For Fans of The Who

Released in 1970 and recorded at the University of Leeds refectory with a capacity crowd of 1,900 people, Live at Leeds captures a band at the absolute peak of their technical fury. It is louder, tighter, and more dangerous than almost anything that has been recorded live since. The original vinyl had a deliberately crude, photocopied sleeve -- the band understood the recording was doing something Sergeant Pepper's sleeve could never do. When Townshend's guitar finally cuts through on 'Substitute', the room explodes. Nothing has topped it.

The 1973 double album is one of rock's great psychological character studies: Jimmy the Mod, four personalities, four band members, Shepherd's Bush and Brighton and the whole collapsing Mod scene. Franc Roddam's 1979 film is a good adaptation -- Phil Daniels is excellent and the Brighton seafront sequences are genuinely electric. But the album does things the film cannot: the studio's own four-track separation, Entwistle's thunderous horn arrangements, the rain. People who saw the film first often underestimate the record. The record should come first.

The closing track on Who's Next runs eight minutes and twenty-two seconds, and it argues -- with more precision than any pamphlet -- that revolutions reproduce the structures they overthrow. Townshend wrote it in 1971. It has been more accurate with every decade since. The synthesizer intro is among the most recognizable in rock history, but it is the final verse -- and Daltrey's scream before the last chorus -- that make it an anthem rather than a curiosity. Political rock rarely ages. This one has.

Biographies try to explain Keith Moon and mostly fail. He played from outside the kit inward, using the toms as melodic countervoices to Townshend's guitar rather than timekeepers for the bass. He had no hi-hat pattern in any conventional sense. He over-dubbed himself on Tommy to give the impression of two drummers playing simultaneously. Off stage he was genuinely chaotic, genuinely troubled, and genuinely funny. He died in 1978 at 32, in the same flat where Mama Cass Elliot had died four years earlier. The band continued but never solved the problem his absence created.