Happy 55th Anniversary to The Who’s Live At Leeds, originally released May 16, 1970.
It’s the first cold night of autumn, and I’m way up in Fenway Park’s nosebleeds. The Who—or what’s left of them in Fall 2019—have cruised through the most notable Tommy (1969) to start the show. After being regaled by the likes of “Overture,” “Sparks,” and “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” the man in the row in front of me is screaming a request, even though the band is hundreds of feet away: “Young Man Blues.”
I am perplexed, for several reasons. First, and perhaps most obviously, there’s no way the band can hear him. Second, The Who are not really in the request-taking business. Third, one comes to a late-era Who show to hear the band’s original compositions, not to hear blues covers. The fire-and-brimstone band that made “Young Man Blues” into entirely new pieces of music wasn’t up there anymore after the losses of Keith Moon and John Entwistle. The guy was requesting something that no longer existed. But I don’t blame him; anyone who’s heard Live At Leeds would understand the nobility of such a futile request.
The Who were one of the most compositionally inventive bands of their era, pioneering exotic song structures, experimenting with synthesizers, and writing full narrative albums. But Live At Leeds, their first live album, is all about performance, not composition. Three out of the six tracks (“Young Man Blues,” “Shakin’ All Over,” and “Summertime Blues”) are covers. The two songs on the second side, “Magic Bus” and “My Generation,” are stretched out to ridiculous lengths, featuring interpolations of other Who songs and noisy, melodically barren but musically rich jams. With original songwriting taking up a small percentage of the runtime, Live At Leeds is clearly about one thing: documenting the spectacular live energy of The Who.
Halfway through the track called “My Generation” (the song itself only takes up about 20% its duration), the band comes down to almost nothing. Pete Townshend strums the “Captain Walker” section of the Tommy overture. The lack of audience mics creates the illusion that the room is dead silent; it’s late at night, and we’re teetering on the edge of something. It reminds me of the end of a show at a DIY venue, where a young band is stretching out, indulgently, and we all wait to see if something magical will happen. It usually doesn’t. But this time, Keith Moon and John Entwistle burst through the haze, kicking the sound into a gear most rock fans didn’t know existed at the time.
Listen to the Album:
“Magic Bus,” one of the group’s goofier tunes, takes on a threatening visage as the closing track. In the first three minutes, the band chugs through the Bo Diddley beat of the original tune, with Daltrey and Townshend screaming their vocals. With each passing moment, the tension in the room builds as the group creeps toward release—and we get it, ever so briefly—before near silence. Then, a final, manic coda: Daltrey on Harmonica, Moon in overdrive, Entwistle finally playing more than just one note, Townshend producing as much distortion as possible, before it all comes, at last, to rest. The jam threatens to end three different times. It is uninterested in establishing a form; it simply breathes.
If the second side illustrates The Who’s complete abandon, the first side shows how that abandon can be motivated toward actual, you know, songs. The aforementioned “Young Man Blues” is a raucous illustration of the twin engines of Entwistle and Moon. “Substitute,” the only Townshend composition on the side, is most notable for its restraint; the band subtly pivots the groove and volume as the song progresses, revealing a virtuosity beneath the aggression. Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” is transformed from a shiny fifties rock track to a loose and snarling thing. And “Shaking All Over” is a prelude to the second side, expanding the rockabilly source material with a winding jam.
This second side is then a testament to the mighty powers of The Who: any material, no matter how routine or innocent, can be turned into a catalyst of teenage anger once placed in their hands.
My favorite Bob Dylan song is “When I Paint My Masterpiece.” The narrator tries to convince himself that he is just one great idea away from completely changing everything: “Someday, things are gonna be different / when I paint my masterpiece.” Of course, he’s wrong (and Dylan, having already painted several masterpieces himself, knew that). In 1970, Pete Townshend had already painted his masterpiece; Tommy received enormous acclaim and changed the band’s fortunes. But there was still something else, that vulnerable and explosive feeling of being a young person in a broken world, that need to make something big and loud, that he hadn’t yet shaken. So I get it, I really do, when I think about that guy at Fenway who sat through twenty minutes of songs from Tommy, the band’s first masterpiece, and asked to hear “Young Man Blues.”
Listen: