The Great Concept Album Horror: The Grand Finale

For the last several weeks, I’ve told you the stories behind some of the worst concept albums in rock music history and also a couple that are downright fantastic.  For the final column in this series, I’d like to give you a short list of some others that are magnificent.  A few of these are going to be very familiar but if you haven't heard them in a while, you should do yourself a favor and spend some time with them again.  

Pink Floyd – Dark Side of the Moon:  It’s hugely popular and famous.  Everyone’s heard of it.  If you haven’t listened in a while though, revisit it.  There’s a reason it’s the best selling concept album of all time.  It's practically flawless in its execution and flows so seamlessly from song to song that you could teach a class on proper album sequencing with it.

It spent 741 consecutive weeks  on the Billboard Album Chart.  That’s over 14 YEARS!  It has sold copies in the millions and deservedly so.  The entire album is linked above.

My Chemical Romance – Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge:  This is not an album for everyone as the music is harsh and abrasive, but check out this concept.  A man loses his life in a gunfight.  He makes a deal with the Devil in Hell that if he delivers the souls of a thousand evil men to Satan himself, he can get his life back and return to the woman he loves.  Satan hands him a gun and the rest is a breakneck ride.  That's the kind of concept that should be launching a comic book series or even a movie, so it comes as no surprise that after this album, the band's mastermind, Gerard Way, began writing for Dark Horse Comics on the side.  He was also recently announced as a writer for Marvel (on a Spiderman series, no less).

   
   My all time favorite MCR track is on this album.  It’s called “Helena” and I’ve linked it above.

Frank Zappa – Joe’s Garage Acts I, II & III:  What’s not to love about Frank Zappa?  Well, that depends on how much of a sense of humor you have.  Personally, he's one of my heroes.

The man was smart as a whip, a musical genius and had an impressively irreverent sense of humor.  All of that is apparent on Joe’s Garage.  Warning though, this is not an album for everyone.  It tells the story of the evils of rock and roll in some hilariously ribald and (let's be honest) juvenile lyrics.  While it’s not for everyone and kind of falls apart in the third act, it’s still a fun listen.  The story is told by the "Central Scrutinizer", a shadowy character who is warning the listener of the dangers of following the rock and roll lifestyle.  In particular, he wants to make sure that you keep those awful sexual urges in check (whether you're a guy or a girl).  Eventually, it goes on to preach about the values of sex robots (again, tongue firmly planted in cheek here).

   If you're not sure whether to give this a shot, listen to the link above (but be warned that it's NSFW).  The song is called "Why Does It Hurt When I Pee?".  I'm pretty sure you can guess the subject matter.  

Queensryche – Operation: Mindcrime:  It’s a heavy metal concept album that not only tells a well thought out narrative story, it does it effectively and with style.  In fact, it is done so well that the band was able to successfully play it live in concert in its entirety.  Behind the band, two video screens showed animated clips to thread the songs together in the few places it was needed.  I saw this tour when it hit Atlanta and it was amazing!

Operation: Mindcrime tells the story of a young heroin addict who is used as an assassin by a shadowy organization.  When he falls in love and decides to make a break for it, all manner of hell comes down on him and the woman he loves.  It is incredibly effective, with just the sort of down ending you want from a story like this.  The entire album is linked above, but again it may not be your cup of tea.  If you don't like your guitars loud and your rhythms driving, then you may want to go somewhere else.

Rush - Clockwork Angels:  There is no reason that the final studio album by Rush should be this good.  What's more, it's a fantastically realized concept album set in a steampunk world where life is dictated by an all-powerful Watchmaker.  One young man decides to go his own way and encounters a ton of weirdness.  

Drummer Neil Peart came up with the concept and then worked with novelist Kevin J. Anderson to write a book to accompany the release of the album.  It was so well received, Anderson wrote a sequel called Clockwork Lives.  Musically, the album is everything Rush fans love about this band.  The song "Caravan" is linked above but you can find the full album on YouTube in Playlist form.

