Tom Dunne's Music & Me: Phoebe Bridgers' bitchin' guitar antics kept up a proud tradition
Phoebe Bridgers smashes her guitar on Saturday Night Live.
In other good news my plans for a Westworld style Rock Island that music legends can be sent to before they destroy their own legacy is at an advanced stage. Too late I know for Morrissey, Johnny Rotten or Ian Brown, but this has been no easy task and anyway, I’m doing it for the kids.
My mission took on extra impetus in the last few weeks when the known rock world, and its leader David Crosby, decided to weigh in heavily after Phoebe Bridgers destroyed a guitar on Saturday Night Live. It was a major faux pas for the skeleton-suited one. Only men are allowed break guitars. Hadn’t Phoebe gotten the memo?
Crosby labelled her “pathetic” and as the backlash gathered pace he helpfully explained that guitars are for playing, not for “childish stage drama”. Eventually he would add that it was “what you do if you can’t write”, which inspired even Flea to tweet “Hendrix can’t write?”.
But it was left to Bridger’s to end the argument. Younger, better versed in the ways of social media and aware that 280 characters is a limit not an aspiration, she tweeted just two words to Crosby: “Little Bitch,” she said. Twitter knows a knockout blow when it sees it. It was “OK Boomer”, but better.
So when did destroying a guitar become a red flag event. Guitars have been destroyed dramatically and to great effect by Pete Townsend, The Clash, Kurt Cobain, The Kings Of Leon, Hendrix, Green Day, Muse and most American hair bands.
Pete probably started it. He destroyed 35 guitars in 1967 alone, which history will show was a bad year to be a guitar. That was the year when Hendrix burnt his at the Monterey Pop festival. Jimi kneeling over the burning guitar, pouring fuel on the flames and still somehow tempting music out of it was one of the defining images of the '60s.
It captured a certain essence of the times. Rock gigs by acts like Hendrix, The Who and others were driving audiences into a frenzy. They were reaching a climax from which there seemed to be no release. Smashing the guitar was a cathartic escape. It was symbolic, fitting, utterly final. Girl we couldn’t get much higher.
It also took no prisoners in terms of the generation gap. No one of a conservative bent could understand the wanton destruction of musical instruments. This was all the evidence they needed to confirm that demonic forces were at work and their children in league with the devil. There was no hiding your hand.
It was a baton that was almost passed from generation to generation. When Paul Simonon of the Clash destroyed his bass onstage at the NY Palladium it was if my generation, punk and proud, had come of age. Pennie Smith’s image, the cover of London Calling, is often referred to as rock’s greatest photo.
Despite advice, I ‘tried it at home'. For an RTÉ video with my first band, The End, we asked if we could destroy a guitar. We were told it was a Health and Safety issue for the camera crew. We asked could we smash a vase with the guitar but it was another ‘no'. We compromised on hitting the vase with the guitar but not smashing it.
In the final shoot it just looked like the vase had been swept out of shot by a golf club. It was more a vanishing act, a slight of hand, than an act of wanton destruction. One minute there was a vase, next minute there wasn’t. Much like the band itself.
Crosby, it is worth noting, is the man who once said that to have been in band just after the invention of the pill but just before the arrival of Aids was the time to be alive. And I am quite sure he was correct. I doubt there are many had a better time in the 1960s, or indeed the '70s.
This might have been the time to take him to my Westworld Island, when his reputation as the hippies’ hippy, the artist’s artist and the coolest man in music was still intact. A time long before social media.
He would like his new home. The island will feature robotic roadies, fans and corrupt managers. There will only be three types of buildings: airports, hotels and venues. “It’s just a big solo tour, David,” I’ll tell him, “it’s just that it never ends.” He won’t notice a thing.
