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This is a secondary source because it is magazine of Pete Townshed smashing his guitar written after Pete Townshed smashed his guitar information was gathered by a third party source

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http://the60sat50.blogspot.com/2014/09/september-1964-pete-townshend-smashes.html
This is a secondary source because its just a Blog made by someone who compiled information from different primary sources and is a third party account

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Photo taken at National Jazz and Blues Festival, Royal Windsor Racecourse, July 1966.
* "Smashed Guitars" (www.thewho.net)

* "Rickenbacker Guitars" (www.thewho.net):

* "Pete Townshend and the Auto-Destructive Art of Guitar-Smashing" (dangerousminds.net):
* "50 Moments That Changed Rock and Roll: Townshend Smashes It Up" (Rolling Stone):
* "History: The Story of The Who" (thewho.com):

* Footage from a Railway Hotel set (exact date unknown):

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September 1964: Pete Townshend smashes a guitar

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Photo taken at National Jazz and Blues Festival, Royal Windsor Racecourse, July 1966.

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Source I:Biography of pete townshend guitar smash 

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Source I:Biography of pete townshend guitar smash 

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https://www.guitarnoise.com/artists/pete-townshend/
this is a secondary source because it gets things from other primary and secondary sources

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Pete Townshend – Music Biography - Guitar Noise

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Pete Townshend has long been Rock n Roll’s poster child for the dangers of constant exposure to incredibly loud music. He was also one of the biggest inspirations for the “unplugged” movement of the 1990’s.

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This is a primary source because it is a world record of Pete Townshed smashing his guitar.It contains information from people who experienced the guitar getting smashed. https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/107896-first-band-to-destroy-their-instruments-on-stage

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Where

United Kingdom (Harrow)

The Who (UK) became the first rock band to perfect the art of destroying instruments as part of their energetic live shows in the mid-1960s. Guitarist Pete Townshend kicked off the crowd-pleasing ritual during a performance at The Railway Tavern in Harrow, London, in 1964 when he "finished off" his Rickenbacker after accidentally breaking the neck of the guitar on the venue's low ceiling, an event Rolling Stone magazine later included in their "50 moments that changed the history of rock 'n' roll". Drummer Keith Moon also became a renowned instrument-slayer, most notably in 1967 when he detonated a kit loaded with explosives at the conclusion of The Who's performance of "My Generation" on the US TV variety show The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. The resulting blast embedded cymbal shrapnel in Moon's arm, singed Townshend's hair and is reported to have contributed to the guitarist's long-term hearing impairment.

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First band to destroy their instruments on stage

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Advertisements Where United Kingdom (Harrow) The Who (UK) became the first rock band to perfect the art of destroying instruments as part of their energetic live shows in the mid-1960s.

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This is a secondary source because it is a newspaper article wrote by a third party after the guitar smash.

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This is a secondary source because it is a cartoon made of Pete Townshed's Guitar Smash. It shows a recreation in the form of a drawing of Pete Townshed smashing his guitar

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This is a primary source because it contains information from eyewitnesses of the event, the book also includes information of other concerts

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Dave Marsh's "Before I Get Old" may remain the alpha male of Who biographies but "The Who Concert File" proves the devil is in the details.

Crammed into this 300-plus-page book, which is slightly bigger than a wallet, are dates, locations, and background notes on every Who gig from July 1962 at the Paradise Club (as The Detours) to September 2002 (Air Canada Centre, Toronto). Godhead for most, of course, will be the years when Keith Moon manned the drum kit, the band ripping huge chunks out of the scenery, chips on their shoulders, fighting and fucking everything in sight, and trampling everything - their audience, their songs, even themselves - into submission. Few bands are as enshrouded in myth as The Who, four guys - all of whom wanted to play lead - behaving badly, swearing loudly, and standing to salute with one finger up their nose. Despite my endless proselytizing in this forum about the likes of The New York Dolls, The Ramones, and The Stooges, The Who, in their prime, were the greatest rock 'n' roll band to ever draw air and I'll fight anyone who says otherwise. Offer void to Rose Tattoo fans.

