Pete Townshend’s guitar was mangled, the amplifiers kicked over in a heap on the floor along with Keith Moon’s drums, the microphone lying where Roger Daltrey had hurled it and the audience was on its feet. Just your usual Who concert finale.

What is business as usual for The Who, however, is a pretty incredible show. Last night at the Auditorium Theater, beginning the first of three days of performances which end tomorrow, the group put on a show that combined the best elements of their music with their penchant for rock theater.

Daltrey is still the swaggering prancer of a vocalist, stomping around on thick-soled clods, dragging the mike with him on its stand or twirling it key-chain fashion, barely managing to catch it before beginning to sing again. Keith Moon’s drumming is as flashy as ever, his mugging, preening and generally weird behavior more pronounced, if that’s possible. And Pete Townshend, the first cheerleader of rock, is a veritable jumping jack flash — leaping, landing,

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treadmilling with his feet while his arm windmills to come crashing down on the guitar in a savage attack.

Only John Entwistle, the bassist, just stands on stage and plays, his quietness a foil for the others’ theatrics. You don’t notice him, really, because he sort of blends in with the amplifiers, but he’s there, and, along with Townshend, responsible for some of the group’s best material.

Last night’s program was a carefully blended combination of early songs, new offerings from their latest album, with most of the songs written by Townshend, and no, they haven’t forgotten that poor blind, deaf and dumb kid who could still play a mean pinball. When Daltrey started in on “Pinball Wizard,” it was as if that’s what everyone had really been waiting for all evening.

That and the big wrecking scene at the end, of course. The Who don’t always do that these days — Townshend originally started torturing and eventually breaking his guitar, he said, as a bit of showmanship to take attention away from any defects in his playing, and there are few of those now. So they do the smash finish only when they feel like it, and I’m glad they felt like it last night. It’s a bit of gimmickry, sure, but one that’s become traditional.

And gimmickry is part of why The Who is so exciting, because this time it’s being done for its own prancing sake rather than a camouflage for lack of talent. The Who dovetail pop and theatrics into rock theater at its best.

The group is traveling in the company of 7½ tons of equipment, including their own lighting and sound system. The lighting arrangement does its part well, but the sound system isn’t doing so hot a job. What it loses in clarity, though, it generously compensates for in sheer volume. A couple more concerts like that and whole bunches of ears could be reduced to the state of our friend Tommy’s.