Blood and Thunder!

["Gary M. Gillman" <garyg@inforamp.net>]

I like the Who's very heaviest material the best; it's what defines the Who
for me. When I listen to Pinball Wizard, I can't wait for the molten hot
double-strummed electric power chords to come in. Ditto BBE, WGFA, The
Seeker, the unedited TKAA, Can't Explain, etc. Hence I LOVE Live at Leeds,
all of it, especially the jam portion of Generation (where Rog is hardly
missed). Ditto Sparks at Woodstock, Bargain on Two's Missing, My Wife in its
numerous live versions (but best at San Francisco in 1971), the Overture on
the Pure Rock Theatre boot, and AQOWHA at the Rock and Roll Circus. There
are many Who songs which are inferior, IMO, because the guitars are produced
too low and thus fail to kick the song into high gear. Eg. I like the Who's
version of Pure and Easy (the one released originally on Odds and Sods) but
I've always wished the electric guitar break at the end had come in much
louder or rather "heavier" as it doesn't do just to turn up the volume for
material not produced as a heavy track in the first place. Most of Quad
suffers from this problem, as do almost all Who songs released after 1971.
Think how much better Let's See Action, New Song, Sister Disco, Guitar and
Pen and Dreaming From The Waist would have sounded had PT's guitars been
placed in the mix front and centre. This was true also of (the song) Who Are
You, and In A Hand Or A Face, although the subsequent releases of those
tracks on CD have partly remedied the situation for them. For this reason,
in terms of the Who's post-1971 output, I restrict most of my listening to
their live material.  To summarise: there is a point with the greatest
studio and live Who material when the volume, guitar sound, intensity and
mesh of the band is just right and creates a kinetic, almost athletic
excitement - it's not that you want to dance to such songs, because usually
you can't in a conventional rock sense - rather you feel like leaping high
in the air like PT did and that you've attained a kind of "rock nirvana", as
the liner notes in the LAL re-release so felicitously put it.....Gary M.