Obscure Fads of the 1960s: Piano Wrecking

November 22, 2011

OBSCURE FADS OF THE ’60S

Sure, you’ve heard of lava lamps, Nehru jackets, yo-yos, pop art,
op art, paper dresses, and bell-bottoms. But here are a few
crazes of the 1960s that may have escaped you.

PIANO WRECKING (1963)
As part of his nightclub act in the 1930s, Jimmy Durante would play a few songs on a piano…then slowly rip it apart with his bare bands and throw the chunks out into the audience. It was a bizarre bit of performance art, and the audience loved it. More than three decades after Durante did it, wrecking pianos became a fad in the engineering department at Derby College of Technology in England. Six-man teams used tools such as axes, sledgehammers, and crowbars to break a piano into pieces so tiny that they could be passed through a 20-cm hole (that’s a little less than eight inches), competing to see who could do it fastest. The fad spread to Cal Tech in Pasadena, California, where the Piano Reduction Study Group deconstructed a piano in just 10 minutes, 44 seconds. Engineering students at Wayne State University in Detroit beat that record with a time of 4 minutes, 51 seconds. But why wreck a piano into tiny bits? Like earlier weird college fads like phone-booth stuffing or goldfish swallowing, it was probably to blow off steam incurred from the rigors of academia. Or, as Robert Diller of Cal Tech told Time in 1963, “It has psychological implications which are pretty clear to us. It’s a satire on the obso- lescence of today’s society.” The fad died out by the mid-’60s, replaced with a far more pressing college pastime: protesting the Vietnam War.

That’s another excerpt in our series of bits and pieces from the brand spanking new Uncle John’s 24-KARAT GOLD Bathroom Reader! You can about read more obscure 1960s fads, as well as hundreds of other stories – at 30% off the usual price as part of our annual HOLIDAY SALE! And that’s 30% of ALL our books.

• Past excerpts can be found by hitting “Excerpts” in the tags blow this post.