The Who songs Pete Townshend thought he couldn’t match: “We didn’t even dare”
A band like The Who was built for the live concerts. Although Pete Townshend could probably waste the day away putting together complex pieces of art that no one had ever touched on, there were just as many times when he seemed to be in his element playing off Keith Moon’s chaotic drum rolls on albums like Live At Leeds. Regardless of their penchant for unforgettable hooks and turning the concert into a public spectacle, Townshend thought that ‘Magic Bus’ and ‘I Can See For Miles’ could barely make it in the studio, never mind the stage.
But when you look at all of The Who’s greatest tracks, each of them sounded different whenever they played them live anyway. It was always going to be difficult to rein in someone like Keith Moon on a good day at the studio, so having him fly all over the drumkit was going to kick up the level of intensity by a few notches on nearly every song.
Compared to songs like ‘My Generation’ that are supposed to be abrasive, ‘Magic Bus’ is a far more minimalist affair. Based on just one chord for half of the song, Townshend offers up a bit of a funky groove than you’d normally expect, especially with his strange call-and-response vocals with Roger Daltrey.
If ‘My Generation’ was an exercise in writing something primal, then ‘I Can See For Miles’ was Townshend trying to reach the shimmering heights of The Beach Boys. Pet Sounds had blown the doors wide open for something different the year before, so hearing The Who throw echo on everything and release something that abrasive was like their first hit on steroids.
But before the group even got them to the stage, Townshend thought that they would have a hard time committing those two tracks to tape, telling Jann Wenner, “A lot of the demos have been so good, in fact, that it’s scared us out of making recordings. ‘I Can See For Miles’ and ‘Magic Bus’ both had demos which were very comparable to the finished release. They were just so exciting and so good that for a long time, we didn’t ever dare attempt to make singles because we were blackmailing Kit Lambert, our producer, into doing them better.”
That kind of problem wasn’t just something that Lambert had to deal with. Considering Townshend did most of the work himself, Glyn Johns probably had his work cut out for him trying to improve upon songs like ‘Baba O’Riley’ and ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ when they were brought in.
Even though Townshend had his reservations about performing the songs on the record, hearing them live was always going to be a completely different experience. While no one could match the insane level of harmonies that the group put on the final track, hearing them take their songs in new directions across Live At Leeds makes a lot more sense half the time, like the comedic bit at the end of ‘Magic Bus’ where Townshend and Daltrey have a pseudo-comedy routine halfway through.
But that’s what the live stage is for, isn’t it? The Who could be studio lab rats, but they were also just as much entertainers, and both ‘Magic Bus’ and ‘I Can See For Miles’ were enough to keep their audience engaged even years after hearing them for the first time.