   And of course there are a lot more great concept albums out there.  Feel free to share your favorites with me in the comments or on Facebook.  I hope you’ve enjoyed the last eight weeks or so of concept album craziness.  I know I enjoyed writing them.

  Speaking of enjoying writing, I really enjoyed writing my book The Wash and I'm pretty sure you'll enjoy reading it.  Check it out over at Amazon!   

The Great Concept Album Horror Success Story #2: Blue Oyster Cult - Imaginos

This album is not being included here because it’s great (although it is very good).  I’m including Blue Oyster Cult’s Imaginos because of the balls-out insanity of its concept, the over-arching reach of its story and how it inflamed the band’s still-rabid fanbase to further flesh it out.

Blue Oyster Cult is one of my all-time favorite bands.  They combine two things I absolutely love (horror and rock music) into consistently great material.  They’re not for everyone, but they scratch my particular itch pretty regularly. 

The band’s heyday was in the 1970’s and while they maintained a solid output into the 1980’s, they never achieved the same heights they did while riding high on singles like “Don’t Fear The Reaper” and “Burning for You”.  By 1988, they’d released 13 albums, but pop music had passed them by.  With one album left on their contract with Columbia, they went back to the well and produced a concept album based on a story written by their longtime producer Sandy Pearlman.  

The album is called Imaginos and it’s darker and heavier than any Blue Oyster Cult album before it.  It was truly a return to form and also a great album to go out on (at least until the inevitable reunion four years later). 

That’s not why I’m writing this though.  I’m writing this about the story itself. 

Pearlman’s story is amazingly ambitious.  I can’t possibly tell it any better than Pearlman himself so here is a snippet from an interview with Kerrang magazine (Sept 1988).

"Basically, it's an interpretation of history - an explanation for the onset of World War I, or a revelation of the occult origins of it.

“Imaginos is the main character, and is what I call 'an actor in history'. He plays different roles in history and was born as a modified child, modified by an alien influence, and his mission is to present the human race with the challenge of evil.

“The aliens are playing with our history as if it's a game, and he motivates the game and presents the choices to the human race. They react as they will."

Thus Imaginos tells the tale of a character realizing his true nature (as an architect of evil) and setting events in motion that bring about WWI.  It’s the kind of revisionist history that authors like Alan Moore did with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, only instead of fictional characters, Pearlman used real events.  Also, he beat Moore to that concept by eleven years.

Here’s the thing about Blue Oyster Cult that most casual fans don't know.  Many of their albums featured lyrics by people outside the band and not just some random group of writers.  They called in heavy hitters in the sci-fi world to help them out.  Lyrics were written by people like author Michael Moorcock, poet/rock icon Patti Smith and rock critic Richard Meltzer.  

For Imaginos, Sandy Pearlman (who had written some of BOC's biggest crowdpleasers) wrote all of the lyrics and since he had an intricate knowledge of their catalog, he started linking older material to this new album.  For superfans, this was like catnip.  Pearlman dropped clues throughout Imaginos that link songs from almost every BOC album together into a narrative that spans over a decade of music.  

Here, at the end of BOC's career, fans suddenly found there was a hidden story threaded through their catalog.  They began scouring through old albums looking for clues.  Pearlman himself dropped a couple of hints to get people started.  He noted that the song “Astronomy” from BOC’s 1974 album Secret Treaties told the story of Imaginos realizing he was of alien origin.  He also included a song on Imaginos called “Blue Oyster Cult” which revealed the band’s name was the name of the alien forces manipulating Earth’s history. 

Enter the age of the internet.  

Here, fans of the band created a community online and in the bowels of the forums, people started comparing notes. To this day, the total story of BOC’s Imaginos mythology isn’t completely settled, but if you feel like jumping down a rabbit-hole that you’ll likely never emerge from again, check out this article on gopherproxy.meulie.net.  

It attempts to lay out the various links in the story that had been collected up to that point.  Warning though, this is serious BOC nerd stuff.  Songs are connected through single lines of lyric in some cases and unless you are familiar with where they’re coming from, it’s easy to get lost.

