Amazing Journey - The road to "Live at Leeds". The Who Live in Philadelphia 19/10/1969

Live At Leeds
The Who's Live At Leeds is undoubtedly one of the most iconic albums of the rock era. If anyone from the future wants to know what 1960s and 1970s rock music was really all about, they will undoubtedly go no further than the recording of The Who's historic performance at Leeds University on February 14th 1970. It has precision, power and musical artistry. It set the bar then, and still does now, for what rock music could and should do. Everything that was magnificent about The Who is there - great songs, great riffs, exemplary musicianship (balanced with a sense of impending chaos) and there are even a few good jokes too.

In 1970 The Who were a live band capable of taking on all comers and seeing them off with a musical dynamism that combined brute force with artistic sensibility. Don't forget that only a year or so before the band had upstaged the Rolling Stones on their Rock'n'Roll Circus TV show. Such was Mick Jagger's dismay at coming in second best on his own TV show that it was quietly filed away and forgotten until its belated release in the 90s.

And Live At Leeds was no one-off. The Who were on a roll. The previous night's show at Hull University was just as good but technical problems stymied its release. Six months earlier the band had triumphed at Woodstock. Six months later the Isle Of Wight Festival would show the band as all conquering heroes. 1970 saw The Who at the peak of their powers. No other band came close. How did they get this good?



Amazing Journey
The answer is non-stop touring through 1968 and 1969 in the USA. Tommy was released in 1969 to massive critical and commercial success and anyone who went to see them at that time would have been treated to a performance of the new album in full plus razor sharp versions of the band's better known singles, some LP material and a handful of cover versions. So good were they that a potential live album was mooted as a stop-gap follow-up to Tommy and many of the autumn 1969 US tour shows were recorded for that purpose. Unfortunately for us, Pete Townshend couldn't be bothered to listen to them all and had all the tapes destroyed. An act that must figure as one of the great losses in rock history.

Well, almost all of them were destroyed. Partial recordings of a few shows seem to have survived. The 2nd show at the Electric Factory in Philadelphia on October 19th 1969 is one of them and it is a remarkable record of The Who at their incandescent best. It may not have the precision and finesse of Live At Leeds but all the energy and momentum are definitely there (see the YouTube audio clip below). This 38 minute long recording still remains unreleased in any official form.



Moon Rocks
One of the most outstanding aspects of The Who's sound was Keith Moon's drumming. The Philadelphia show is more evidence (if any more were needed) that Keith Moon really was one of rock's most original and pioneering drummers. He was very much part of what made them unique and this period from 1969 to 1970 is probably his finest. It is Moon's jazz inspired fills and effects that colour the music and give it that thrilling balance between chaos and art. Ginger Baker was capable of the same but was actually a more dependable drummer. Baker played jazz in a rock band. Moon was not a jazz drummer but often played like one. He took all kinds of risks and you were never quite sure what was going to happen happen next. This gave the band a tension that, when it worked, was exhilarating and awe-inspiring. Moon quite often leads and the others respond. He propels the band and demands they match him. Playing with Moon must have been like walking on a knife edge. Both Townshend and Entwistle would have needed to stay fully conscious and attuned to what was Moon was doing. Having built a bridge between musicality and chaos they then have to keep it up. And therein lies the art.

This knife edge tension is the first thing you hear when the Electric Factory tape cuts in. They are in the middle of playing John Entwistle's show opener Heaven and Hell and although Townshend is nominally supposed to be taking the lead, Entwistle and Moon are playing with Townshend, rather than just backing him up as any normal rhythm section would do. They all seem to be playing lead. Each musician is claiming his space within the band's sound-scape. However this is a sound-scape that the musicians are also creating by simultaneously interacting with each other. It's like jazz. The first 30 seconds of the Philadelphia tape sound like a rock version of John Coltrane's Chasing The Train. Brilliant and sometimes gravity defying. God they were good. I can think of only a few other rock bands who could do this. Cream and The Grateful Dead come to mind.

The Electric Factory, Philadelphia

The Electric Factory, 19th October 1969
The Philadelphia Electric Factory was an ex tyre warehouse and the kind of small size venue The Who would not be playing again in the wake of Tommy's success. This recording from the 2nd show that night (the first stated at 4pm!) has pristine sound quality and features highlights from Tommy. Especially noteworthy are the triumphant sounding Amazing Journey / Sparks (featuring the always transcendental amazing orgasmo-riff at around 19:00 onwards), a storming Summertime Blues and an extended My Generation which, although it may not have the pace and stucture of the Leeds version, certainly matches it for sheer aggressive in-yer-face Whoness. As the song segues into the instrumental section it almost sounds like it's about to go into sizzling feedback auto-destruct mode but then Townshend starts pulling out the stops and we get the Tommy revisited rifferama a la Leeds. This is Townshend in full command. Now he really is leading the band and boy is it ever his band. They've done Tommy and its his work and the world is at his feet and he knows it. It's an astonishingly assertive performance that just keeps peaking. It's full of Townshendesque swagger and in-yer-face-told-yer-so-up-yours-fuck-youness. Quintessential Who.

The Who at their peak. Sublime, glorious and affirmatory. Some of the best rock music ever recorded.



