Who- Live at Leeds- Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey
The Who Live at Leeds may have been the first live album I ever bought way back in May 1970, but it’s safe to say that it has since remained a benchmark with which to compare a half century of live performance pretenders to the throne of anything demonstrably better. To this day, nothing in The Who’s considerable canon composed by the genius Pete Townshend slays me more than the opener, a cover of a Mose Allison song, “Young Man Blues”, snarled so emphatically by Roger Daltrey that day at Leeds University that the stuttering spittle didn’t land until six years later in the south London neighborhood of Brixton, lubricating young Joe Strummer to form The Clash.
The original Live at Leeds contained Who classics “Substitute”, “My Generation” and “Magic Bus” extended jams, another definitive cover “Summertime Blues”, and the expanded edition added their latest album at that time, Tommy, something to do with “a rock opera about a deaf, dumb, and blind boy…”.
The contrast between the 1969 worldwide hit rock opera Tommy by England’s The Who and the release that followed in May 1970, Live at Leeds, could not be more stark. “Live at Leeds was meant to look like a bootleg!” chuckles The Who songwriter/guitarist Pete Townshend. “I used to suddenly wake up on stage with The Who as one leg of this crazed stallion, leaping, marching through a field like a Sherman tank!” Mixed metaphors aside, by the time the band rolled into Leeds University, Roger Daltrey, Keith Moon, John Entwistle, and Townshend “had become this incredible machine.”
Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey are here In the Studio hosting the backstory behind The Who Live at Leeds, with my archival classic rock interview from the late John Entwistle. –Redbeard