Still, in my opinion, any concept album that has a group of dedicated fans twisting and spinning it like that puzzle cube from Hellraiser is a pretty good concept album.  Below is a link to the album on YouTube.  

The Great Concept Album Horror Success Story #1: Drive-By Truckers - Southern Rock Opera

So, we’ve spent a lot of time talking about concept album losers.  The fact is, there are some fantastic winners out there also.  I want to wrap up this series by talking about a few of them that deserve mention.  The first two won’t be ones you’ve likely heard of before, but you owe it to yourself to give them a listen.

This week, I want to talk about Drive-By Truckers’ masterful album Southern Rock Opera.

There may not be an album released in the last twenty years that was more important to me personally than this one.  Drive-By Truckers is a band that my wife and I used to see regularly when we lived in Athens, GA.  We rarely missed a show and saw them play probably twenty times or more while we lived there.  

Years later, after we moved to Southern California, we made more than one trip back to Athens to visit family and organized the visits around shows they were playing.  I have an autographed poster from one of those shows where the entire band thanked us for making the trip.  It's even signed by the artist, Wes Freed, who was playing in the opening band The Shiners.  It was given to us after a show at Tasty World in Athens.  

It was completely unexpected and meant more to us than they could possibly know.  The day I part with it will be the day it's pried from my cold, dead fingers.  

Drive-By Truckers will always be one of my favorite bands and a very big reason for that is Southern Rock Opera.  Whether you like their style of music or not, there is no denying the incredible achievement this band made when crafting this album.  It uses the story of legendary band Lynyrd Skynyrd as a framework to address the American South in general.  Songs explore topics as broad and deep as racism, religious conservatism and the conflicting feelings of the modern southern man.  That last part is what resonated with me.  It has to do with recognizing the mistakes of the past while embracing your roots unapologetically.  In other words, being proud of the deep sense of family, community and strong moral ethic, while acknowledging all of the racist and cultural shortcomings that personally make me sick to even think about. 

Southern Rock Opera tackles all of that and more by playing to the Truckers' strengths.  What this band does best is tell stories.  Their songs are character studies that do more with three verses and a chorus than many authors do with three hundred pages to work with.

For instance, take the song "Zip City".  It never once preaches to you.  The entire song is sung from the perspective of a seventeen-year-old boy who has a fast car, too much time on his hands and "no good intentions".  He's traveling to see a girl in Zip City because it's something to do.  He's been dating her despite the fact that she won't sleep with him, he doesn't love her and there's absolutely no future in what he's doing.  The song paints a picture (which the best songs always do), but this song isn't about how great it is to be in love or how awesome the party is.  This song is showing you a moment in time as this kid reflects on where he is, why he's there and what (if anything) he's going to do about it.

Almost every song on the record takes a similar approach; never preaching at you but instead just presenting the picture as it is and letting you make up your own mind about what it's trying to say.

Southern Rock Opera is a beast of an album.  It’s not apologetic, but faces the issues and flaws of its subject matter head on.  It contains a song (“The Southern Thing”) that truly encapsulates feelings I've had my entire life which had never, EVER, been properly articulated by another artist.

In short, it’s one of my all-time favorite albums and if you listen to it from beginning to end, you'll feel like you've been on an epic journey by the time Hood and guest vocalist Kelly Hogan sing "Angels and Fuselage" (a song about the plane crash that took Skynyrd down). 

One of the coolest things about Southern Rock Opera is the story of how the band brought it to market.  The Truckers had released two albums on their own label.  They knew just how ambitious releasing a double album was going to be, especially a concept album like they had in mind.  Instead of seeking a record label to foot the bill, Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley put together a business plan.  They presented it to potential investors and pitched to them exactly how they would pay that investment back with touring over time.  Remember, this was happening at a time when the internet was still fairly young.  In fact, there was no model out there like Kickstarter for them to raise the funds.  They did it through presentations, e-mails and getting in front of people. 

The idea was ingenious and so well thought out that years later, Hood was invited to speak about it to a class of business students at the University of Georgia.  While that alone is impressive, you have to think about the motivation behind what they were doing.  By raising their own funds, they were able to craft their vision exactly as they saw it, with zero interference from a record label.  

