THE WHO, from left, Keith Moon, Peter Townsend, John Entwistle and Roger Daltrey, provide on the spot instrument pulverization in their live performances. (Pop Scene Photo)

Scene Is Wild When Group Plays

"I’ve broken 95 guitars," Peter Townshend said. "I broke six that I really liked. I was the first to do it and mean it. I broke the only one that I had once."

Peter is the energetic lead guitarist for the Who, a British rock group currently on tour of the United States. He sat on his motel bed, between sets at San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium, and explained why he’s known for treating guitars with a certain disrespect:

"We were playing things that couldn’t be surpassed," he said. "We couldn’t play them any louder or any harder. There was nothing else that we could do."

It began several years ago when the Who were playing a concert in England. Peter uses feedback like an ordinary man uses an electric toothbrush, swinging the guitar back and forth to bring it close to the amplifier and get the right tone. The guitar began to bang into the amplifier, and then the ceiling. Eventually he began to smash them, and before long the group was ending their concerts by breaking the guitar, throwing the drums around, and disappearing under the cover of a smoke bomb explosion that obliterated view of the stage.

Costly Gimmick

Though guitars can be expensive, Peter has a solidly anti-McLuhanesque view of smashing them. "Love of the instrument shouldn’t stand between me and the music," he says. He makes no estimate of the exact cost.

The Who is generally known as an in-person group because the sound of guitars splintering and smoke bombs igniting is hard to capture on record, but they have three albums on Decca, "The Who Sings My Generation," "Happy Jack," and "The Who Sell Out," their latest.

The Who Sell Out is distinguished by an album cover featuring each member of the group shown testing a different brand name product. Peter is shown with a giant tube of deodorant under his arm.

The album is a half-hour segment designed as a radio program for Radio London, the defunct pirate radio station, including commercials and station breaks. It has created only ripples in the placid sea of American top 40 rock stations.

Ignite Audience

But the Who music is excellent. On record, they ignite the audience with excellent rock songs, with minimal concocted effects, and in person they blend hardrock exhuberance with considerable gymnastics to turn on any audience.

Keith Moon, the Who 21-year-old drummer, flails the drums with incredible energy while gasping for breath like a beached guppy.

Lead singer Roger Daltrey jumps about stage, twirling the microphone over his head and banging it into one of Keith’s two bass drums.

Peter Townshend flies around the stage taking spectacular roundhouse strokes at his guitar (a movement he admits stea.ing from Rolling Stone Keith Richards).

John Entwistle, the bassist, stands to one side and is content to seem quite disinterested in the acrobatics going on to his left. "When we started we were quite mad at him for that," Peter says. "We wanted him to get in there and do his thing. But his acting as an anchor is probably the only thing that’s kept us together."

Peter admits having been bothered by the fact that American audiences expect him to break guitars, a feature he dropped from the Who’s British stage act some time ago, and has even cut down on drastically in this country. But it could be worse.