The following post assumes that you acknowledge that The Who’s Live at Leeds is, in fact, the greatest live record ever. As one not given to making absolutist statements of this sort (at least not positive ones… I’ll often proclaim that an album or band is, “bullshit”), the supremacy of Live at Leeds over every other real or purported live record is a  truth that I hold to be unalienable. Why? Everything. The sound. The performances. The Energy. The unbelievable luck that the band was actually set up to record on a night where God descended from above and said, “I’m here to watch your gig, and therefore, it shall be good.”Having said that, from what I can tell, Leeds University was anything but a posh venue. Dig it:                Yup. The greatest live album of all time was recorded in a cafeteria. At any rate, I have always wanted to have a snare drum for the studio like the one that Who drummer Keith Moon used at this show. Problem was, no one was sure which snare it was. I asked my friend and drummer Ray Kubian to investigate, and after several months of assiduous research, he found this.               Now if you’re a drum nerd, you be able to tell from this shot from the very same Leeds performance that  Moon was in fact using a 5×14 Ludwig Supra-phonic. So what did I go and do? I hit the internets and got one on eBay (a ‘71, one year later than the Live at Leeds performance but it’ll do).  And yes, it sounds FUCKING AWESOME.         

Tags: keith moon, live at leeds, ludwig, pete townshend, roger daltrey, snare drum, supra-phonic, the who, Tommy

This entry was posted on Friday, May 22nd, 2009 at 9:54 pm and is filed under studio . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.