In past installments, I’ve discussed how creating in a vacuum completely killed concept albums, however in this case there's one key difference.  This album was a band effort, not the vision of one songwriter with an ego to stroke.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, the band put Southern Rock Opera out on their own label at first.  They toured behind it and sold copies out of the van as they went.  In less than a year, the buzz about the album was so big that Lost Highway records came calling and agreed to distribute it nationally.  The Truckers' investors were paid back with interest and it cemented the band as an American success story.  

Critically, it is hailed as a great album.  It was given 4 out of 5 stars in Rolling Stone, 5 out of 5 stars on Allmusic.com and has been featured in dozens of books and articles as one of the best rock albums of all time.

Eight studio albums later, they are still putting out amazing music.  I literally can't point to one album and say it's not worth listening to.  If you’ve never heard it though, Southern Rock Opera is a great introduction to the band and you can find the entire album on YouTube.  Below, is a link to an animated video of “Zip City”, the song I mention above.  

Should you want to hear a different album though, I would point you toward American Band, their latest record which, while released prior to his election, became a rallying cry to those frustrated by Donald Trump’s rise and the racial tensions that bubbled up to the surface.  

Even if you don't agree with the politics, you have to admire the way they frame the issues of gun violence and police brutality in modern day America.  Below is a link to "Ever South" from that album, a song where Patterson Hood sings about how no matter where you are, if you're from the American South, you bring that with you.

Next week we'll take a look at another concept album that's "off the radar" for most folks.  Until then, enjoy the link above and check out my Amazon author's page to download my novel The Wash and other stories.

See you next week!

The Great Concept Album Horror Vol. 5: Yes - Tales From Topographic Oceans

I have a love/hate relationship with what is called “prog rock”.  I love it because without it, I likely would never have gotten my beloved Sex Pistols.  The punk movement was a direct reaction to the excesses of progressive rock.  

Okay, that was a cheap shot, I admit.  In actuality, I'd do like some "prog rock", especially when the music takes me on a journey (preferably non-drug induced).  At the same time, I hate the vast majority of it because to me, it feels like a bunch of musicians just trying to show how technically great they are.

With Yes, it’s even more convoluted for me.  While I hate some albums, I love others.  In some cases, there are albums where I can’t stand ninety percent of what’s there but one song will be so good I can’t get it out of my head. 

Tales from Topographic Oceans is not one of those albums.  It’s hailed by fans as one of their greatest achievements.  It’s derided by critics as ego-driven bombast.  Amazingly, both things are more or less true but it makes the list of bad concept albums for me for a number of reasons.

Let’s start at the beginning though.  Yes had been climbing in prog rock circles for some time.  Every member of the band was/is a masterful musician.  These are people who dedicated their lives to becoming the best they could be on their respective instruments.  Their previous six albums had already produced songs that still play on rock radio today (“I’ve Seen All Good People”, “Roundabout”, “Starship Trooper”).  Each album had been more successful and more technically accomplished than the last.  Detractors said the music had no heart and was losing that primal connection the best rock music always had.  Fans of progressive rock saw them as a band that could potentially write an album that would stand up there with the greatest compositions of our time.  In fact, some thought they could surpass the classical masters.

Unfortunately, singer Jon Anderson and guitarist Steve Howe bought into that latter vision but instead of involving the rest of the band, they decided to write their masterpiece mostly themselves.  Anderson was reading a book called Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda.  He became fascinated by a long footnote and started writing the concept.  He enlisted Howe and the two began hammering out basic musical ideas.  The result is the purest example of rock and roll excess that I know of.

Tales From Topographic Oceans is a double album.  Each album side contains only one song or suite as the case may be.  Each song speaks to a different spiritual subject.  Since there are only four songs, let’s take a quick look at each with a little help from the band themselves as they describe what’s going on.  WARNING:  Things are going to get snarky.

Track 1 – The Revealing Science of God: Dance of the Dawn (Running time – 20:23)

This track is based on Hindu scripture called the Vedas which are “revealed” to the practitioner.  Anderson is quoted as saying, “It should have just been The Revealing, but I got sort of hip.”

