The Who - Young Vic Theatre, London, Britain, 4-26-1971

I was listening to this concert again the other day, and liking it so much that I want to share it here. It is officially released, but it doesn't get that much attention because it can only be found as bonus tracks on the 2003 deluxe edition of the "Who's Next" album. It really should get its own release.

After 1969's very successful "Tommy" concept album, the Who's main songwriter Pete Townshend was working on a new concept album, to be called "Lifehouse." Ultimately, that didn't get completed at the time, and the best songs from it got released on the 1971 album "Who's Next" instead. But in early 1971, "Lifehouse" was still planned. The Who held a series of concerts at a small theater in London that only held about 200 people, called the Young Vic. 

For these concerts, they mainly played the new Lifehouse/Who's Next songs, even though they generally hadn't even been recorded in the studio yet, plus a few covers and older hits. It was pretty much the only time the band ever played new songs in public before releasing them on album. As a result, the songs here are in somewhat rough shape, with some lyrics unfinished and the band sounding tentative in spots. It seems some songs, like "Goin' Mobile" and "Baba O'Riley," weren't included because they hadn't even been written yet. At one point, Townshend even told the audience that he thought the new songs sounded "kind of lame!" That's amazing to me, because the songs are all considered classics now, and even these rough versions sound great.

I really like this concert because it allows one to witness the making of "Who's Next" in the middle of its creation. When it comes to listening to live Who recordings, I get tired of the "Tommy" songs, which usually made up the majority of the band's set list, even well into the 1970s. Here, we only have two "Tommy" songs, and the focus is mainly on the Lifehouse/Who's Next songs. No doubt, the band would play these even better later in 1971 after they got more familiar with them. But no great recordings of those shows have been made public so far (aside from a few songs). Plus, those later shows generally didn't include some of the new songs here, like "Time Is Passing" and "Getting in Tune." Other songs like "Too Much of Anything," "Boney Moronie" and "Young Man Blues" got dropped from the set list shortly after these shows.

In case you want to know more about this concert, here's a whole article about it written by music critic Richie Unterberger, who wrote a book about the Who's peak early 1970s era:

whoexc2 (richieunterberger.com)

As for this concert, it was professionally recorded by the band, so it sounds great. But I made a couple of tweaks to improve it even more. One, because it's a soundboard, it mostly captured the band on stage, and not much of the audience noise. So I boosted the audience applause after each song to make it sound more like a typical concert. However, the audience response is still rather muted, due to the fact it was a much, much smaller audience than the usual Who concerts at the time. And two, I broke the banter between songs into separate tracks and generally boosted the volume of those to make those comments (seemingly all by Townshend) easier to hear.

By the way, I believe the recording of the cover song "Baby Don't You Do It [Don't Do It]" got cut off before the song actually ended. The end is very abrupt, with no audience noise after it whatsoever. When I compared it to other versions of the song the band did around that time, it's clear to me it should have gone on for another minute or two, and had a different ending. I tried to edit one of those endings onto this one, but I found the band played it in a different key than usual on this night. Even a bootleg rehearsal version from a day earlier is in a different key! So I left it as is, because editing two very different keys together sounds bad. However, I did add in some crowd noise after it ended, from elsewhere in the concert, to at least make it sound like this was the real end of the song.

This concert is an hour and 34 minutes long.

01 talk (Who)
02 Love Ain't for Keeping (Who)
03 Pure and Easy (Who)
04 Young Man Blues (Who)
05 Time Is Passing (Who)
06 talk (Who)
07 Behind Blue Eyes (Who)
08 talk (Who)
09 I Don't Even Know Myself (Who)
10 talk (Who)
11 Too Much of Anything (Who)
12 Getting in Tune (Who)
13 talk (Who)
14 Bargain (Who)
15 Pinball Wizard (Who)
16 See Me, Feel Me (Who)
17 Baby Don't You Do It [Don't Do It] (Who)
18 talk (Who)
19 Water (Who)
20 My Generation (Who)
21 Road Runner (Who)
22 Naked Eye (Who)
23 Bony Moronie (Who)
24 Won't Get Fooled Again (Who)

https://www.imagenetz.de/bbB9u

In making this album cover, I really wanted to use a photo of the band playing at the Young Vic. However, I only found two such photos, and both of them were black and white and low-res. Instead, I found a much better photo of the band. I don't know exactly when or where it was taken, but it looks to be from 1971.