For a band so driven by one-upmanship, anger, frustration and - in Moon's case - drugs and drink, most anything could and often did happen once the lights came up and the amps started buzzing. The carnage left in the wake of their appearance on "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" insured it would be their only appearance on a U.S. variety show, the band going off script with a post lip-synched "My Generation" detonation of a triple-packed charge concealed inside Keith Moon's bass drum which left Pete Townshend with hair ablaze and completely deaf for 20 minutes. Their live U.S. debut at the Monterey Pop Festival ended with the ritual destruction of equipment, left the hippies wondering what happened to peace and love, and contrary to popular opinion, made Jimi Hendrix's ensuing flaming-guitar sacrifice look like a cub scout marshmallow roast. And has there ever been a better way to greet a new sunrise than the Woodstock set, the stage fading to black, Townshend's SG still ringing feedback? "Ladies and gentlemen, The Who..."

Of course, every night wasn't a triumph, notable exceptions being the 1973 "Quadrophenia" tour, which was fraught with backing-tape cock-ups, lengthy between-song explanations by Townshend, and in San Francisco, the need to call out to the audience for a replacement drummer for a monkey-tranquilized Moon, who simply couldn't soldier on. Strangely, the December 3, 1979 Riverfront Coliseum show in Cincinnati, from which 11 people never returned home, is given short shrift.

But there's plenty here to recommend, even if it all seems like a desperate trip in the wayback machine to a time when heroes did truly walk among us, before MTV did for rock & roll what the full-length mirror did for Liberace.

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Dave Marsh's "Before I Get Old" may remain the alpha male of Who biographies but "The Who Concert File" proves the devil is in the details. Crammed into this 300-plus-page book, which is slightly bigger than a wallet, are dates, locations, and background notes on every Who gig from July 1962 at the Paradise Club (as The Detours) to September 2002 (Air Canada Centre, Toronto).

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https://dangerousminds.net/comments/pete_townshend_and_the_auto_destructive_art_of_guitar_smashing
This is a primary source because its a poster of a picture taken from the moment right before he smashes the guitar

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Pete Townshend said it was an accident the first time he smashed his guitar. He was playing with The Who in a small cramped room at the Railway Hotel in Harrow, west London. The ceiling was damp with condensation, the room smoky, a smell of sweat and stale beer. The Who were playing "Smokestack Lightning," "I'm a Man," and "Road Runner" when:

I scrape the howling Rickenbacker guitar up and down my microphone stand, then flip the special switch I recently fitted so the guitar sputters and sprays the front row with bullets of sound. I violently thrust my guitar into the air-and feel a terrible shudder as the sound goes from a roar to a rattling growl; I look up to see my guitar's broken head as I pull it away from the hole I've punched in the low ceiling. It is at this moment that I make a split-second decision-and in a mad frenzy I thrust the damaged guitar up into the ceiling over and over again. What had been a clean break becomes a splinter mess. I hold the guitar up to the crowd triumphantly. I haven't smashed it: I've sculpted it for them. I throw the shattered guitar carelessly to the ground, pick up my brand-new Rickenbacker twelve-string and continue the show....

This is Townshend recounting the first time he smashed a guitar in his autobiography . It's an event that Rolling Stone magazine considered so important that it was included in their list of " 50 Moments That Changed Rock & Roll."

When The Who played the Railway Hotel the following week, the audience expected Townshend to give a repeat performance of his guitar smashing. He didn't. The next time Townshend smashed his guitar was at the Olympia Ballroom, Reading, in April 1965. This time it was done as a piece of self-promotion. The Who's manager Kit Lambert had "invited Virginia Ironside ( Daily Mail) and writer Nik Cohn along to this gig and briefed Pete to create an impression by smashing his £400 Rickenbacker, despite the expense."

This he duly did, and Keith joined in by smashing his drums. However, Lambert had been waylaid in the bar with the journalists when this grand spectacle occurred and was reportedly horrified to find he had been taken at his word.

It wasn't until 1966 that Townshend's trademark guitar-smashing regularly became part of The Who's performance right up to a concert at the Yokohama Stadium, Tokyo, Japan, where he smashed a gold Fender Eric Clapton Stratocaster.

Over the years, Townshend has given various reasons as to why he first smashed his guitar in September 1964. He has claimed he deliberately did it because he "was determined to get the precious event noticed by the audience."

Pete: I proceeded to make a big thing of breaking the guitar. I bounced all over the stage with it and I threw the bits on the stage and I picked up my spare guitar and carried on as though I really had meant to do it.

And he has also said it was " really meaningless ":

"I've often gone on the stage with a guitar and said, 'Tonight, I'm not going to smash a guitar, and I don't give a shit.' And I've gone on, and every time I've done it. Basically, it's a gesture that happens on the spur of the moment. It's a performance, it's an act, it's an instant, and it's really meaningless."

"I thought, 'It's broken'" said Townshend. "'Might as well finish it off.'"

