Fillmore West 1968 3rd Night (Wardour 571)
Fillmore West, San Francisco, CA, USA – August 15, 1968
(76:16) Bill Graham Introduction, Heaven & Hell, I Can’t Explain, Boris The Spider, A Quick One While He’s Away, Summertime Blues, Young Man Blues, Happy Jack, I’m A Boy, Magic Bus, Substitute, Fortune Teller / Tattoo, Daddy Rolling Stone, Little Billy, Shakin’ All Over, My Generation
There are just a handful of live Who recordings from 1968, the vast majority of titles are made up of the excellent Fillmore East soundboard from April. The other recordings from 1968 are audience sources and as one could expect, are average sound quality, but they are documents nonetheless. This new title by Wardour features a newly surfaced audience recording made by a person named JP Gaynor that surfaced on Youtube via Edoarado Genzolini, the writer of the excellent The Who: Concert Memories book. In fact on page 103 of the book it has pictures of cassette tapes labeled Aug 14, 1968 and Aug 15, 1968, one can assume this cassette is the source of this new title.
This is a recording that does require your bootleg ears, the sound is a solid good with all instruments and vocals being clear and well balanced in the mix, there is a bit of low end rumble thanks to the powerful bass of The Ox. The recording level is a bit low lending to the rather Lo-fi sound, and there is a bit of tape hiss as one would expect from an audience recording of this age. There are cuts between the majority of songs that sometime ruins the stage banter. That being said, once the sound settles down this is an enjoyable recording and performance.
The late concert promoter extraordinaire does the introduction, joined in progress “…A very great talent, The Who” and the band take the stage with a new song Heaven & Hell that made its debut earlier in the month at the Singer Bowl joint show with The Doors. The sound is muffled and bass heavy, the sound drastically improves for the minute and half of I Can’t Explain, certain GP was moving his gear around. Roger gives the crowd a recap of the songs played and introduced Boris The Spider, like the previous two songs the sounds moves around a lot. Pete gives a long introduction to A Quick One that has the audience laughing, their bands first mini opera finds the sound settling down and consistently decent. Entwistle’s bass comes through perfectly, incredible to hear his playing, some a HUGE part of The Who sound as is the vocal harmonies which are spot on, a musical assault!
Pete’s story before Summertime Blues is hard to discern as the tape is cut, the audience is amused, Summertime Blues is bombastic, Moon is hammering all over the place as is the The Ox, Pete has the easy job of hitting those powder chords. Keith gets the audience laughing at the beginning of Magic Bus with his percussive introduction, the song is cut at the 7:58 mark eliminating the rest of the song. The Ox does the introduction for Fortune Teller, the version is very short clocking in at 2:20 and is linked non stop with Tattoo, a female voice speaks into the recording device “I love you” to end the song. Pete tells the audience they want to play a long song, the B-side to Anyway Anyhow Anywhere, Daddy Rolling Stone. The band played the song days before in St. Charles, Illinois, this version features some incredible drumming by Keith who plays at a marshal tempo, Entwistle is right with him, at times it’s bluesy, other times almost funky and sounds like they almost do a bit of Spoonful.
Pete gives a humorous bit while tuning his guitar, “If nobody says ‘break your guitar’ I Don’t. But they always do, somebody always says ‘break it” (shouts of “break it”) You want it broke you get it broke it’s all part of the budget.” Little Billy is short and sweet, Shakin All Over is not. Clocking in at 6 minutes this is a tour de force, they get into a power “shake…shake…shake” and the combined might of Moon, Entwistle, and Townsend shake the Fillmore West to the bones, very heavy indeed, one of the best songs of the set. The band go non stop into My Generation and chaos erupts in a bombastic assault, this time Pete goes all out and his guitar is the victim, guitar repairs are in the budget after all. This chaos ends the concert with only John’s bass being in proper working condition, the band receive a nice ovation for their efforts.
The packaging is nice, the pictures used are from the era, the interior has shots from the previous nights performance, there are no shots of The Who’s Aug 15, 1968 show, perhaps Wardour does not have a copy of the book. Nonetheless the shots used are very good and get us close. Audience recordings of The Who circa 1968 are not common so it is nice to have a new show in circulation, casual fans beware as the sound is merely average but the performance more than makes up for the flaws.
