Live at Leeds - The Who (1970)
a selection of live albums I love
The Who had a monster hit with Pete Townshend’s rock opera, Tommy. They spend nearly all of 1969 and 1970 touring that record, playing it (mostly) in its entirety bookended by previous hits and a few covers.
The Lighthouse, Townshend’s next long-form piece, was already clearly not going to happen any time soon. (Lighthouse would end up collapsing under its own weight and get mined for the tracks that would eventually make up Who’s Next). So in the interest of getting some new material on the shelves, the band decided to record their extremely well-oiled live show for a record.
Live At Leeds, recorded at the University of Leeds in Febuary 1970, was originally released as a single record with only 6 tracks–though to be fair, one of those six was an extremely dense 16-minute version of My Generation that also included material from Tommy and a couple of improvisations that I would call the band’s best Led Zeppelin impression.
Those six were enough to cement it as a classic. Eventually the recording of all the songs minus the performance of Tommy was released, which is what you’re getting linked to here.
The band are in the pocket and firing on all cylinders. All four bandmembers were integral at this point, each contributing a few vocals, each standing out in the mix at different times, and even John Entwistle sneaking in one of his infrequent writing contributions as the lead track.
Even in the expanded version, there’s no slack. This is a snapshot of one of rock history’s greatest bands doing everything right.
The 2010 re-reissue (The Who love a reissue as much as any and more than most) also features the Tommy performance plus the following night’s show in Hull. It was originally scrapped because Entwistle’s bass tracks didn’t get recorded in places, but through the miracles of modern sound editing his parts have been spliced in from the Leeds recording to make it complete.
Recommendation: I liked The Who already, but I really got to love them after listening to the excellent Discography podcast that goes through the band’s whole history.
