Some of us old folks remember a time when artists would compose an album as “an entire piece” and, over 10 or 12 tracks, take you on a musical journey from beginning to end. The songs would be held together by a common theme and this oddity was called a “concept album”.
I am sure that the idea for concept albums began long ago because Woody Guthrie’s 1940 debut album Dust Bowl Ballads was a collection of folk tunes that all had a common theme of desperation and resilience. Later, after the United States was enjoying more prosperity, Frank Sinatra released what many consider the first true “concept album” in 1955 with In the Wee Small Hours. It is a collection of ballads which all express feelings of late-night loneliness and isolation. As the 1950’s ended, country and western artists produced some of the best concept albums. In 1959, Marty Robbins released Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs full of stories of gunslingers and cowboys.
Music started getting weird in the 1960’s and so did concept albums. The Mothers of Invention released Freak Out!, a scathing farce about American idealism. The Moody Blues traced an average day of the common man from waking up to going to sleep in Days of Future Passed. The Who gave us the first “rock opera” concept album Tommy in 1969. The concept was about a young boy named Tommy who is stricken deaf, dumb and blind after witnessing his father’s murder by his stepfather. Tommy attracts a cult of personality as a pinball wizard but is eventually rejected by his followers.
The 1970’s were my favorite decade for concept albums. Jethro Tull had several, like Thick As A Brick, a parable about modern society and how we are influenced by it, told through the eyes of a young boy. Pink Floyd gave us Dark Side of the Moon, which loosely chronicles the pressures of modern life stemming from the clash of morality and materialism and how it can drive us insane. But their most ambitious concept album was The Wall, which likens traumatic incidents occurring in your youth to adding bricks to a wall which obscures your ability to live a normal adult life. David Bowie morphed into his alter ego avatar Ziggy Stardust for 1972’s concept album Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, in which Ziggy is a Martian rock star who comes to earth with a simple message to “let the children lead the way” but his time on Earth corrupts him and he becomes a victim of his own excesses. The following year, the Who released Quadrophenia and it was personally very important to me and to Eddie Vedder, who said it comforted him to a tough time in his life. In my case, my grandfather had just died and I was feeling very alone and sad. The concept of Quadrophenia is about finding yourself when you feel like the whole world has let you down. That’s what happens to Jimmy, the disillusioned young man in Quadrophenia who tries but does not fit in with the style of the times. He begins to realize that everything he believes in and loves, including his family, his friends and his girlfriend, have let him down. Through introspection he realizes that he is the cause of all his problems and, after finding his true self, achieves salvation.
It was also during the 1970’s that progressive rock was rampant. There were a lot of thematic albums, like Rick Wakeman’s Journey to the Center of the Earth and The Six Wives of Henry the Eighth, but I don’t consider them concept albums in the truest sense because they were, like Alan Parson’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination (based on the works of Edgar Allen Poe) inspired by other great works of literature and historical figures. However, a genuinely creative and imaginative work entitled The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway was released by Genesis in 1974 when Peter Gabriel was still at its helm. The concept was about a juvenile delinquent named Rael in New York City who journeys underground to encounter bizarre creatures and nightmarish perils in order to save his trapped brother. Recent Genesis live albums still feature “The Carpet Crawlers” from The Lamb…, but my personal favorite track is “Counting Out Time”.
Who can forget “domo arigato, Mr. Roboto”? It came from the Eighties and a concept album by Styx called Kilroy Was Here. In the story, Robert Orin Charles Kilroy (ROCK) was imprisoned by an anti-rock-and-roll group the Majority for Musical Morality. Kilroy escapes by overpowering the Roboto prison guard and hiding inside the emptied-out metal shell. I like to remember this as a metaphor for the empty shell that rock and roll was for the most of the Eighties. Sadly, the concept album became a favorite mechanism for Heavy Metal bands like Iron Maiden and Queensryche. Iron Maiden’s Seventh Son of a Seventh Son was mythology about a seventh son of a seventh son with mystical powers. Queensryche’s Operation:Mindcrime told the tale of a young man who awakes from a coma to remember that he had worked as a political assassin. Rock had become mythology trapped in a comatose state. Fortunately, alternative rock bands like R.E.M. and U2 were coming to revive it.
After its rough patch in the Eighties, the concept album returned to its former glory in the Nineties. Marilyn Manson released a conceptual triptych with Antichrist Superstar in 1996, Mechanical Animals in 1998 and Holy Wood in 2000 which, like George Lucas’ Star Wars presented the sequel before the prequel. Dream Theatre, Smashing Pumpkins and Nine Inch Nails, all very different in musical styles and approaches, gave us concept albums during the 1990’s. But my favorite pick for Concept Album of the Nineties is OK Computer by Radiohead. It is a brilliant indictment of the loss of individuality in the computer era.
Concept albums are still alive and well in the 2000’s, and their champion is Green Day. American Idiot in 2004 and 21st Century Breakdown in 2009 were each fantastic concept albums. American Idiot was made into a Broadway musical and, in 2010, it won two Tony Awards. Now more than ever, musicians should really consider making concept albums. Because so much of what we listen to these days are singles downloaded as individual tracks, thanks to iTunes and its many competitors, we seem to have lost the thread of the story that music can tell. One way that artists could start selling albums again, instead of just singles, would be to make a concept album. Otherwise, we’re only getting part of the story.
