Great Moments on Video №3: The Who - Young Man Blues

(London Coliseum, December 14, 1969)

I guess if №1 was Beatles-related and №2 was Stones-related, I have to complete this trilogy in the expected way before heading into some unpredictable direction. Of course, if this series is to go on, The Who will probably figure in it repeatedly…

The Who - Young Man Blues

(London Coliseum, December 14, 1969)

When it comes to hoarding «great moments on video», few bands can compare with The Who in their prime; Jeff Stein’s The Kids Are Alright pretty much has nothing but great moments — even including the bits and pieces of interviews with the band members or home footage — and it was that particular movie, more than anything else, that really made me understand all the various ways in which The Who were not «just another Sixties group», but one of the most outstanding pack of individuals in the popular art of the 20th century.

However, even within The Kids Are Alright there are moments that simply make for great, unparalleled entertainment — like ‘A Quick One’ from the Rock’n’Roll Circus, or Pete duck-walking his way through ‘Roadrunner’ in 1975, or Keith blowing up the drumkit on ‘My Generation’ in 1967, or... too many to mention — and then there are a few, just a few moments during which The Who simply tear the roof off the sucker and show the world why rock’n’roll music had to be taken seriously in the first place. Perhaps not coincidentally, most of these moments come from 1969 — the Woodstock bits, such as ‘See Me Feel Me’ and ‘Sparks’... and then there’s this: the band’s primal run through Mose Allison’s ‘Young Man Blues’ from the London Coliseum, which Stein, as the legend goes, together with the rest of the footage from that show, almost literally rescued from a trash bin.

Now ‘Young Man Blues’ was a staple of The Who’s live show for at least a decade, and in addition to several awesome audio-only live versions (such as the classic Live At Leeds recording), you have quite a bit of a choice here — there are at least two nicely captured live renditions from 1970, when the band was still at its peak (Isle of Wight and Tanglewood, both with much higher quality footage), not to mention later performances from the mid-1970s and (occasionally) later reunion tours. It’s all good, and the Isle of Wight version, which I’ll come back to in a moment for comparison, has its own unique properties which make it every bit as indispensable as the Coliseum version. Still, if I had to choose one, I would never hesitate.

There are no «objective» reasons, I think, to why this particular version went off so well. The Who were right in the middle of their opera house tour at the time, promoting Tommy across «elite» establishments all over Europe, and this was neither their first nor their last show on the road, although the very presence of a film crew on stage may have prompted Townshend and Daltrey to add a little extra spice. The fact is, though, that as a whole — now that we actually have the opportunity to watch it after all those years of the footage rotting away — the London Coliseum concert was neither greater or worse than the average Who show at the time. It was just that on this particular track God himself accidentally blundered his way on the stage, taking a smoke break for four or five minutes, then returned to his daily tasks, leaving only the usual guardian angels to carry on.

The tricky — and essentially irreproducible — thing here is, I think, how this performance is enhanced by the combination of the band’s raw talent and the flaws of sound and video capture. You know how sometimes, probably very rarely, you come across this one «perfect bootleg» where the sound mix and volume levels are anything but professionally controlled, yet end up giving the whole performance a level of raw, aggressive power unheard of on an officially released album? (My favorite example here is this version of ‘Bitch’ from the Stones’ show in Sydney on February 26, 1973 — there ain’t a single official live album from the band where the inferred energy level even begins to approach the all-out sonic tornado in the instrumental middle of the song, and it would almost certainly have been sterilized under professional treatment). Well, this is precisely the case with this here ‘Young Man Blues’.

First, there is the sonic «imperfection», of course: the oddest, «ugliest» guitar tone you shall ever hear coming from Pete’s guitar. Maybe there was some minor issue with the amplifiers on that evening, or with the recording microphones, or with the tape, or Pete set some slightly wrong settings on the instrument itself — in any case, the sound has this bit of wobbly, fluttery, «poisonous» distortion to it that might be a problem on more lyrical tunes, but totally fits the required atmosphere on this pissed-off anthem. Meanwhile, Roger’s voice reverberates with a mighty, cavernous echo that gives it an epic Olympian quality you do not get elsewhere — not on Leeds, not on the Isle of Wight, not anywhere — but which makes for a perfect counterpart to Pete’s aggressive guitar. It’s like Jupiter and Mars on a collective prowl.

