Source link : https://las-vegas-news.com/concert-rituals-that-started-as-accidents-but-became-tradition/
Some of the most recognizable moments in live music history were never planned. A guitar hit a ceiling. A crowd lit candles in the rain. A drummer hurled his sticks into the dark. These accidents did not fade into embarrassing footnotes. They stuck, grew, spread across venues and genres, and eventually became the very things fans travel hundreds of miles to witness. The story of how concert rituals are born is often not a story of clever marketing or deliberate showmanship. It is a story of pure, unscripted chaos that an audience decided to keep.
Smashing Instruments: Pete Townshend’s Ceiling Mishap
In 1964, The Who were playing a gig at the Railway Hotel in London when Townshend began one of his always very physically involved quests for feedback and noise. He started knocking the guitar about a lot, hitting it on the amps to get banging noises, and it started to crack. It banged against the ceiling and smashed a hole in the plaster, and the guitar head actually poked through. What followed was not artful or calculated. That accident quickly descended into all-out rage, and Townshend finished off the guitar entirely. A Who tradition was born, and the band’s smashing up of their instruments became a regular feature of their performances from then on.
Audiences were initially shocked but eventually came to expect the destruction as part of The Who’s performance. This was a time when…
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Author : Matthias Binder
Publish date : 2026-02-25 13:08:00
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