![]() “I used to hate it when people called us a rock’n’roll band. The record was the band’s portal to an unreal world where audiences numbered in the tens of thousands, and Keith Moon could blow up hotel rooms and drive limousines into swimming pools.”įarren said this to Daltrey, and the singer took exception to his description of The Who as a ‘rock’n’roll band’. Suddenly everyone in the world wanted to see Maximum R&B for themselves, and The Who were boldly precipitated into a then very new rock’n’roll superstardom where only The Rolling Stones had gone before. “With Tommy,” he wrote, Townshend had created “rock's first formal masterpiece and now, with the live album, he gets the definitive hard‐rock holocaust.”Īs Mick Farren wrote in Classic Rock issue 152, Live At Leeds “reveals a band at the peak of honed chops and fluid energy. Somehow, whenever they've gone into the studio, they have softened up… Without exception, they're For the first time, the full force of the group has been caught on record, their un equaled ferocity and power. In the New York Times (opens in new tab), Nik Cohn wrote that, “Without exception, are shatteringly loud, crude and vicious, entirely excessive. It’s worth it to hear it’s the short sharp shock that, on its release, saw it acclaimed as the greatest live album ever made. If you want to hear it as it originally sounded, you have to find an old copy or make your own playlist. Of the three versions available to stream on Apple Music right now, none have just the original 6 tracks. The album has been remixed, reissued and expanded many times. “Even on the new Hull mixes the guitar is mixed a shade too low for my taste,” said Townshend. The Hull mixes were later included on a reissue (with bass from Leeds added on the missing tracks). What distinguishes it from most other Who mixes is that the electric guitar is very loud.” “I mixed Live At Leeds in my tiny home studio where I had recorded all my demos thus far, Thunderclap Newman and some stuff with the Small Faces. A lot of them were so bad I couldn’t fix them. ![]() The Leeds night was covered in clicks, and most of them I literally cut out of the master tape with a razor blade. I just moved straight on to Leeds and mixed it. So I didn’t even know the bass had been recorded on some songs. “I didn’t even listen to Hull all the way through,” he told Mick Farren. The problem? John Entwistle’s bass was entirely missing from the Hull recording (or so it seemed – Townshend didn’t listen to the whole thing). “It was a better performance from me – no bum notes. ![]() I remember it like it was yesterday, although in retrospect ‘Live At Hull’ doesn’t really trip off the tongue.” Roger Daltrey: “Hull was a better gig than Leeds. And the band remembered Hull as being the better of the two shows, with the City Hall offering warmer acoustics. Hull was expected to be the live recording, with Leeds as warm-up and back-up.
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