And in this context, the poor lighting conditions, which sometimes have people complaining ("great show, but I wish they hadn’t performed during a blackout!", one YouTuber humorously quips), actually add to the cumulative effect — all that epic, gargantuan sound coming to you out of near-total darkness, with an occasional ghostly figure of a Gibson player in a white boiler suit leaping out of the shadows to do a windmill or two, then step BACK as the young man in frills walks by, swinging his microphone. You never even get to see a glimpse of John, while Keith is all blurry and glitchy behind his kit. It’s a sort of «felt-but-not-seen» performance, a shadow theater where a large part of the mechanics of the magic remains concealed, but you do get to discern faint visual hints of where it’s coming from. (Compare the totally different — like, from-another-planet-different — visual effect of the well-lit Isle of Wight stage!).

And then, above everything else, there is the simple fact of just how much Pete was on fire that night — or, at least, during this specific performance. My own listening experience with The Who’s live shows has taught me that there were evenings when the man was in a more «perfunc­tory» mood, playing with the same energy as usual but with somewhat more predictability and somewhat less inspiration (such was the night at the Isle of Wight); and more magical evenings when inspiration, improvisation, and just various playing ideas were flying right off the brain — such was the night at Tanglewood 1970, and here, too. Just for comparison: look how frickin’ interestingly he is varying the rhythm playing here, during the several bars between 1:24 and 1:40 into the performance, and how flat, in comparison, the same passage sounds at the Isle of Wight (pretty much the same cha-choom, cha-choom, cha-choom, repeated four times in a row). And these are just the early bits.

While Pete is never usually recognized as a great soloist, there are occasional moments here which I’d take over pretty much any hard rocking passage from Hendrix or Jimmy Page. How, for instance, at 2:03 there is this insane swirling guitar vortex that takes us out of the feedback noise and into several lines of melodic soloing. How the proverbial «epic upward climb» from 3:00 to 3:12 is performed with the smoothness worthy of a Warren Haynes, or how the tone of those staccato licks forming the riff around 3:18 sounds like some diabolical scalpel making sharp incisions on your skin, before the licks start meshing together and smoothly, gradually, meticulously convert that distinct riff into a sea of noise. How at 3:49, with one terrifying high-pitched screech, the guitar launches into about thirty seconds of perfectly controlled feedback, giving the impression of a cattle stampede flying across the plain — all in one direction, never swaying off course, chaotic and focused at the same time. I don’t know if there are any «mistakes» as such in Pete’s playing — I imagine there must be, as there must be in any performance that involves plenty of jumping and windmilling as a necessary part of the shtick — but there ain’t a single second in this performance which would make me go, «oh, I wish he played this a bit differently», or «oh, this note really does not belong here».

This is, of course, not to undermine the importance of the other three members of the band, but the rhythm section is the rhythm section — John and Keith are always reliable in more or less equal measure, provided Keith does not injest his elephant tranquilizers or whatever — and Roger only really has a chance to be the star of this performance at the very beginning; like I said, that echo seriously helps the stardom.

Comparing this version with the now generally better known and more often watched Isle of Wight performance from August 1970, I can’t help but comment on how, curiously, the best aspects of the Coliseum performance are missing on that one.

Much better lighting, for sure; much better sound; John’s hilarious skeleton costume; Keith charming the crowd by throwing and catching his drumsticks in mid-air; and, of course, that glorious bit from 3:45 on when Pete teaches us how one plays an electric guitar by shaking it, and ending with what might possibly be the fastest and craziest windmill ever captured by a film camera. But the overall sound is not nearly as mystically frightening as it was in the Coliseum — and there are moments here which actually make me cringe and think «oh no, I wish he didn’t play that» (like, at 2:25, for no reason at all, Pete totally loses momentum, going into some wimpy, non-rhythmic blues soloing, then realizes only about ten seconds later that he’s got to catch up with the rest of the band now). It may also be that the band goes just a bit over the top here, in their effort to create a totally maniacal atmosphere on stage — the Coliseum version is ever so slightly more «cool, calm, and collected», creating its impression of an apocalyptic thunderstorm somewhat more through playing the instruments than through «playing the fool». (For an absolutely awful example of how to bring that approach to its logically absurd conclusion, check out how the Foo Fighters are playing this song - it’s so terrible I even refuse to provide a direct link). Anyway, the Isle of Wight version is still utterly great - but not nearly as perfectly balanced as it was on the evening of December 14, 1969.

As a post-scriptum, it’s almost uncanny just how well this hard-rock reimagining of Mose Allison’s minimalistic jazz vignette from 1957 still suits the times — being just as relevant today as it was in the late Sixties, when young baby boomers identified with its message of having the world taken away from them by a generation of out-of-touch grayhaired warmongers and business sharks. A young man still ain’t got nothing in the world these days, it seems. At least in 1969, the young man had Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey to stand up for him...