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The first Rock Opera ever


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Maybe my source is wrong, stranger things have happened!

Allmusic.com says 'About two and a half years before their first full-length rock opera, Tommy, the Who presented a nine-minute mini- rock opera, "A Quick One, While He's Away." It served as the concluding track on their second album, A Quick One (originally titled Happy Jack in the U.S.), in late 1966.'

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from wikipedia

The earliest example of the form was seen in the track A Quick One While He's Away from The Who's second album, A Quick One (1966), a nine-minute suite of song snippets telling an operatic story. In 1968 The Pretty Things released S.F. Sorrow, thought to be the first attempt at a single thematic concept expressed over an album's worth of songs. Less than a year later The Who returned with Tommy, the first album explicitly billed as a rock opera. Tommy remains the most famous rock opera.

Townshend is also considered the originator of the term itself. In 1966, he played a comedy tape to his friends called Gratis Amatis. One of his friends made the comment that the odd song was "rock opera." Kit Lambert, the Who's producer, is than believed to have said "Now there's an idea!"

from stylusmagazine.com

The Kinks - Arthur (or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire). What can you possibly say about a rock opera that tells the tale of the decline of the British Empire as seen through the eyes of an old man named Arthur? Well, for one, it was the first full length rock opera ever, beating Tommy ... to the record store shelves by a month or so.

Arthur was originally conceived by Ray Davies and screenwriter Julian Mitchell as a combination album/made for TV film, loosely based on the life of Davies? uncle. The story takes place sometime in the late sixties as Arthur?s children are planning to emigrate to "the promised land" of Australia. He sits by the fire, thinks back on where he and his country went wrong, argues with his son, and realizes that the world passed him by.

from rockopera.com

The first true full-length rock opera, released in 1968, S.F. Sorrow features a surprisingly relevant rock score brought to life by a cast of 14, a 6 piece rock band and a multi-image light show. The Production featured standout performances by Peter Moore as S.F. Sorrow, Linda Bean as Sally, the girl next door, Gene Dante as the Narrator and Mick Maldonado as Baron Saturday.

S.F. Sorrow tells the cautionary tale of Sebastian F. Sorrow, a nobody. With fatalistic resign he navigates through his life working in the ?factories of misery? of an industrialized and unforgiving world where rain falls relentlessly and life is squeezed out drop by drop. We follow Sorrow from birth though adolescence; witness his early stirrings of love; the horror of war; the tragedy of loss; and the madness which eventually engulfs him after his fateful exchange with the sinister Baron Saturday.

The Pretty Things, rock and roll's unrepentant original bad boys, have a long and illustrative career. Breaking onto the scene during the first "British Invasion" of the mid-sixties the Pretties, like the Rolling Stones, Yardbirds and Kinks, demonstrated loudly that not all British bands were lovable mop-tops. The rawness of their sound and their off-stage antics foreshadowed what would become the de-rigure "bad" attitude for alternative rock groups to this day. They also managed to record a lot of great records along the way including S.F. Sorrow and Parachute, both recently re-released on Snapper Music, and they managed to stay alive. The Pretty Things themselves performed S.F. Sorrow live in concert for the first time in 1998 at Abbey Road Studios (with a live webcast and special guest David Gilmour)

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I am wondering....would any of you include Rick Wakeman's solo works such as King Arthur, Journey to the Center of the Earth and a couple of others as rock operas? They were great musical pieces of the rock genre.

As many of you know, Wakeman is probably one of the best if not the best keyboard man in rock and his work with the synthesizer was better than any other.

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