Hip, indeed!  Nothing is more "rock and roll" than a nine word song title with a colon.

Track 2- The Remembering: High the Memory (Running time – 20:35)

This track refers to epic poems called “smriti”.  Anderson described it as, “A calm sea of music”.  He supposedly directed the band to “play like the sea” with “rhythms, eddies, swells and undercurrents.”

Remember, none of the other musicians were included in the writing so being directed by their singer on what to do became a little bit of a sore point.

Track 3 – The Ancient – Giants Under The Sun  (Running time – 18:37)

This track is supposed to be about ancient times and supposedly contains eighteen “ancient” allegories.  Anderson commented on this one by saying, “Steve’s guitar is pivotal in sharpening reflection on the beauties and treasures of lost civilizations.”

Yes, you read that right.  You're supposed to be reflecting on the "beauties and treasures of lost civilizations" while listening to this track.  Remember, this is only fifteen years after Buddy Holly sang about the beauties and treasures of Peggy Sue.  

Track 4 – Ritual – Nous Sommes du Soleil (Running time – 21:33)

The final track is about the rituals or rites of the Hindu religion.  Anderson described the bass and drum solos as a representation of the struggle between “evil and pure love.”

I've been to a lot of concerts and I've been in more than a few bands.  The bass and drum solos I've heard have always been a struggle between "yawning" and "Beer-run".  

(That was for you, Tommy Warren.)

All of the examples cited above bring up another point about concept albums in general and Yes as a band.  Rock music was born from and has ultimately always been about two things:  Sex and Rebellion.  Maybe the song lyrics weren't specifically about sex, but the guy singing usually portrayed himself as a rebel, whether he wore a leather jacket or a cardigan.

When it comes to concept albums, the majority of them usually happen when an artist takes himself/herself way too seriously.  Even the most successful concept albums are rarely fun as concepts.  Most are trying to pass along some lesson or truth within their story.

Yes as a band embodied this "taking yourself too seriously" concept long before Tales From Topographic Oceans.  The result is that when they are "on", they make fantastic music but when they are "off", they're so full of themselves that it really lands with a thud for all but their most devoted fans.  

What I'm saying is that your mileage may vary based on how much you love Yes, which is what I meant earlier when I said the album can be described as both a success and a failure. It reached number one on the UK album charts and number 6 on the US album charts, however critics gave it mediocre reviews overall.

No matter how you look at it though, one thing is absolutely undeniable.

Tales From Topographic Oceans is 100% completely full of itself.

Keyboardist Rick Wakeman left the band after the tour because he felt his contributions had been pushed aside for Howe and Anderson’s vision.  However it’s his frustrated quote to a journalist that sums up this album better than most. 

When asked why he was leaving, he supposedly said, “I got tired of fans asking me what the hell that album was about.”

If you want to hear the whole thing in one hour and a half shot, here's a link to it on YouTube.

Next week we're going to change things up a bit.  We're going to start looking at success stories for the last three entries in this series.  For many of you, there will be some surprises in here.

Speaking of surprises, why not check out my book, The Wash.  It's available on Amazon and I guarantee there are at least a few things in it that you won't see coming.

See you next week!

The Great Concept Album Horror Vol. 4: Styx - Kilroy Was Here

Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto, indeed.

There was a time when I was in high school that I loved Styx's album Paradise Theater so  much that I wore the cassette tape out.  Then something happened.  My taste changed.  The stars fell out of alignment.  I don’t know.  The bottom line is that now,  I can’t stand the vast majority of their music.  Other than a few cuts from Paradise Theater and the whole of Grand Illusion, I no longer own anything by Styx.  Something about the songs gets under my skin and I’m telling you this not to say I’m in any way “cooler” for not liking them.  I’m just saying that as you read this article, there is definitely a bias at play here. 

At the same time, history cannot be argued when it comes to the events surrounding Kilroy Was Here, so I’ll try to keep things as objective as possible. 

