The Who’s Pete Townshend has played – and smashed – many different guitar brands over the years. But he had a ripe period when he played – and again smashed - Gibsons. From the mid '60s to mid-‘70s – for many The Who’s glory days – Townshend relied on a variety of Gibson electrics and acoustics. Here’s a brief rundown.
Anyone who has seen The Who recently will testify that even at 70, Townshend has lost none of the fire that’s made him such a compelling performer over the years.
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For years the Who's guitarist kept an array of modified Les Pauls on stage, numbering them 1-9 so they could each be tuned accordingly. The wine red #5, seen in the film The Kids Are Alright, is probably the most famous of the bunch.
In The Who’s early days, Townshend’s stunt of smashing guitars onstage made him notorious. It was good theatre. Only problem? It was costing him more in guitars than the whole band were earning.
A Gibson J-200 was the defining acoustic sound of The Who when Pete Townshend stretched out as a composer. He wrote “Pinball Wizard” on his J-200, which starred on The Who’s Tommy album. “I picked it 
out from about five at Manny’s in New York in 1968,” Townshend told Gibson.com. “It had a crisp sound and an easy neck. It was only later I found how well the J-200 records when you play it hard. Like the Everly [Brothers] acoustic, it has a rather dead soundboard and that allows you to really dig in when strumming.
There are numbers on the back of each guitar to indicate which instrument Townshend will use during certain points in the set, and for capo use.
“They are hard to bring to life with piezo pickups because the sound is so distinctive in real air, but the body shape, the necks and the sheer strength of the guitar are all very important to me. They also look utterly beautiful.”
Townshend’s favorite J-200 “exploded.” He was working on his solo album Iron Man in 1990 when disaster struck. Townshend told Guitarist magazine: “I don’t have romantic misconceptions about musical instruments – they’re just wood, probably far more useful as pulp than anything else. There are actually a couple of instruments that I would miss, and in fact a weird thing happened to the J-200 that I’ve had for a long time. Half-way through Iron Man it got wet in the studio and exploded. It was almost like the guitar getting back at me – the only guitar I cared about dying on me!” (SOURCE GIBSON:COM)
You can find a very complete list from the very first PT guitar to the last. click here
Townshend first started using Gibson semi’s circa 1966-’67: at first a borrowed ES-175, then ES-335s (345s and 355s). And before Jimmy Page made the Gibson SG EDS-1275 doubleneck famous (for live performances of “Stairway to Heaven”), Townshend was using a black EDS-1275 6/12 to play “Substitute” live.
He even maimed that guitar – there are photos of Townshend in 1967 at London’s Saville Theatre with the 6/12 guitar, obviously rebuilt, as the necks are at splayed angles and a there’s clearly visible repair in the body between the necks.
