I’ve always understood Live at Leeds to be a “pure” live album, i.e. no studio sweetening done. Yet the “Magic Bus” track has always vexed me. I’m hearing extra instruments.
1.) The part right before Roger sings “I don’t care how much I pay.” There’s an odd little guitar break; it almost sounds like a backwards tape loop. It sounds nothing like the riff (or guitar) Pete had just been playing.
2.) The instrument performing the Bo Diddley beat. I’ve determined it’s not guitar or bass as you can hear those respective parts separately at the same time this mystery instrument is playing.
Of couse I’m not considering the possibility that the album was indeed sweetened or that the Who invited extra musicians to perform with them onstage. This has been bothering me going on 23 years now. Help!
From Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere:
"An attempt was later made to overdub lost vocals. ‘We tried, but it didn’t work’, said John. ‘The only thing we added was a bit of tape delay. It sounded too clean for a live recording. Once we added the delay and cut the audience out, it sounded fine. There was a bit in Magic Bus where we couldn’t get it to flow properly, so Pete just edited the tape, cut a bit out, and turned it backwards.’ "
I would have said Moon was playing claves, but the liner notes to the 1995 reissue refer to Moony “tapping away on his little wooden block.”
I think the tone change before “I don’t care how much I pay” is just Townshend flipping the pickup switch on his guitar from neck to bridge position (possibly inadvertantly, since it happens in mid-strum), with the bridge pickup having the volume turned down at first.
Slightly off-topic, but I saw The Who on their first farewell tour (1982, IIRC), and they had a keyboard player, but they kept him hidden behind some amps and monitors. Not hidden all that well, obviously, but the whole thing kind of smacked of condescension, being as everyone in the audience could hear the friggin keyboard. During parts of “Won’t get Fooled Again” and “Baba O’Reilley” it just seemed stupid.
Are you sure it wasn’t just your angle on the stage? “Rabbit” Bundrick had been a regular part of the Who’s touring lineup for years by that time; they certainly never tried to keep him a secret. He wasn’t hidden when I saw the Who in 1980.
Possibly. I was several rows up. He was definitely not anywhere near the area in which the “big 4” were playing, though. perhaps “deemphasized” would be a better word than “hidden”?
The version I have on LP has a roughly two second long section which is played backwards. I assumed that they did that to mask some horrible boo-boo. The CD version is different, it may be the same part (it’s a bit of standard Pete sus4 strumming) but it’s not backwards. I’m still guessing that it was spliced in to cover a section where Moon fell off the stage or something.
Are you sure it’s not the bass. The bass part is pretty busy.
More research is needed, I will report back after lunch.
Also, since you mention those songs in particular, I should have mentioned that the synthesizer + organ parts in both songs have always been on tape when the Who played them live, and I expect that was still the case even when there was a live keyboard player onstage. (The “Baba O’Riley” intro would be a bitch to play live.) When I first saw the Who, in 1971, they simply turned out the lights during those passages. (They also cut the lights for Entwistle’s vocal line in each verse of “Summertime Blues.”) In later years, the synth/organ break in “Won’t Get Fooled Again” became the cue for the laser show.
Small Clanger made a good point: I was listening to the 1995 CD reissue, not the original LP mix.
There is an excellent bootleg of the concert that is taken straight off the soundboard with no editing. Magic Bus, besides that bit of editing at the beginning, is missing well over 2 minutes of the actual performance. Shaking All Over has a minute edited out. Young Man Blues is missing 30 seconds of solo by Pete.
If you want to know more, look here. Also, Google on live at leeds complete.
[Google ads hijack]
I don’t know if we all see the same ads, but the first one at this moment is “Bass Playing Suck? I can teach you how to play bass like a pro in 45 minutes.”