But in his autobiography, Townshend ties his guitar-smashing into a more political act:

I had no idea what the first smashing of my guitar would lead to, but I had a good idea where it all came from. ... I was brought up in a period when war still cast shadows, though in my life the weather changed so rapidly it was impossible to know what was in store. War had been a real threat or a fact for three generations of my family...

I wasn't trying to play beautiful music, I was confronting my audience with the awful, visceral sound of what we all knew was the single abso lute of our frail existence-one day an aeroplane would carry the bomb that would destroy us all in a flash. It could happen at any time. The Cuban Crisis less than two years before had proved that. On stage I stood on the tips of my toes, arms outstretched, swooping like a plane. As I raised the stuttering guitar above my head, I felt I was holding up the bloodied standard of endless centuries of mindless war. Explosions. Trenches. Bodies. The eerie screaming of the wind."

All this from one smashed guitar?

It's undoubtedly good copy, and gives the young Townshend's actions considerable cultural cachet, as The Who at this time were still little more than a pop band singing songs about white boy angst-music for young white working class kids who thought they were missing out on something, but weren't quite sure what. By 1965, there was nothing particularly new about their music or their obsessions with girls, dancing, or their generation. But the association with Mods, and Townshend's guitar-smashing gave the band an edge, which counterculture figures like Mick Farren would later see as making Townsend and The Who revolutionary figures offering a kind of leadership in the fight against a police state.

In the early sixties, Townshend had been a student at Ealing College of Art, where he attended classes given by the auto-destructive artist Gustav Metzger. In his autobiography, Townshend says he was "Encouraged too by the work of Gustav Metzger, the pioneer of auto-destructive art, I secretly planned to completely destroy my guitar if the moment seemed right."

So, who is Gustav Metzger and what was his "auto-destructive art"?

Metzger was born in 1926, and has been creating conceptual art over the past 50 years. In his early work he would spray acid onto nylon sheets causing it to "auto-destruct." His "Acid on Nylon Paintings" produced colors and drippings as the nylon disintegrated. In the 1970s, he declared an " Art Strike 1977-1980 " where he did not produce any art for three years.

Artists engaged in political struggle act in two key areas: the use of their art for direct social change; and actions to change the structures of the art world. It needs to be understood that this activity is necessarily of a reformist, rather than revolutionary, character. Indeed this political activity often serves to consolidate the existing order, in the West, and in the East.

The use of art for social change is bedevilled by the close integration of art and society. The state supports art, it needs art as a cosmetic cloak to its horrifying reality, and uses art to confuse, divert and entertain large numbers of people. Even when deployed against the interests of the state, art cannot cut loose the umbilical cord of the state. Art in the service of revolution is unsatisfactory and mistrusted because of the numerous links of art with the state and capitalism. Despite these problems, artists will go on using art to change society.

Of course, the joke then was that Metzger went on art strike and no one noticed. Metzger was campaigning for "the destruction of existing commercial and public marketing and patronage systems, can be brought to a successful conclusion in the course of the present decade." He wanted a new way for artists to operate, exhibit and sell their work. However, Metzger's art is heavily dependent on the gallery system, for without it (like many other conceptual artists) his work would not be known or maintained. His art is about ideas, often trite, sometimes interesting, but ideas are only valid as long as they are shared.

More recently in 2004, Metzger was in the news when one of his sculptures, a bag of garbage, was accidentally removed by cleaning staff from an exhibition of his work at Tate Britain.

The exhibit was part of Metzger's Recreation of the "First Public Demonstration of Auto-Destructive Art," which aimed to show the "finite existence" of art.

Metzger wrote three manifestoes on "Auto destructive art," the first appearing in 1959:

Auto-destructive art is primarily a form of public art for industrial societies.

Self-destructive painting, sculpture and construction is a total unity of idea, site, form, colour, method and timing of the disintegrative process.

Auto-destructive art can be created with natural forces, traditional art techniques and technological techniques.

The amplified sound of the auto-destructive process can be an element of the total conception.

In 1960, Metzger altered the manifesto to include weaponry.

Rockets, nuclear weapons, are auto-destructive...

... Auto-destructive art re-enacts the obsession with destruction, the pummelling into which individuals and the masses are subjected.

Metzger finessed these manifestoes in his final auto-destructive art statement in 1961, by simply concluding:

Auto-destructive art is an attack on capitalist values and the drive to nuclear annihilation.

It was this angst over mass annihilation from "the drop drop drop dropping of the HH bomb" that Townshend was referring to ("one day an aeroplane would carry the bomb that would destroy us all in a flash..") when he smashed his guitar.