The Electric Factory in Philadelphia, 19th October 1969. 8pm Show
Heaven and Hell (fades in) /  I Can't Explain /  Overture /  It's A Boy / 1921 / Amazing Journey / Sparks / The Acid Queen / Summertime Blues / My Generation

Bonus
Sparks at New York's Fillmore East a few days later on the 22nd October 1969. Hear the always transcendental amazing orgasmo-riff tear through the very fabric of reality at 6:05.

More stranger than known
Cream live at the Spalding Bar-B-Que, 29th May 1967

Freak Out! In praise of Improv

Led Zeppelin at Southampton University 1973

The Grateful Dead - 1969 Dark Star set to vintage film ...

The Rolling Stones' finest hour - "Get Yer Leeds Lungs Out"...

The Rolling Stones' finest hour - "Get Yer Leeds Lungs Out"

This hour long recording, originally made for the BBC at Leeds University on 13th March 1971, and bootlegged in the 1970s on vinyl as "Get Yer Leeds Lungs Out", is easily the finest unissued live music by the Rolling Stones. In fact the last 45 minutes from Midnight Rambler on is arguably some of the best music they ever recorded.

After the hysteria and drug busts of the mid 1960s and the death of Brian Jones still overshadowing the band, the Rolling Stones returned to touring in 1969 with new guitarist Mick Taylor in tow. Taylor, fresh from John Mayall's band, added a virtuosity to the Stones' music which put them on a par with contemporaries like Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac, Eric Clapton and other blues wailing guitar heroes of the day. The Stones were now a band with a blues maturity they had previously, in their mid 60s pop incarnation, lacked.

The 5 years which Taylor spent with the band can be seen as their most artistically creative (Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main Street, Goats Head Soup, and It’s Only Rock’n’Roll were all recorded during his tenure). As a live band, they were at their tightest and most energetic and Mick Jagger was at his youthful demonic peak. The 1969 American tour saw the band reinvent themselves as “the Greatest Rock’n’Roll Band in the World” and although terminating in the disastrous Altamont festival, the tour was highly successful and put the band back on the rock center-stage along with Dylan, the Who and the recently separated Beatles.

The Rolling Stones played Leeds University in the spring of 1971 on the penultimate date of their first UK tour since 1966. Recorded in the Refectory in front of (presumably) less than a thousand slightly stoned hippy students, it has an intimacy and informality that the later Rolling Stones' arena shows lack. It sounds like a band in a club. Jagger talks to rather than shouts at the audience. The Watts / Wyman / Richards rhythm section has the funky looseness soon to be recorded on Exile On Main Street and there is a tight rhythm guitar / lead guitar interplay between Richards and Taylor, both of whom instinctively know when to leave space for the other. Taylor’s playing is arguably better on the '72 American tour however on that tour the band tended to pay everything too fast and a lot of the funk present here was lost. This is a recording of a band with a virtuoso lead player who is however playing within, and functioning as a part of the band, rather than in front of it, as Eric Clapton, Alvin Lee or Johnny Winter would have done. It isn’t about the guitar player it’s about the music. It’s about the “roll” as well as the “rock” as Keef said. This is a prime recording of the "roll" in the Rolling Stones.

And this is the dirtiest, rawest, rudest guitar sound Keith Richards ever achieved. His amp sounds as though the speakers have gaping holes in them. Midnight Rambler burns and crackles and Brown Sugar is far more incendiary here than on the single version. The flick knife intro precedes a guitar sound which is the aural equivalent of rusty razor blades. Jagger still sounds as though he is interested in what he is singing and makes an effort to put some life in the words as opposed to the breathless barking and yelping he would be making on the 1972 tour and for quite some time thereafter. The version of Satisfaction here is slower than the single and has a much funkier arrangement that seems to owe a lot to James Brown and Otis Redding. However the overwhelming climax here is Chuck Berry's Let it Rock. It is everything you ever wanted from the Rolling Stones. Richards and Watts appear to take inspiration from the opening lines "In The Heat Of The Day Down In Mobile Alabama, working on the railroad with the steel driving hammer" and pound and hammer their way through the song to bust through into a moment of true magical inspiration when the band takes off and appears to become energized and overtaken by some higher power. Their own momentum overtakes them and it's the song itself that seems to be playing the band. I swear about half way through they all sound like they are levitating...

It'll leave you breathless.

I have no idea how often I have listened to the last 45 minutes or so of this show over the years. For me Midnight Rambler through to Let It Rock it is the quintessence of the Rolling Stones. It has all the rawness, grace, swagger and danger of what rock music was supposed to be about in the early '70s. The Stones were soon to lose their ability to conjure up those qualities but should anyone now too young to know ever ask you who were the Rolling Stones and what was all the fuss about...
Play them this.


Note; The track list for the hour long BBC broadcast is Dead Flowers / Stray Cat Blues / Love In Vain / Midnight Rambler / Bitch / Honky Tonk Women / Satisfaction / Little Queenie / Brown Sugar / Street Fighting Man / Let It Rock (the band opened with Jumping Jack Flash however the early part of the show is missing)

Midnight Rambler starts below at 14:45