The Who - Young Man Blues

Riff mark: The whole damned thing is a riff

For all those teenage years spent sopping blood from my ear canals with those orange foam headphone earpads, my post-traumatic adolescent viewpoint is that Live At Leeds is the spastic destroyer of all kinetic recorded performances. No bullshit, we’ve got the loudest shredder operating with blades of glorious, un-oiled distortion alongside Deep Purple’s In Rock for 1970, the year metal really started popping its placenta-covered head through a womb made from a few Kinks songs. Perfect timing, The Who achieving untouchable Zen in audiences greater than two or three studio engineers, for this instance the explosives experts just drop their microphones and get the hell out of there. I mean these blokes are really beating the shit out of everything, including themselves. Townshend and Entwistle are deadlocked in a 4^th-dimensional war over whose wounded, blistered fingers can wrap around time the fastest, particularly in those bluesy, free-verse tracks. Moon’s Moon, but worse, given license to pound everything nonsensically in one take, as long as it fits into common time, every measure a fill more than beat. Daltrey’s got the deceptively hardest job: wail and look good at it, the bluest collar barely capable of holding back the triangular avalanche behind him. It’s all a beautiful migraine epidemic, and with all the hoopla of Zep and Sabbath bullying inside the primordial ooze of heavy metal, The Who rightfully lay claim to a percentage of that amorphous, developing mass. Mandatory noise. Original 1970 LP released with a meager six tracks. Reissued in 1995 with a generous 14 rockers, then once again in 2001 with an entire performance of Tommy (personal opinion: it never shined live, or in film, or on Broadway, or anything not studio).