There are several noteworthy points in the early history of the Who. One is that the staged destruction of guitars, drums and microphones, for which the Who got notorious, originally began with Pete Townshend accidentally breaking his guitar during a show i 1965. In those days they could hardly afford the expenses of their equipment, and Townshend remembers feeling miserable about loosing his guitar and having to turn a 12-string into a 6-string just to continue working. However, when they played a week later at the same hotel the incident seemed to have evoked expectations in the audience, and on that occasion Keith Moon purposely ruined his drum set. Still, it was only after their manager had realized the publicity potential and promised to back it up financially that the destruction of instruments became a regular happening at the Who's concerts. But for years to come none of them - including the managers - could really afford this habit. And it never got to involve the bass guitar of John Entwistle, who had veneration for his instrument and would try to shield it whenever the lunatic behavior of Townshend, Moon and Daltrey was about to get out of control.
This might draw attention to some less flattering aspects of the way the Who were initially promoted. At first they were managed by the odd pair of Helmut Gordon, a businessman with little understanding of their music, and Pete Meaden, a constantly pill-speeded visionary, but in 1965 they turned to Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, who made up a devoted though totally inexperienced team. The promotion originating from these arrangement may have been somewhat dilettantish. But it was also very aggressive and it seems to have been carried out without any reservations whatsoever against the commercialism of the pop industry. Thus the Who should have been explicitly instructed by Kit Lambert in handling interviews by always saying something outrageous. The intelligent and outspoken Pete Townshend, who soon became the principal spokesman for the Who, would get plenty of opportunities to follow this advice. But the fact that it originated from a simple marketing strategy should stand as a lesson to an audience all too willing to give an artist credit for running a risk, when he's really just pulling a trick.
This issue has a further aspect concerning the British youth culture at the time. The Who came to the front as a group representing the lifestyle, world view and dress code of the so called "mod" culture - a rather strange and exclusively British phenomenon. The mods seem to have been a sort of bourgeois rebels, whose main characteristics were an obsession with fashion and a heavy use of pep pills. They became notorious for fighting the adherents of another youth movement, the rockers, at the beach of Clacton in 1964, so this was a convenient time to market a new band as the mouthpiece of the mods. Well, that is exactly what Pete Meaden did. Even though none of the musicians in the Detours were originally mods they were dressed up like such and promoted as an organic part of the culture. It was Pete Meaden who introduced them to the lifestyle, the fashion, the pills to take and the places to go, and it was his idea to change their name to "The High Numbers", which sounded very mod. Only afterwards did the musicians themselves - especially Pete Townshend - get more or less absorbed by their new identity.
It is in no way easy to determine, to which extent these last remarks can raise a question about artistic authenticity, and whether such a question should at all be relevant to the reception of the music. But it is pretty interesting that a band so rough and apparently unvarnished was actually planted by their manager in the youth culture they represented.