently. Where Townshend's smashing was aggressive and cathartic, Hendrix's famous guitar burning at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 was ceremonial. He knelt in front of his Stratocaster like a supplicant, poured lighter fluid on it, and set it on fire with his hands. Then he lifted the burning guitar above his head and smashed it on the stage.

The imagery was explicitly sacrificial. Hendrix had talked about the guitar as an extension of himself, and the destruction of it at the peak of his performance had the quality of an offering. He was giving something up. The crowd at Monterey watched in silence and then erupted. They understood, even without being able to articulate it, that they had witnessed something that was not a stunt.

Hendrix only did it a handful of times. The rarity was part of the meaning. When everything gets destroyed every night, nothing means anything.

When It Became Theater

By the 1970s, guitar smashing had migrated from statement to spectacle. It had become something audiences expected, a line item in the performance budget, a moment in the set that the tour manager planned for rather than the artist arrived at. The guitars destroyed nightly by bands who could afford to destroy them were not sacrifices. They were props.

This is the moment where testosterone entered the analysis. The deliberate cultivation of rock excess, the hotel rooms, the limos, the destroyed instruments, was partly about power and partly about performance of a specific kind of masculinity. Smashing a guitar in 1975 was not a comment on the relationship between art and destruction. It was a way of demonstrating that you had the money to waste and the energy to waste it loudly.

It is worth noting that the musicians who pioneered instrument destruction, Townshend, Hendrix, were not performing masculinity in the conventional sense. Townshend was an art school intellectual. Hendrix was one of the most emotionally expressive performers in the history of the instrument. The thing they were doing had nothing to do with aggression for its own sake. The people who copied the gesture without the intention behind it turned it into something much less interesting.

Cobain and the Exhaustion

Kurt Cobain smashed guitars the way he did most things in public: with an ambivalence that was itself a kind of statement. The destruction at the end of Nirvana shows was not Townshend's catharsis or Hendrix's ritual. It was closer to exhaustion. The guitars went into the amps and the amps went over because the show was ending and something had to happen and this was the thing that happened.

There is footage of Cobain destroying equipment with an expression that is not joy or release but something closer to obligation. He had inherited a tradition and was performing it without conviction, which was in its own way honest. By the early 1990s, guitar smashing was so thoroughly a rock cliche that doing it sincerely required more ironic distance than Cobain was willing to manufacture.

The most interesting thing about Nirvana's relationship with destruction is not the equipment. It is the music. Nevermind is an album about the tension between wanting to be heard and finding the means of being heard intolerable. The smashing at the end of the shows was almost incidental to the more thoroughgoing destruction happening in the songs themselves.

The Actual Cost

A 1959 Gibson Les Paul is worth somewhere between one hundred thousand and four hundred thousand dollars depending on condition. Pete Townshend destroyed instruments that would now be considered irreplaceable artifacts. Hendrix burned a Stratocaster that would sell at auction for more money than most people earn in a decade.

This changes the moral calculus somewhat depending on your perspective. There is an argument that destroying a great instrument is genuinely wrong, that the object has a value that transcends its owner's right to dispose of it. There is a counter-argument that an instrument is a tool and a tool belongs to whoever is using it and they can do what they like with it.

The more interesting question is what it means now, when the gesture is so thoroughly catalogued and historicized that any musician who smashes a guitar on stage is consciously or unconsciously referencing sixty years of people who did it before them. The original statement required ignorance of precedent to be fully honest. That ignorance is no longer available.

When It Still Means Something

It still happens. Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day has destroyed guitars on stage throughout his career in a way that reads as genuinely felt rather than performed. Some punk and noise acts treat equipment destruction as an integral part of the sonic experience, the feedback from a guitar going into an amp at full volume being as much a part of the music as the notes that preceded it.

The difference, as it has always been, is intention and rarity. When the destruction is the culmination of something real, when it follows from what the performance has been building toward rather than being scheduled for 10:47pm every night, the original power is still available. The audience can tell the difference. They have always been able to tell the difference.

Townshend understood this. He stopped smashing guitars when it stopped meaning something. The instrument was never the point. What it represented, the total commitment, the willingness to consume the means of expression in the act of expressing, that was the point.

A guitar is just wood and wire. The question is always what you are willing to give up and why.

Explore the artists who changed live music forever on Sonic City — The Who, Nirvana, and the gear they played and destroyed.