Last month we spoke with author Eric Wolfson about his new book Fifty Years of the Concept Album in Popular Music: From The Beatles to Beyoncé (Bloomsbury Academic). That conversation only scratched the surface of albums that take the listener on a journey with a unifying theme, narrative, or idea. We’ve brought him back for part two of that discussion.
Over the last half-century, artists as varied as Joni Mitchell, Pink Floyd, Iron Maiden, The Notorious B.I.G., and Janelle Monáe have created LPs whose tracks collectively communicate a larger meaning.
Wolfson’s book includes 25 important concept albums, from influential rock records like the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Moody Blues’ Days of Future Passed to modern hip-hop and R&B classics like Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D City and Beyoncé’s Lemonade. In this second installment of a two-part interview, Wolfson breaks down the debate over the first concept album, makes the case for Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland being a concept, and explains why De La Soul may take issue with their inclusion.
Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
360°Sound: There’s debate over which album is the first concept album. Some argue that Frank Sinatra’s themed albums for Capitol Records in the ‘50s, such as In the Wee Small Hours, are the first. Others go back further and say Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl Ballads from 1940 was the first. However, you write in the book that the term “concept album” wasn’t widely used until the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper came out in ’67.
Eric Wolfson: Everybody wants to retroactively go back. People want to claim stuff with their 20/20 hindsight. Since there wasn’t really a major book about [concept albums], I wanted to be basic and mainstream about where I was drawing the lines. Sgt. Pepper is the cliche answer, but also, as I found, it’s really where the term “concept album” explodes in the media. It’s an album everyone’s heard of. Most people I talked to had at least heard it if not owned it. That’s the first example I give when someone asks, “What’s a concept album?” So, it was helpful in that regard.
I’ve been working on this book for years. Earlier versions started with Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys from 1966. I have always heard that as a single narrative, but that was not the intent. I read lots of interviews with Brian Wilson, and they definitely were just trying to go with moods in each song. They weren’t trying to link everything. It’s not one story; it’s different stories. I took it to be like Rubber Soul as a stepping-stone album, where it’s got a lot of the pieces. It’s an essential foundation, but it’s not really a concept in and of itself.
Looking back, there are things that people consider concept albums. The Sinatra albums, like In the Wee Small Hours, which were sad love songs, and then he did Songs for Swingin’ Lovers, which were all happy love songs. Again, it doesn’t tell a story. It’s more like a bunch of really sad songs for when you’re feeling sad and upbeat songs for when you’re getting ready for a date or something. Then you have the Ella Fitzgerald song books, which no one was doing. She was including the introductory prelude to the songs from the original musicals that no one else was doing. Ray Charles’s Modern Sounds in Country and Western is an R&B guy singing country for 40 minutes. It’s his version of country, [which is] a conceptual leap.
I’ve always found [the live album] to essentially be a concept album because it’s supposed to be a concert. A lot of them begin with an introduction and an end with lots of fanfare. The modern classic would be James Brown’s Live at the Apollo. But Benny Goodman’s The Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert really broke the mold in terms of having these different parts of the show. Once they figured out the 12-inch 33 1/3, they were like, “Oh, we can actually fit a lot of this in and can have the sections and the chronology of what the show was trying to do.” Goodman is basically giving people a history of jazz while also celebrating modern elements. I see all those as predecessors.
The number one for rock-and-roll is Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl Ballads, because Guthrie influenced Bob Dylan, and then everyone from Johnny Cash to Bruce Springsteen to Beck to Neil Young. Everybody who throws on a harmonica rack and plays acoustic guitar is like one of Woody’s children in a way. I’ve always loved that record. I like that it almost crossed over into a historical document as opposed to just an album since every song was on that theme. Folkways Records, which reissued the album, was definitely trying to set them up in a historical context. Like here’s a real folk musician singing what it was really like. Most people weren’t thinking that way about albums.
Did any of the 25 artists in the book deny that their album was a concept album?
Yes, De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising. They were like, “This is not a concept. This is an album.” The thing is they still put in the skits. And for me, the skits were essential. Skits are so omnipresent now, but at the time in ‘89, it was still developing. The skits all make it unified as a game show. That, to my ears, meant that the songs are like commercials. They kind of are because they’re short, and they’re weird. They’re pithy, and they get stuck in your head. It’s almost like if They Might Be Giants did rap. I mean, it’s better than that. It’s got more social commentary.
In all the interviews I read, they said, “Oh, well, we just did that [added the skits] in the last couple days of mixing. That was a joke we didn’t even know was gonna go on there. We’re just screwing around with [producer] Prince Paul.” I think Paul just threw it all together and made it the theme. So that’s one where if I tracked them down, they’d be like, “Thanks for putting me in the book, but this isn’t really a concept album.”
What do you think is your most controversial inclusion?
Maybe Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland. I went out on a limb with that one a little bit because it’s never really grouped with them. It’s a double record, so it’s four sides, and I hear the four sides as corresponding to the ancient elements – earth, wind, water, and fire. I argue that each side represents a different element that then together form Hendrix’s visceral world that he’s able to make. I don’t think there’s another artist who is as successful at conjuring weird sounds and like otherworldly space lands and underwater lands. I mean, especially considering this was 1968 technology, the stuff he was figuring out, he was a real genius.
His work is so conceptual and groundbreaking that I thought it would be good to have him in the book. Electric Ladyland would be the obvious choice because that was the one record that he was given unlimited studio time for the only time in his life. He wasn’t pressured by his managers to make 12 singles and put it out. He really got to play with this stuff, and it coheres like he’s building his own universe. I don’t know if he necessarily meant to do that, but there are a lot of water songs together. And at the end, there are a lot of fire songs together. I don’t think anything’s accidental like that. The ending of that record is monumental with “House Burning Down,” “All Along the Watchtower,” and “Voodoo Child (Slight Return).” It’s humongous. But I’m bracing myself for people to be like, “You included that and not Genesis?”
You wrote a 33 1/3 book on the album From Elvis in Memphis. If you could write another entry on one of the concept albums in the book, which would you choose?
The Mothers of Invention’s We’re Only in It for the Money. I’ve always been shocked that there’s not a Frank Zappa volume yet, considering he’s got that hipster cult following. We’re Only in It for the Money was always such a keystone album because it’s like the anti-Sgt. Pepper. It’s the American Pepper. We’re Only in It for the Money actually holds together excellently as a concept album, much better than Sgt. Pepper, even though it was just trying to make fun of Sgt. Pepper. I love albums that are self-contained units, where it’s its own little world that you can go into and walk around in. I feel that way pretty much about all of Zappa’s early records, but especially We’re Only in It for the Money.
I love that it came out not even a year later after Sgt. Pepper. Zappa claims that he couldn’t get the rights to spoof the cover. Even though, since then, Paul McCartney has said he never told him he couldn’t do it. Paul’s like, “We were huge Zappa fans. We wouldn’t have stopped him from anything” and “I don’t even think the label could have stopped him even if they wanted to.” Because it’s not a copyright violation, it’s a parody. But that led Zappa to put the cover on the inside of the record so that the cover is done with the yellow background, which is the inside gatefold of the Sgt. Pepper record. Like if you put them next to each other, they’re like mirror opposites, which is insane. What should be the cover is hidden inside. And the gatefold opening is the upside. I’m shocked that they got to it so quickly.
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