Styx was a HUGELY popular band in the 1970’s and 1980’s.  The two things that ultimately tore them apart are the same things that produced the album we’re going to discuss today.  Those two things are Egos and Greed.  The band had spent almost a decade releasing album after album and touring relentlessly to build an audience.  They reached a huge commercial breakthrough when their single “Babe” went to number one in 1979 and on the heels of that album (Cornerstone), they went into the studio and created what many consider their greatest album.

Paradise Theater is a concept album.  It was conceived by Dennis DeYoung who was one of three songwriters in the band (Tommy Shaw and James Young being the other two).  DeYoung had always striven to drive the band in a more theatrical, pop direction while Shaw and Young pushed back, wanting to play straight ahead rock and roll.  As long as those two forces reached a balance, Styx was cranking out huge hit albums, but the success of “Babe” (a song written solely by DeYoung) changed the dynamic slightly.  Thus, when DeYoung presented the Paradise Theater concept, he was able to push his bandmates to go along. 

The thing that made Paradise Theater work was that there was room to move within the concept itself.  The story centered around a theater whose heyday was in the 1920’s but had over the years fallen on hard times.  The songs didn’t tell a story so much as just painted a picture.  The opening song, “Rocking the Paradise” started things off in those early, heady days after the theater opened and by the time you got to the end of the album, you had heard songs about drug addiction (“Snowblind”), desperate people (“Half Penny/Two Penny”) and could piece together that the neighborhood around the theater had deteriorated.

It was a huge success and the subsequent tour was one of the highest grossing of that year.  As I said above, it’s considered by many to be the band’s best album and thanks to another huge DeYoung hit (“The Best of Times”), he once again leveraged his position to try to steer the band into a more pop/theater path.

This time, DeYoung pitched another concept album but it had a more focused narrative.  In fact, each band member would play a different character and the story would play out on stage with props, set pieces and a short film full of special effects to set the tone.  By most accounts, Shaw and Young fought back but through record company pressure (re: Greed) and DeYoung’s insistence (re: Ego) the concept was eventually forced upon the band.    

Thus Kilroy Was Here was born.

  

It tells the story of a world where rock and roll is outlawed by an evil dictator named Dr. Emmet Righteous.  Censorship has been enforced in order to maintain control over the populace.  Our hero (naturally played by DeYoung himself) is Robert Orin Charles Kilroy (get it?  The initials spell ROCK!).  He is a former rock star who was imprisoned on trumped up murder charges.  However, there is an underground rebellion looking to bring rock music back and overthrow the government.  They hack into the television signal that Dr. Righteous sends out to the public and they broadcast bootleg footage of Kilroy’s final concert.  Back at the prison, Kilroy sees this and is inspired to escape.  He overpowers one of the Japanese robots (a Mr. Roboto model) and hides inside it to get out.  Then he arranges to meet with the underground to bring back rock music (which of course will save us all).

Let’s just say this now.  That concept has a number of things going against it.  However, I should point out that times were different when it was conceived.  In the late 1980’s, there was a large push in the U.S. by Christian conservatives who wanted to censor rock music.  There were stories on the national news about people who supposedly discovered satanic messages hidden on rock albums and only a few years after this album was released, a group of Washington wives would form the Parents Music Resource Council (P.M.R.C.).  That organization actually forced hearings in Congress on the issue and ultimately got record companies to voluntarily sticker albums with explicit content. 

So while the concept is pretty heavy-handed and silly on a number of levels, it was actually DeYoung’s response to what he saw happening in American society.  When it was released, it was greeted with a lot of enthusiasm.  The record was a commercial success.  It made it to number 3 on the U.S. album charts and scored two top ten singles (“Mr. Roboto” and “Don’t Let It End”) which were both written by DeYoung.  

Even so, the concept was so strict that it hogtied the other two songwriters.  The rest of the album consists of songs that were written strictly to connect scenes together so neither Tommy Shaw nor James Young had much room to stretch out.  Where their songs were generally highlights on a Styx album, on Kilroy Was Here, they are completely forgettable. 

