"Sonny and Cher sing 'All I Ever Need is You' as the device destroys some of the most beautiful objects a creative person could ever hope to have, or see..."

"... a trumpet, camera lenses, an upright piano, paints, a metronome, a clay maquette, a wooden anatomical reference model, vinyl albums, a framed photo, and most disturbingly (because they suggest destructive violence against children's toys, and against the child in all of us) a ceramic Angry Birds figure and a stack of rubber emoji balls" (from rogerebert.com):

 

The NYT reports on the backlash and Apple's caving to (hydraulic) pressure: "Apple Says Destructive iPad Ad ‘Missed the Mark’/People in the creative world widely panned a commercial showing a giant hydraulic press squishing objects ranging from paint cans to a piano":

50 years ago this month: the first time Pete Townshend destroyed his guitar as part of an on-stage performance.

"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 don't think the precise day is known, so I can't say "50 years ago today" as I normally do, and it wasn't a planned action, so this is an ambiguous milestone. Later, Townsend would do it on purpose. But even if it was intentional, it was long after the first planned performance of instrument destruction. I don't know what was the first, but Wikipedia has an article titled "Instrument destruction," which gives the honor to a performance that took place in 1956, amazingly enough, on the Lawrence Welk TV show. It was Rocky Rockwell, doing an Elvis Presley impersonation, and it looked a little something like this:



Maybe because that was comical, it shouldn't count. Rockwell wasn't sincere in his Elvisosity, so the destruction expressed only a rejection of the music he was inviting us to laugh at and reject. And they say Jerry Lee Lewis set his piano on fire in the 1950s. Charles Mingus famously got mad at someone and broke his $20,000 bass.

But there's some restriction of the definition of the feat that puts Pete Townsend first. Here's Jeff Beck aping Pete's routine in the 1966 movie "Blowup":

"One toke over the line."

Orin Kerr -- for some reason -- is looking for the cheesiest Lawrence Welk clip on YouTube. He challenges his readers with a truly profoundly cheesy video -- which you can see over there -- and then a reader comes up with this:



The original version of the song was by Brewer & Shipley, and here you can see them playing it live -- and talking about that Lawrence Welk version (as well as how they got on Spiro Agnew's enemies list (or something)):



Everyone knew this was a drug song, and it's impossible to believe that the people on the Welk show didn't know. Welk says -- with a "straight" face -- "there you've heard a modern spiritual by Gail and Dale" -- Jesus and Mary do appear prominently in the song -- but there is a limit to how dumb functioning human beings can be. The show was populated by musicians. They may have been sublimely square musicians, but they were musicians.