The one musician Pete Townshend crowned as a “guitar genius”
When The Who first began, Pete Townshend was never going around pretending to be God’s gift to guitar playing.
He was making the most with what he had half the time, and even if he could create a hell of a noise with the rest of the band behind him, he knew that what would stick around long after he was gone were the songs that he wrote every single time he crafted one of their concepts. There had to be some more meat behind everything that he was doing, but that’s not to say that there weren’t some fantastic guitarists who made him feel like they had transcended the instrument.
When you look at the late 1960s, it was almost as if a new guitar hero was coming out virtually every other day. Besides people like Keith Richards and George Harrison making their living coming up with the best guitar breaks that anyone had ever heard of, Eric Clapton was setting the standard for what every single kid wanted to be with a guitar in their hands. ‘Slowhand’ wasn’t being all that flashy by accident, but even compared to Townshend’s uses of feedback, there was nothing that could have prepared anyone for what Jimi Hendrix brought to the table.
Hendrix practically presented himself like some wise sage of music whenever he performed, and hearing him play felt like watching someone truly at one with their instrument. Seeing him live was enough for Townshend to practically beg him not to play before The Who, but once the Summer of Love ended, there were other bands that were about exploring the mechanics of what the instrument could do.
If you think about it, the guitar had only been a mainstream instrument for a few years after being a part of the backing band, and it was only a matter of time before people started to explore its capabilities. Hendrix was doing that whenever he plugged in his guitar, but on acoustic guitar, people like Joni Mitchell and David Crosby were busy exploring what different tones you could get out of the instrument when they used alternate tunings.
But even if Crosby was one of the finest songwriters when it came to these strange tunings, Stephen Stills was the one who mastered them. He had already begun exploring what he could play when he was in Buffalo Springfield, but even though Townshend was toying around with his own approach, he was floored by what he heard coming from those first Crosby, Stills and Nash records.
Stills was the creative visionary behind a lot of those first songs, and his touch on the acoustic was beyond anything Townshend could have imagined, saying, “Stephen Stills is one of the great, great geniuses of guitar, of every style of guitar. The problem is that he’s never really had much of an idea on how to deal with that. Also with the fact that not everybody in the world has recognized that. Probably somebody else that suffered from the presence of someone like Jimi Hendrix.”
He does tend to get overlooked when it comes to his guitar prowess, but anyone who only listens to CSN for tunes like ‘Teach Your Children’ needs to dig up the more inventive songs in their catalogue. ‘Carry On’ is still one of the finest examples of how to think outside the box with a guitar, and even if every string is almost tuned to the same note, you can hear Stills really bringing a bunch of swagger to every one of those riffs.
And while Townshend did have his fair share of moments when he was making some decent strides on guitar, he knew that what Stills was doing was out of everyone else’s grasp. He was a decent songwriter, all things considered, but if Stills was going to go down in history for anything, it was knowing the subtle nuances of the guitar better than just about anybody that he performed with.