Critics slammed it and after that initial excitement from fans who bought it based on the first single, things got ugly.  Kilroy Was Here divided Styx’s fanbase because it was not a rock album.  It had more in common with the electro-pop that was dominating the airwaves at the time (think bands like Thompson Twins, who relied heavily on keyboards instead of guitars).  In retrospect, this makes sense as it was exactly where DeYoung wanted the band to go.  Unfortunately for their fans, Styx couldn’t come to the middle again.  Despite being successful, by the end of the supporting tour, the band decided to call it quits. 

DeYoung went on to a solo career and eventually ended up right where you would expect him to go. 

Broadway.

The rest of the band pulled a Pink Floyd and got together without him.  There was a lawsuit involved and the two sides don’t really talk any longer, however Styx continues to tour to this day.  When you look at the setlists though, you’ll notice they don’t include any songs from Kilroy Was Here. 

Also, to their credit they are not just a nostalgia act.  They’ve released six new studio albums without DeYoung, the latest of which was last year’s The Mission.

Guess what!  It’s a concept album.

It’s about a mission to Mars in the year 2033.  I personally haven’t heard it, but it was critically well received and actually touted as a worthy follow-up to Paradise Theater.  Unfortunately no matter how good it is, Styx will never completely erase the taste of Kilroy Was Here.  This is especially true as long as “Mr. Roboto” continues to be used in car commercials, sit-coms and is a staple on karaoke nights around the world.

This album will be my soundtrack in Hell.  Seriously.

Perhaps you don't agree with me though.  I'd love to hear from you.  Leave your opinion in the comments section or on Facebook.  

Also, if you haven't already, please check out my Author Page on Amazon.  It's got links to short stories as well as my horror novel The Wash, which I hope scares you but doesn't end up on your "worst horror novels of all time" list.

The Great Concept Album Horror Vol. 3: Pete Townshend - Psychoderelict

Pete Townshend, frustrated author or genius musician?  We asked that same question about Roger Waters but if anyone deserves that title, it’s actually Townshend.  He’s been part of the literary community for almost as long as he’s been a rock star.  He’s produced articles, short stories, plays and novels.  The only thing I can’t seem to find is Townshend writing a comic book but don’t put that past him.  He’s still very active.

For those who don’t know, Pete Townshend was(and occasionally still is) the main songwriter for The Who, a massively successful band that many consider third in line behind The Beatles and The Rolling Stones in the contest for Greatest British Invasion Band of All-Time.

Townshend single-handedly brought the concept album into the rock and roll world when he penned The Who’s Tommy album.  It was the very first “rock opera”, telling a narrative story about a young blind, deaf and dumb boy who becomes a messianic figure thanks to his amazing pinball skills.  When you read it like that, it sounds stupid.  Actually, in reality it is kind of stupid but the music is fantastic and the album spawned a Broadway play and a hit movie. 

He repeated the magic with Quadrophenia, another concept album that tells the story of a young man in 1970’s Britain trying to find his purpose in life.  My point is, Townshend knows his way around a story and how to link scenes together musically in a way that appeals to music aficionados as well as casual fans.

Townshend has had the concept album bug for his entire career.  Aside from the two albums mentioned above, he also penned four more concept albums.  Two are noble failures, one is just forgettable and the other… well that’s what we’re here to talk about.  Let’s take a quick moment though to talk about those near misses first.

The most famous is probably Lifehouse, a science fiction themed effort that fell apart before it was completed.  In order to salvage things, Townshend cherry-picked the best songs and came up with what many consider The Who’s best album, Who’s Next.  That single disc spawned the songs “Baba O’Reilly”, “Bargain”, “Behind Blue Eyes” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again” (the song whose ringing A-chord on Pete’s electric guitar literally pulled a ten-year-old Cary Christopher by the ear into the world of rock music).

The second failed but still great attempt at a concept album came in the late 1980’s.  The album was Townshend’s solo effort, White City.  The story was supposed to be semi-autobiographical about Townshend’s upbringing in the White City housing project but was also supposed to address themes about sexuality, gender, race and violence.  It proved too hard to pull off and the resulting album doesn’t hold together narratively.  However, once again the album is saved by great songs like “Give Blood”, “Face the Face” and “Second Hand Love”.  All three are highlights of Townshend’s solo career and the rest of the album is very good, even if the story doesn’t translate.

