As the songwriter and guitarist of The Who, Pete Townshend has been a huge influence on countless musicians who have come into contact with his music. He is often regarded as one of the greatest British guitarists and although many of his heroes on the instrument are also from the United Kingdom, he is also a big fan of some American players.
2 American guitarists Pete Townshend is a big fan of
Joe Walsh
The first one is the Eagles’ and James Gang’s Joe Walsh, who actually influenced Pete Townshend directly, since he was the one who presented him with the guitar that later became fundamental in achieving the sound he wanted for The Who’s classic album “Who’s Next”.
“Joe Walsh is a fluid and intelligent player. There’re not many like that around,” Pete told Rolling Stone magazine already in 1975. They first met each other shortly before the James Gang album “Rides Again” (1970) was released and around that time The Who took them on the road as their opening act.
“Joe Walsh, whom I’d met, sent me an orange Gretsch like Neil Young uses and a Fender Bassman amp and with an Entwoods volume pedal in between. I started getting into that kind of sound. Leslie West sent me a really great Les Paul Junior with one pickup on it and Eric gave me an old Strat.”
Pete Townshend continued:
“I think in a way what these guys were trying to tell me was if I wasn’t ready to go out and find me a good guitar, they did it for me. They gave me good instruments and I still have those three instruments today. And those were really the guitars I used on that album. Mainly the solo work on ‘Who’s Next’ was done on the Gretsch Chet Atkins.”
“(…) I feel Joe (Walsh) is a very expressive guitar player. He has brought out a lot of expressiveness in the other guitar player in the band (The Eagles), Don Felder.” Pete Townshend to Sound International magazine in 1980. That guitar was used by Townshend every track of “Who’s Next” and he later said it was the finest guitar he ever had.
Walsh considers Pete a mentor and someone who taught him how to play in a trio, since The Who was essentially a power trio in terms of instruments. “I was about 21 (When I was in James Gang). We complete out of luck got to open for The Who in Europe when they premiered ‘Tommy’. (They found me in) Pittsburgh. They played ‘Tommy’ in Pittsburgh and we opened for them because the promoter was our manager. Pete Townshend just happened to come early that night and heard 20 minutes of it. We became really good friends, I became really good friends with the whole band.”
Joe Walsh continued:
“They took us to Europe and that’s really what broke the James Gang. He taught me how to play guitar in a three piece band: guitar, drums and bass. The thing he taught me was to play with an attitude, just the attitude is the whole thing. You can hear that attitude on a lot of my records. But Keith Moon, The Who’s drummer, he taught me how to trash hotel rooms. Have you noticed that in hotel rooms you can’t open the windows anymore? That’s because of Moon and me (laughs),” Joe Walsh told Jimmy Kimmel in 2024 (Transcribed by Rock and Roll Garage). Curiously, Walsh was also important for Jimmy Page, as he was the one who sold Page his first Les Paul, which was later used to record some of Led Zeppelin’s most famous songs.
Pete and Walsh played together back in 2015 when the American guitarist joined The Who on stage during their Teenager Cancer Benefit concert in Chicago.
Stephen Stills
“Stephen Stills is one of the great, great geniuses of guitar, of every style of guitar. The problem is that he’s never really had much of an idea on how to deal with that. (Also) with the fact that not everybody in the world has recognized that. Probably somebody else that suffered from the presence of someone like Jimi Hendrix. Maybe took some of his thunder because he was not just a great guitar player but also a great performer.”
“But their (CSNY) vocal style was groundbreaking in a way because it was arranged. Stephen could write charts and I’m not sure that everybody in the band could read charts but he could write them, so he could organize in a traditional way. The harmonic structure of Crosby, Stills & Nash was new and unique, very personal. I think he controlled, one tends to think that it’s about Crosby and Graham’s voice.”
“But for me the halcyon years of Crosby, Stills & Nash was when they imported a real human being called Neil Young. Once Neil Young was in the band, wow, that was some band. Great couple of records they made. Neil Young is still out there.”
Pete Townshend continued:
“(He) is the only one still doing it, the only one left, the only man who is still out there, his beard growing, doing MTV Unplugged and he believes, you know. I got passion while I’m on stage but I don’t know if I really believe the way he believes. But yeah, they were a good band,” Pete Townshend said in an interview in 1995 (Transcribed by Rock and Roll Garage).
Interestingly, according to Pete, it was after seeing CSNY play and noticing how Stephen maintained his guitar that he decided to “create” the guitar tech job. “(…) I guess you can say I invented the guitar tech! Because I can remember going to see Crosby, Stills, and Nash in a session. They were restringing their own guitars.”
“Or, in Stephen Stills’ case, he would only string some guitars. Because there was this one Martin there that he said to me, ‘I’ve never changed the strings on this guitar. I never will unless one breaks’. That was part of the sound of them,” he told Guitar. Besides his incredible work with Buffalo Springfield and CSNY, Stephen Stills released more than 15 solo albums during his career.
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