Pete Townshend is perhaps best known for his guitar smashing antics. He first smashed his guitar in a 1964 show--before The Who made it with My Generation--after accidentally cracking his guitar head on the low ceiling. To save face, he made the mistake look intentional and went on to smash the guitar completely. Fortunately, he had a spare twelve string to finish the show with. Shortly thereafter, Pete said this about the incident:
"I think I justified it in terms of being noticed. And fuck it, I wasn't going to stand on stage and play rock & roll, if it was just the music; because that's not what rock & roll is, anyway. It might be what the blues is, but rock & roll is something else again."