Today’s Vinyl: The Who
Pete Townsend’s difficulty in penning a followup to Tommy forced The Who to release their first live record, the generically labeled (in a nod to bootlegers) Live at Leeds. After the Tommy tour and a performance at Woodstock, the band declined to sort through nearly a hundred hours of live recordings (and reportedly burned the tapes to prevent piracy), instead scheduling concerts at Leeds and Hull in February of 1970 with the express purpose of taping a live record. The Hull tapes were tossed because the bass wasn’t recorded, but the Leeds performance, as released on vinyl in 1970 (much later, the full recording would be released on two CDs) is reverentially referred to as the greatest live record ever made. Does it still hold that claim thirty years later?
Fuck yes. This record is an all-destroying avalanche of sound, the arms and legs and trees and branches of the band members jutting out awkwardly from the sides as it rolls down the hill toward your quaint chalet, all of it ultimately subsumed into the raucous noise. There’s nothing delicate here, no quiet acoustic strums or graceful songcraft. This is the definitive live rock show, a grand cacophony perched on the edge of self-destruction and entropy.
If this all sounds somewhat noisy, it is. Townsend brutalized the power trio sound, transforming it into a hot, fuzzy mess of crashing cymbals and distorted guitar, even rendering Entwhistle’s normally clean bass as a chugging, gelatinous sewer-monster. This isn’t the sound of rock turned up to 11; it’s someone intentionally hooking the amps up to high-voltage power lines and watching the whole thing fry. Who needs fireworks when you’ve got real goddamn explosives?
And then there are those drums. Back behind Townsend sits the strange math that underpins this exhibition of chaos theory. “Drumming” is a pitifully inadequate term for the swirling, coruscating wash of crash and rhythm that Keith Moon produced. Like Hendrix, Moon’s method of playing his instrument was so unique that nothing could ever sound like it again. To listen to Keith Moon drum on this record is to hear layers of precision and technique transformed through maniacal energy, like an old master painting thrown into a wood chipper and sprayed against a wall, the end result vastly better than the original.
The standout track for me on Live at Leeds is the cover of Summertime Blues, a live standard for the band that shows them all at their loosest and meanest. Entwhistle sounds like he could break his bass strings with little more than his pinky nail; Townsend plays off Moon, building a terrible, fearsome racket that bears down on the listener like a horde of marauding Visigoths. That feeling you get after taking the most amazing shit of your life? The endorphin-addled rape and the euphoric, empty, evacuated relief? That’s the best live record in the world - this one.