Here’s where the slide begins. 

In 1989, Townshend tried to adapt the children’s story, The Iron Man, into a concept album and musical play.  He recruited a great cast of singers including John Lee Hooker and Nina Simone as well as The Who’s frontman Roger Daltrey.  He even used the opportunity to reunite The Who and launch their first tour in almost a decade.  Unfortunately, there is not one memorable song on the album, not even The Who’s contributions (a Townshend original called “Dig” and a cover of Arthur Brown’s “Fire”).  The whole thing plays as background music and without good songs, the story itself falls flat. 

Still, while the album didn’t sell well, the reunion of The Who breathed new life into Townshend and for the next few years, the band toured off and on.  That one misstep didn’t deter fans from wanting new music, so in 1993, when Pete Townshend announced a new concept album called Psychoderelict, the music world took notice.

Psychoderelict tells the story of a reclusive washed up English rock star.   His manager conspires with a journalist to goad him into making an unwanted comeback.  On the surface it's not a bad concept except that the journalist poses as a 14-year-old girl who wants to make it in the music industry.  If the story had stopped there, I probably wouldn’t be writing about Psychoderelict, but unfortunately for all of us, Townshend decided to make this part of the story rather “icky”.  Our journalist  trades letters and pornographic photos with the aging star to inspire him to work again.  Remember, she’s posing as a 14-year-old girl. 

Fourteen. 

That’s not the legal age of consent even in Kentucky!

Ultimately, the plan works and our “hero” (who has now shown pedophilic tendencies and is incredibly hard to root for) writes the comeback album his business managers had hoped for.  Everything works out perfectly and no one was hurt.

But our aging, newly invigorated rocker is still a step away from “stranger with candy in a white van” territory.

Granted, you can tell by my tirade that the 14-year-old thing bothers me.  It should.  I have a fifteen-year-old daughter and the last thing I want is some 50-year-old creep sniffing around her.  Here’s where I tell you that the age thing wasn’t what killed the album.  

Psychoderelict (in its initial release version) is annoying as hell.  Townshend decided to actually record actors with dialogue in scenes that helped string together the story.  As a result, listening to the album is like listening to one long audio play with a bit more music than usual.  For music fans, it was a horrible listen.  Voices step on the intros and outros to every song.  It made it impossible for fans to dial up their favorite tune from the album without first hearing people talking over everything leading up to Townshend’s vocal. 

When sales of the album tanked, the studio rushed out a "non-dialogue" version but the damage was done.  Psychoderelict marks the last release of newly recorded solo material from Townshend, proving that a bad concept album can even bring down the best of them.

Adding to the ickiness of the story, almost ten years after the release of Psychoderelict, Townshend was caught up in the web of a UK sting on child pornography.  His name was dragged through the British press, even though he literally had nothing to do with child porn.  He had visited an adult porn site whose records had been used when rounding up perpetrators.   All charges were dropped when the investigation proved him completely innocent, but having this album in his catalog didn’t help things.

Unfortunately, I could not find a link to the entire Psychoderelict album with dialogue included.  It's as if the internet is trying to erase it from existence.  However, you can go on YouTube and find playlists with most of the songs, sans actors speaking.

One final note:  Pete Townshend, together with Roger Daltrey, put together a final album by The Who called Endless Wire.  While the album itself does not play as a concept album, this is Pete Townshend we’re talking about here.  I only mention it because after the album’s release and the subsequent  tour, he took the songs and reworked them… into a play.  It premiered at Vassar College in 2007.

The man’s not finished telling stories yet.

If you are looking for another good story, why not check out my novel The Wash?  You can find it on Amazon.  At my Amazon author's page, you can also find an additional short story that takes place in the world of The Wash.  Check them out if you haven't already and let me know what you think of Townshend and Psychoderelict in the comments.  

I'd love to hear from you!