The Who
1968-08-24
Oklahoma City, OK
Wedgewood Park
early show

This is probably the best sounding audience recording from the summer of 1968 tour! According to “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere”, and most significantly, to the period poster (as featured on the booklet rear page, kudos to Mike who put it on The Who Concert Guide web),
The Who played two shows that day; this is definitely the early show as Pete comments on the sun bearing down on their necks and audienceís eyes, which would be the case of the sun position in that latitude at circa 15:30 in late August (by 8 p.m. the sun had set).
It is doubtful if this is a recording of the complete show, lasting less than 30 minutes from beginning to end, comprising just 6 songs. Those days they would end their sets with the highly explosive ìMy Generationî and it is not probable that they omitted it this time; Magic Bus and Shakiní All Over were often played right before it. It looks more likely that somebodyís 30-minute side of a tape ran to an end (C-60ís were the standard-length cassettes then, it seems to have run a bit faster during the recording ñ see comment below).

The quality of the recording is not stellar, but still pretty listenable. Definitely, it is a lot better than the Singer Bowl and a wee better than Jaguar or Fillmore West tapes from the same tour. Nevertheless, the recording suffered from several problems which needed to be rectified: 1) The speed/pitch was too (s)low because the tape ran a bit faster during the recording, exactly by one whole semitone, and that was easily corrected in Soundforge. Therefore the resulting playing time on the bootleg totalled 30í30î; after the pitch/speed shift it clocks
out at 28í48î. 2) Another very common bootleg disease was the channel swap, although stereo separation is not prominent (yet just before the beginning of Substitute, tapping on the right channel
mike can be heard as if the taper was trying to check the controls and fiddled with them 15 seconds into the song). Also channel balance adjustment was necessary ñ the left channel was a lot weaker so I amplified it, but it still sounds a bit muffled. 3) During ìI Canít Explainî there are tape anomalies ñ it sounds like the tape got chewed up in the player some time later during playback, about half a second is missing, the worst bit probably being cut. Due to the pasting of the tape back together, the head alignment after the anomaly changed and the volume dropped. It stayed considerably lower in both channels so I panned them to the previous recording level.
Otherwise I made no other sound adjustments or eq-ing.
Some sources claim this might be a recording of a show The Who played on 19th or 29th March, during the previous US tour that year. This is quite improbable, Magic Bus had not been released then and therefore was not played live.

I liberated this section off the “Cry Blue Murder” bootleg; the Dallas 1967 part of it has been made available here already. I have included only the rear cover of the original CD, the front contains Roger’s picture from about ’71/72 and really makes no sense. (The back cover pictures are bogus as well; Keith used that drum kit in late 1966, by Dallas, and in Oklahoma, too, he already had the ìPictures of Lily ñ Patent British Exploding Drummerî kit.)
I included a cover I made myself from various period sources. Mind you, itís a Ploy díOr. Lineage: silver disc > WAV+adjustments (Soundforge) > FLAC (level 8)

SET LIST:
01 Substitute
02 I Can’t Explain
03 Boris The Spider
04 A Quick One, While He’s Away
05 Magic Bus ñ Shakin’ All Over

(By the way, has anybody got the 7th August gig in Central Park? It is
rumoured to be only fair, but it would make the set of recordings from that tour complete.
Another recording extant is claimed to be from FW on 13 or 15 August, but that sounds
pretty suspicious: Johnís phrasing of ìHeaven and Hellî was different in í68, and the sets
would still end with destructive ìMy Generationî, and Peteís licks are more confident and
less chaotic – this sounds more like the early í69 recording with Tommy excised. It is a pity the
set does not contain Young Man Blues, which would prove its origin without any doubt: in 68
they played it in F but by 69 they transposed it down one semitone to E, probably to make it
easier to play, and sing. Anyway, this recording is available elsewhere.
The 5th April audience recording from Fillmore East would be most welcome, too.
Seed them here!)

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