Highway Chile wrote
The Tele pickup switch sounds more reasonable to me......I have always wondered whether the whole whammy bar as impaled thing, was just some sort of myth......nevertheless, I found this..........
Doesn’t Pete Townshend hurt his hand when he does that windmill thing on the guitar?
Even worse than you think. During a 1989 Who concert in Tacoma, Washington, Townshend missed the encore when he sliced open his hand on his guitar strings and was rushed to the hospital. During another show that year, Townshend actually impaled his right palm on the guitar’s whammy bar. Plus, the guitar strings routinely get underneath his fingernails and rip them off. This means he starts to bleed, and when the guitar pick gets bloody, it becomes slippery and hard to hold. “It is terribly painful,” Townshend said in 1994. But he relishes it: “I think, ‘This is it. I’ve arrived. It is the place where I should be, like a boxer in the middle of a fight.’” Of course, before his painful hearing loss, he used to take the same pleasure in how physically punishing the Who’s loud amplifiers were–there’s a masochistic element in his onstage abandon.
It's mentioned in Joe Boyd's book as well - and a much earlier incident. In the early 70s Boyd produced a documentary on Jimi Hendrix. Some of the original footage got sent to a landfill site by mistake so they had to re-shoot some of the interviews. One of the most important had been Pete Townshend. The only chance they could get was an after concert interview. Things started running late when Pete hurt his hand on the selector switch and had to have the hand bandaged before he could finish the performance.
Boyd also revealed that early in his career Townshend had hypno-therapy with the aim of inducing a state so that when he was performing he would give a maximum effort. This may explain why he doesn't let things like a cut hand deter him. It's not stated overtly, but it seems from that book that "performing" wasn't limited to "on stage". The original interview that they'd done with Townshend had been good for all kinds of reasons, and when they got to sit him down for the re-shoot everything was wrong - Pete wasn't in a good mood, the lighting was bad, they were running out of time and were going to get just one take etc etc. Yet when they started the cameras he recreated the original interview almost exactly. Boyd also mentions some sessions he produced in which Townshend was involved. The rhythm section was Ronnie Lane and Keith Moon, and they made mistakes and the session kept on stopping because of that, but Townshend was perfect every take on a song that wasn't his.