Of course, this all could be all the retelling of events with the privilege of hindsight, but at least it maintains a link to the art of Gustav Metzger.

Martin Pickles filmed Gustav Metzger preparing for his exhibition of "100,000 Newspapers" in 2003.

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Pete Townshend and the Auto-destructive art of guitar-smashing

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Pete Townshend said it was an accident the first time he smashed his guitar. He was playing with The Who in a small cramped room at the Railway Hotel in Harrow, west London. The ceiling was damp with condensation, the room smoky, a smell of sweat and stale beer.

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This is a primary source because its a picture of the guitar which is an artifact. And it shows the damage dealt to the guitar.
https://www.antiquestradegazette.com/news/2018/pete-townshend-guitar-smashed-at-end-of-the-who-concert-now-on-offer-at-us-auction/

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Source A: Pete Townshend interview of guitar smash

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Source A: Pete Townshend interview of guitar smash

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The is a primary source because its an interview of the moment and what felt in that moment. The article states that he accidentally hit and cracked the head stock of his guitar on a low ceiling, then he smashed the rest of the guitar. The article is from the who who was Pete Townshed's band up until 1982.
https://www.thewho.net/whotabs/gear/guitar/smashed.html

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Smashed Guitars | Pete Townshend's Guitar Gear | Whotabs

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Pete Townshend's guitar history ... of smashed guitars. A date/venue listing of known guitar destruction.

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Source B:Picture of Pete Townshed smashing guitar

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Source B:Picture of Pete Townshed smashing guitar

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This is a primary source because it is a picture taken from the time he smashed his guitar. It shows the guitar in the air about to be broken.

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Source F: Pete Townshed article of guitar smash

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Source F: Pete Townshed article of guitar smash

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This is a secondary source because it is an article about the Pete Townshed guitar smash. It was not written by anyone who witnessed the guitar smash just someone who heard about it.

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Name: Pete Townshend.

Age: 75.

Occupation: Guitar repairman.

Oh, for a minute, I thought you were talking about Pete Townshend of the Who. I am talking about Pete Townshend of the Who.

But he doesn't repair guitars - he destroys them. Well, that's partly true. For years, Townshend developed a reputation as the wild man of rock, often finishing concerts by smashing his guitars into smithereens. But that's only half the story.

What's the other half? That's the bit after the concerts, where Townshend would creep around the stage collecting up all the bits of smashed guitars so he could glue them back together again.

That isn't very rock'n'roll. It gets worse. To make it easier to repair his broken guitars, he went to great lengths to smash them up as carefully as possible.

Yikes. This is all according to his bandmate Roger Daltrey, at least. On the How to Wow podcast, he revealed the careful process behind Townshend's destruction. "They were real guitars, but we worked out very cleverly that very rarely did the neck break. As long as the neck didn't break, you could glue the body back," he said.

What a cheapskate. Hardly. As Daltrey also pointed out: "It was costly in glue."

I'm so disappointed. If it helps, there is a chance that this is just Daltrey deliberately trying to sabotage Townshend's reputation. The pair interact as little as possible these days, doing separate interviews, having separate backstage areas at concerts and even recording entire albums without seeing each other.

You'll be telling me next that Gene Simmons never had a cow's tongue surgically grafted on to his own tongue. What? Of course, he didn't. That's berserk.

Or that Keith Richards could only get off drugs by having his blood replaced at an expensive Swiss clinic. Also false, I'm afraid. He has since admitted that he made that story up.

I'm heartbroken. Please, at least tell me that Alice Cooper really once bit the head off a bat. I hate to break this to you, but Alice Cooper did not bite the head off a bat. But Ozzy Osbourne did, if that's any consolation.

I suppose that's better than nothing. Listen, it's important to remember that even rock stars are people, and they have to deal with the same mundanities as the rest of us. Do you know why Townshend had to glue all his guitars back together?

Why? Because the Who didn't have any money. It was a simple case of frugality.

Hey, I don't have any money either. And that's what makes you a rock star.

Do say: "The Who's reputation is in tatters."

Don't say: "Someone get me a Pritt Stick."
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The U-WHO: why Pete Townshend glued together his smashed guitars

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Name: Pete Townshend. Age: 75. Occupation: Guitar repairman. Oh, for a minute, I thought you were talking about Pete Townshend of the Who. I am talking about Pete Townshend of the Who. But he doesn't repair guitars - he destroys them. Well, that's partly true.