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Culled from a historic three-hour performance at the Isle of Wight Festival, the English response to Woodstock, this 85-minute Who performance captures the quartet's vivid, dramatic stage presence while gamely wrestling with technical problems and musical lapses dictated by the relatively combat conditions of the show. The 1970 show reflects a band in transition, starting with a raw and lively set of early Pete Townshend classics ("I Can't Explain," "My Generation," "Magic Bus"), familiar concert covers ("Summertime Blues," "Young Man Blues," and "Shakin' All Over/Spoonful"), and a then new, post-Tommy original, "Water," that surprisingly evokes Neil Young's contemporaneous midtempo epics with Crazy Horse. The bulk of the set is inevitably devoted to a 13-song suite that captures the high points of Tommy itself. For the band's fans and students of live rock, the emerging portrait is engaging, capturing the dynamism of the core instrumental trio: boiler-suited Townshend paces the stage, jumps midchord, and teases the crowd with his signature "windmill" strumming (yawning playfully, in fact, during "My Generation"); the late Keith Moon whirls across the top of his drum kit, crouches tensely as he reins in his formidable power for quiet accents, and mugs shamelessly, perpetually moving; and John Entwistle is the apotheosis of the inward bassist, standing otherwise motionless as he studiously plucks intricate, melodic lines that anchor the melee. Stage center, of course, is Roger Daltrey, whose matador poses, lassoed microphone flourishes, and tossing curls have since become the lingua franca of two succeeding generations of arena rockers.
The camera work hews tightly to the band, succumbing to the fast zooms and sudden cuts of its day and capturing a few telling moments of irritation or fatigue among the members, but there are few establishing shots that take in the full scale of the performing site. Limited stage lighting often bleaches the color from performers and crowd alike, while the audio recording, coupled with doubtless limitations to the sound system, exacerbates ragged vocal pitches. In a post-MTV era when even concert footage is usually subjected to sonic surgery, extra takes and insertions, Live at the Isle of Wight may look and sound crude, but as a document of one of rock's most powerful, passionate bands, it's definitely worth a look, as well as comparative viewing with both Woodstock and Monterey Pop. --Sam Sutherland
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