Tour by The Who | |
Associated album | "Tommy" |
---|---|
Start date | 16 January 1970 |
End date | 20 December 1970 |
Legs | 5 |
No. of shows | 76 (approximately) |
The Who concert chronology |
The Who Tour 1970 was a series of performances and tours by The Who in support of both their Tommy and Live at Leeds albums.
As in most of 1969, the band's stage act was dominated by the stage performance of the rock opera Tommy, which had been the centerpiece of their show since the previous spring. The year began with the group bringing Tommy to various European opera houses, a trend they had begun in December 1969 when they performed at the London Coliseum. Included were January stops at the Champs-Elysees Theatre in Paris, the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, and three opera houses in Germany. The band then focused again on recording a live album, having abandoned the idea of wading through the hours of tape they had from recording shows during their North American tour the previous autumn. While 14 February Leeds University and 15 February Hull City Hall performances were both recorded, only the Leeds recording was deemed suitable for release, as the bass track was inadvertently not captured during the first few songs at the Hull show. The result was the legendary Live at Leeds, which became a hallmark live rock album and has been released three more times since its initial May 1970 debut (the 2010 "Super Deluxe" edition would include both the Leeds and Hull performances for the first time).
After beginning recording sessions for a planned new album, the group returned to the United States for a 30-day tour in June to support Live at Leeds. In the year since the release of Tommy, the group had become rock superstars and now commanded considerably larger venues than on previous stints in the country, when they played mostly in theatres and colleges. The tour began with the band's final opera house date, as they performed two shows at New York City's Metropolitan Opera House in what was erroneously billed as their final performance of Tommy (which in reality was kept in their act for the rest of 1970). While the rock opera remained the focal point of the set, the band also featured their latest single, "The Seeker" on this tour, although it was dropped after only two weeks and would not be performed again until 2000. They also added some material from their in-progress album (eventually abandoned in favour of Townshend's Lifehouse project), performing "Water" and "I Don't Even Know Myself" regularly; "Naked Eye", although unfinished in the studio, was performed in various arrangements on the tour as well, generally during the long show-ending jams catalysed by "My Generation". The group's stage show on this tour would basically remain for the rest of the year.