A history of violence against instruments

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By Will Bredderman

Brooklyn Daily

Eli Smith and his band of banjo-abusing folkies aren’t the first to trash a perfectly good instrument. Destruction of the tools of the music trade is a long and rich tradition going back to Beethoven, who sawed off the legs of his pianos. Here are some of the finest practitioners of the art form of instrumental annihilation:

Pete Townshend

The Who’s band leader has been turning rock stages into scenes of ungodly guitar carnage for nearly 50 years, leaving a trail of shattered Les Pauls and Rickenbackers all across the globe.

Vladimir Horowitz

This Russian emigre ivory-tickler famously snapped a piano string at a 1968 concert performance, during the crashing crescendoes of Rachmaninoff’s Sonata No. 2 — an act of shocking musical brutality that sent ripples of anxious murmuring throughout the classical world.

Rakim

The lyrical half of Eric B. & Rakim “used to let the mic smoke,” but he changed technique in 1987’s “I Ain’t No Joke,” in which he boasted about slamming the device to the ground when he was done to “make sure it’s broke.”

— Will Bredderman

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