Grandiosity Incorporated
Grandiosity Incorporated
Eric Wolfson Goes Long on Rock's Thematic Beasts
Tim Riley talks to Eric Wolfson:
Fifty Years of the Concept Album in Popular Music from the Beatles to Beyoncé,
by Eric Wolfson (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Academic presses now fixing holes and taking risks where giants stutter, and the rest of us await the Big Leap Forward in long-form digital narrative…
Eric Wolfson: I started this book over half my life ago when I was in college working under a professor who I really admire. He did a rock and roll class. He still teaches. I was in the very first class. His name is Scott Sandage from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
And for the final project, I'm dating myself a little bit, he had us all make mixtapes of our, we had to cover at least 50 years of music and then, make a mixtape string of songs that were related to each other somehow. So I decided I thought it would be interesting to do traveling in music.
I always liked the idea of like, you know, Woody Guthrie, Robert Johnson. Jimmy Rogers, people like that, that traveled around. And I guess I was a little romantic about it at the time, although now I'm not sure how romantic it is, but yeah, the guys, you know, traipsing around and seeing what they see.
So anyway, when I was doing it, the kind of brilliance of the, if I may say so myself, the thing that made it click was that [00:01:00] I decided that the thing that was a game changer for rock and roll is psychedelic drugs in the mid sixties. And when that started happening, then the journey went from something that was physical and realistic and real to something that was surreal and completely psychological.
And that then took on the journey, and then from there I was sort of as I was, you know, working, thinking about it more. I'm like, well, then the concept album is then the artwork, like that's the painting that you get and it all just lined up with the idea of sort of rock with the Beatles and Dylan and the Stones all sort of becoming taken more seriously by the end of the 60s.
What I hope people get is that it sort of becomes almost like this sort of alternate history of music. Where, you know, instead of going by gigs, or like events, or singles, or you know, songs or something, that it's this very unique and abstract sort of magical thing, the concept album, that ties all these very, very different artists together.
It all just sort of fit together. So, I actually then did an independent study just to try to turn this into a thesis or something and my advisor said “You know, this is really a book and we should treat it as such.” And so he said, “What we should do is write the best part first,” which was the concept album part.
So the Sgt. Pepper chapters, like pieces of it, probably, I think that are still in there, it's like the Last Supper. There's like probably tiny little things, you know, that are still there in the original version. And that was sort of how it started. And then I noticed, then I was like, ‘Oh, there isn't a book about the concept album.’
And then I just prayed for the next 20 years, and no one's scooped me on it. I think in December, I heard that someone did something about British rock in the seventies in the concept album, but I cannot find that book if that did in fact come out. And my editors pointed out that there was a self published history of the concept album that I bought right away.
That was, that's available on Amazon, but it wasn't like it, you know, it was self-released. So it wasn't like a major label thing or something.
Something you’ll really enjoy…
Live at Leeds deluxe, The Who (Geffen, 1970/2014)
Live at Hull, The Who (Polydor, 1970/2012)
Live at the Isle of Wight 1970, The Who (The Who/Eagle Rock, 1970)
Rolling Stone, uDiscover Music, and more: best concept album lists
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Live From the Underground: A History of College Radio (University of North Carolina Press) by Katherine Rye Jewell
yesterday’s album, tomorrow’s arrangement
Benmont Tench shares his top streams; Petra Haden, The Who Sell Out (Bar/None) celebrates its 19th anniversary with a deathless Townshend quote (“Like hearing it for the first time… I felt like I’d received something better than a Grammy. I adore it”); and Emerson students give the best gifts:
more Beatles nonsense
Gave a talk called “What Get Back Gets Wrong” to an overflow crowd at the Framingham Public Library last month, watch here.
undead killers of the overlong epic
I’ll give Scorsese 3 1/2 hours, perhaps with the period this well done and the lead actor (Lily Gladstone) sucking the life right out of the camera. But spare me Robbie Robertson’s moist, portentous soundtrack. Made it feel twice as long. See David Thomson in the LRB.