What Pete Townshend considered to be a curse throughout his childhood turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as it inspired him to pick up the instrument that would lead to his ascent to rock ‘n’ roll stardom as the lead guitarist of the Who in the latter half of the 1960s. He would later credit this “curse” as the driving force for learning to play the guitar and write songs.
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If only a young Townshend could’ve known what awaited him on the other side of his challenging high school years. If he had, he might not have let the class bullies ruffle his feathers so much.
Pete Townshend Struggled With Childhood Insecurity
If there’s one fact of life that transcends time and geographical background, it’s that kids can be cruel to those who look different from them. Such was the case for guitarist Pete Townshend, who spent most of his childhood ashamed of his larger-than-average nose. As an incredibly famous rockstar, his striking profile is hardly the most memorable thing about the musician now. But in the early 1960s, it was virtually all he thought about.
“When I was in school, the geezers that were snappy dressers and got chicks, like, years before I ever even thought they existed, would always talk to me about my nose,” Townshend told Rolling Stone in 1968. “This seemed to be the biggest thing in my life: my f***ing nose, man. Whenever my dad got drunk, he’d come up to me and say, ‘Look, son, you know, looks aren’t everything.’ He’s getting drunk. And he’s ashamed of me because I’ve got a huge nose, and he’s trying to make me feel good.”
“My mother was no help,” he added in a 1974 Penthouse interview. “She seemed to think that anybody who wasn’t beautiful couldn’t be any good. She was gorgeous, of course. My father…used to say things like, ‘Don’t worry. Arthur Miller married Marilyn Monroe, didn’t he?’ I didn’t want to look like f***ing Arthur Miller. I wanted to look like James Dean.” Townshend told Penthouse that his parents’ reactions to his looks, paired with the commentary from his classmates, made high school “very painful.” So, he started looking for something to distract himself.
The Future Rockstar Found Solace In The Guitar
Eager to find something to distract him from his obsessive preoccupation with his nose that could help him gain confidence, Pete Townshend took to the guitar. “I knew down inside that the only way I was really gonna become confident was to become something everybody could respect,” he told Penthouse. “So, I labored at the guitar, trying my best to be incredible within a few weeks. And when it didn’t happen, it destroyed me. It was only later on that I realized I actually did have a talent. As soon as I started to write, I really came together in one piece.”
Although the confidence didn’t come to him overnight, Townshend said that, eventually, he became more comfortable with his looks. “I wanted to…distract attention from my nose to my body and make people look at my body instead of at my face. Turn my body into a machine. But by the time I was into visual things like that anyway, I’d forgotten all about my nose and a big ego trip. I thought, ‘Well, if I’ve got a big nose, it’s a groove. It’s the greatest thing that can happen because, I don’t know, it’s like a lighthouse or something.”
Considering Townshend’s legacy is now cemented as being a founding member of one of the most influential rock bands of the 20th century, we’d say that his nose is the least of his worries.
Photo by Andre Csillag/Shutterstock
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