“Leave a wound”: The night Pete Townshend attacked a policeman and rock ‘n’ roll changed forever
In 1967, as The Who were gearing up for the Monterey Pop festival, Pete Townshend laid down the vicious marker that they wanted to “leave a wound”.
It was a declaration that spoke to the band’s proto-punk attack on banality. It spoke to the same angsty aggravation that made ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ such a zeitgeist-capturing anthem. But all of this was ideological. Sure, The Who might have quite literally destroyed their instruments and laced drumkits with explosives, but Townshend himself loathed machismo and took a much more spiritual view on destruction.
That is, until May 16th, 1969. That fateful night, while performing in New York City, he clashed with a non-uniform police officer who jumped on stage. It was, in many ways, reflective of the fever pitch of rock ‘n’ roll at that point, and a portent that it was about to step one toke over the line and implode.
If you’re looking for tales of youthful energy and vibrant rock and roll attitude, then you may as well start with The Who. As well as the iconic ‘Moon the Loon‘, the band’s ferocious drummer, the group was always brimming with the tension between Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend always burning away, and a ferocious mantra: “We won’t let our music stand in the way of our visual act”. That often led to violence of a certain performative ilk.
‘Performative’ was initially the operative word. The destruction was always symbolic. It represented a rupture in the previous sanitised world of pop. But the wiry Townshend, for all his windmilling fury, wasn’t some nihilist brute. He was an art school thinker, fascinated by the idea of auto-destruction as a creative act rather than a mindless one. Yet, as the decade wore on, that line began to blur.
At Woodstock in ’69, Townshend once hit Abbie Hoffman with his guitar when they invaded his on-stage territory; the same can be said for the man filming it, who later caught a boot to the face. Townshend might have been a softy who said he was bullied at school and loathed the macho bantering of his robust bandmate, but he certainly had a bloody temper all the same.
The Who were performing at the Fillmore East in New York a few weeks prior to Woodstock, and Townshend’s quick feet once again saw him in trouble. The group were running through their epic rock opera Tommy across the United States, and their scheduled New York debut was one of the most prized stops.
The group were in the middle of performing ‘Summertime Blues’ when a plain-clothed police officer tried to jump on stage. He began wrestling the mic from singer Roger Daltrey, who himself is no slouch with his fists. Daltrey defends himself abruptly. Townshend, seeing the fracas, swiped at him with a heavy boot.
What the band didn’t know was that on the other side of the wall, smoke had begun to creep into the theatre. The ashen fog had begun to cascade into the venue from a grocery store next door that was on fire. The undercover policeman was trying to warn all those inside of the impending danger and, instead, received a swift kick to the crotch from Pete Townshend.
Luckily, as the band finished the song, with a prostate copper reeling in pain and unable to get his point across, Fillmore owner Bill Graham came out and calmly told the crowd the situation and had everyone leave in an orderly fashion. The show was later rescheduled for the upcoming Sunday.
It was a fortunate delay because The Who had to contend with their guitarist being in a jail cell for a night. He was later fined around $30 and charged with assault. While the legality that unfurled might have been no more than a trifling discrepancy for a band in that era, what it implied for rock ‘n’ roll and the impact it had on Townshend were rather more meaningful.
Destruction was once an inventive theatrical performance with a point. Now, it was purely ‘performative’. “It’s also embarrassing, is what it is,” Townshend would later reflect on the trope in 1994. “It’s like comedians being forced to use their catchphrase after they’ve become serious actors.”
It might have been borne from art school, but now it seemed juvenile, and Townshend was ready to move on from the nights in jail, take The Who’s music down a more spiritual and conceptual route. With prog and the likes on the horizon, a fair chunk of music clearly felt the same.
