The WHO
Live at Leeds happens to be the first album which got performed by the English rock band named the WHO. The album got recorded on 14th February 1970 at the University of Leeds Refectory. It turns out to be their only live album that got released as the group was proactively recording and performing with its arrangement of Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey, Keith Moon, and John Entwistle, who were the principal members. Still, later Moon got replaced by Kenney Jones. The WHO was a British rock band that appeared to be among the most influential and prominent groups during the 1960s and the 1970s, and it started the rock opera (Powell, 2013).
The WHO band got mainly inspired by the American rhythm and blues, and they took a firm step toward representing a uniquely British rock vernacular during the 1960s. The WHOs earlier records happened to deal with uncertainty, alienation, and frustration, setting upon harsh lyrics, untamed power arcs and bawling feedback by Peter Townshend who was the guitarist-songwriter, the kinetic smacking of drummer Keith Moon, the bassist John Entwistle and lastly the macho brawn singer who happened to be Roger Daltrey.
With numerous tapes from the year’s touring to pass through and also Townshend’s aspiring powerhouse project becoming more challenging, the WHO band made a decision to do a real thing and make an appropriate document on how good they were on stage. Therefore, they decided to book two nights at Leeds University and progressed to provide a performance of their robust stage act at the time. During its release, the album finally came covered in a mock bootleg, brown paper sleeve with a released ephemera of their 1960s R & B marquee club heydays, demonstrating how far they had come. The band performed at the University of Leeds equipped with their rock opera together with old classics. They produced one of the rock’s interminable albums, a powerful document of the group at the pinnacle of their concert game. The WHO got tired of playing ‘Tommy,’ and they decided to take it back to preliminaries that established the bar for live albums in the 1970s.
The Live at Leeds album begins with ‘Young Man Blues,’ which is an R & B tune that happened to be a standard section of the WHO’s stage collection at the time. The album then got expanded to involve an instrumental jam with stop-start parts. A 1966 single for the WHO band, ‘Substitute’ got played uniformly to the studio version. The ‘Summertime Blues’ got lined up to involve power chords, a primary transformation, and Entwistle singing along the authority figure lines like ‘but you are too young to vote’ in his deep bass voice. The next track, ‘Shakin’ All Over’ got laid out uniformly to the original, but the chorus line got retarded for influence, and there occurred to be a jam session at the center. The second side starts with a 15-minute performance of ‘My Generation,’ which got immensely expanded to entail a mixture of other songs and disparate improvisations like ‘See Me, Feel Me’ and the final part of ‘Sparks’ from Tommy (Powell, 2013). The album then ends with ‘Magic Bus’ which comprised Daltrey playing harmonica and an expanded song ending. Therefore, the record entailed the above six tracks.
The WHO band recorded the live album because of several reasons. First, the album would act as a proper follow up to Tommy, providing them enough space to switch from rock opera, which happened to be a millstone on their neck. The second reason was their wish to capture their live performance during the time which, with high PA wattage and musical innovation, had lifted them to a position as the best live performance in the universe, matched only by the Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones. The album also got remarked as the earliest recognized albums to acknowledge the existence of bootleg LPs completely. It could have seemed as a lapse from a band whose prior album, Tommy, had boosted them out of the 1960s pop performance legions appearing to the top 40 and emerging on Ready, Steady, Go.
In the 1970s, the press received the album very well, and this positive reaction enabled the WHO band to escape from the shackles of Tommy. Even though they would keep on performing it live till the end of the year, Townshend had a comfortable space to try another enthusiastic project. The Live at Leeds lacked artsy concept. The album came in a brown card sleeve, with three cover versions and some lengthy jams. The collections meaning was about sheer power and also the energy of rock music. Live at Leeds album has so far got cited as the best and most potent live rock recording of all time by the BBC, The Daily Telegraph, and also Rolling Stone.
On its release, the album got proclaimed as the best live album ever made. According to Nik Cohn, the songs were crude and vicious, shattering loud, and entirely excessive. Therefore, without any exception, the band was, for the first time, the fullest force that got caught on record, with their power and unequaled ferocity. The album record happened to be the band’s gateway to an imaginary world where the audiences grew into tens of thousands, and Moon would blow up hotel rooms and also drive compacts into the swimming pools. The six-track live album left the WHO knows as the globe’s top rock attractions of the early 1970s (Powell, 2013). The band has got proclaimed as the most excellent live album, and it uplifted the WHO’s legacy as the best live band, and they have maintained this reputation till the modern era, and this got manifested in the exceptional twelve-minute performance during the last Super Bowl event.
The Live at Leeds album has contributed significantly to rock music’s development. Some of the band’s contributions entail the development of the PA systems, Marshall stack, and the usage of synthesizer, which was Moon and Entwistle’s main playing styles. The album has also contributed to the employment of Townshend’s power chord guitar techniques and feedback, and the growth of the rock opera. The WHO tend to get cited as an influence by punk rock, mod bands, and hard rock and their tracks still receive systematic exhibition. Therefore, I believe that the Live at Leeds album was a unique live record that captured something that I have not seen or heard anywhere across the world, and it led to the emergence of the rock opera.
References
Powell, A. (2013). Classic Album Covers of the 1970s. Pavilion Books.