In its earliest
days, prior to
Keith Moon joining,
the band was known as The Detours and played mostly
rhythm and
blues. They eventually changed their
name to
The Who when
Keith joined, making
the classic line-up complete. For a
short period during 1964, under the management of
Peter Meaden, they changed their name to The High
Numbers during which
time they released a mostly unsuccessful single under that name, designed to appeal to their mostly mod fans. When "
Zoot Suit/I'm The
Face" failed to chart, they fired Meaden and
quickly reverted back to
the Who. The rest, as they
say, is history. They became
one of the most
popular bands among the British Mods, a social movement of the
early 60s who rejected the "greaser"
music favored by the Rockers.
In the early days, The Who was most famous for smashing their instruments at the end of their concerts, and would often throw the damaged remains into the audience. one of the most famous times this happened was on The Smothers Brothers Show. the Who were nearing the end of "My Generation" when the American audience witnessed the truly destructive nature of the Who. Pete Townshend jammed his guitar into his speaker, causing it to short circuit in a ball of fire and smoke! As Pete Townshend smashed his guitar into oblivion,Keith Moon rigged his drum set with double the normal amounts of explosives. This would signal that the band had given all it had, and generated some coveted souvenirs as a side effect. Townshend cites his art school mentor Gustav Metzger as an influence, who had developed a concept called Auto-Destructive Art. Although The Who mostly stopped smashing their instruments around the time of Tommy, they would occasionally do it long afterwards.
They were also notorious for how they treated their hotel rooms and dressing rooms, particularly Moon. the band was arrested for this on at least one occasion, in Montreal, and were for many years banned from the Holiday Inn hotel chain. Led Zeppelin, a hard rock act of the same era, was equally famous for their wild antics and parties in their lodgings, but The Who were generally considered the worst in this category.
The Who's live performances were traditionally extremely loud. For most of the 1970s they were listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the loudest Rock band in the world, measured at 130 decibels, though other bands, notably Deep Purple, have since taken over that dubious honor. Townshend's later partial deafness and tinnitus is well known; popular legends hold that the members of the band suffered permanent hearing loss from their loud concerts, or that Townshend's right ear was damaged as a result of being too close to the drum kit when Moon detonated an oversized concussion bomb in it at the conclusion of a performance on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1967. Townshend, however, maintains that the true cause was listening to the music at high volume through headphones.
Various members of the band wore "trademark" dress on stage and in photo shoots at various periods of The band's history. During the 1960s Pete Townshend sported a jacket made of a Union Jack. (Reportedly the Irish Republican Army threatened to blow up the band on stage if he wore it at an appearance in Ireland, but Townshend had planned ahead and provided himself with a jacket more sympathetic to Irish nationalist sentiments.) At the end of the decade he switched to a simple jumpsuit or boiler suit, and appears wearing it in the Woodstock footage. For a period John Entwistle wore a Halloween-style skeleton suit in concert. From the late 1960s through most of the 1970s Roger Daltrey appeared in a fringed buckskin jacket or vest, and can be seen wearing it in most film footage of the era.
--Wikipedia
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