Ah, Live at Leeds! Brilliant stuff. I'm well aware that it's far from a purist album. But you know, I have doubts about this story about the bass being re-recorded. Why?
* I haven't turned up anything else on Google claiming that the Leeds gig had the bass overdubbed.
* Two gigs were recorded: one at Leeds, one at Hull. Wikipedia says about Hull, "technical problems with the recordings from the Hull gig — the bass guitar had not been recorded... " Engineer Bob Pridden says the same thing at
http://www.thewho.org/leeds.htm . So I wonder if the rumor started from that story, getting a crucial detail wrong as so often happens with rumors.
* At
http://www.thewho.org/leeds.htm there's a lot about vocals being overdubbed, echo effects being added, cable noise being digitally removed from the bass track ... but no mention anywhere of the bass being re-played. It doesn't seem like they're trying to hide anything, so why omit that?
* The original bass sound would have bled significantly into the vocal mics and drum mics ... into John's vocal mic at least, and probably Roger's too. There's a generally weird comb-filtery sound to a lot of the reissue that I think is due to all the bleed. (A tangent: Bleed from the bass is really evident on the Isle of Wight DVD where the bass seems to have been under-recorded and you can hear the bass sound oscillating like crazy when Roger swings his mic around!) What's my point? That in almost 30 years of obsessive listening to Leeds in its several editions ... I have never noticed any bass guitar bleed that sounds like it doesn't sync up. Not even a hint of phantom bass. I can't imagine anybody, including Entwistle, being able to play along with 120 minutes of that wild improvising style and nail every note so perfectly that no ghosts are audible.
* On the reissues, the bass sound is fairly consistent between the stuff that was on the vinyl version and the stuff that wasn't. I doubt they would have taken the time to overdub the entire concert's worth of material back in 1970, and I also doubt they could have done new overdubs in 1995 or 2001 that so closely matched such a quirky original tone.
I could be proven wrong, of course. But until some evidence turns up, I'm going to assume the bass tracks are original.
Sorry for the soapbox rant. Carry on
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