The Pretty Things -- "S.F Sorrow" [Snapper '98, orig. British EMI '68]
Remastered-for-CD version, includes 4 bonus cuts of the incredible single tracks from '67 that led up to this concept album ("Defecting Grey", "Mr. Evasion", "Talkin' About The Good Times", "Walking Through My Dreams").
Allegedly the earliest 'rock opera' but a commercial failure, unlike colleagues The Who's "Tommy" of a year later, for which "S.F. Sorrow" was supposedly something of an inspiration via common band manager Kit Lambert. OK, so "Tommy" deserved its success by having more memorable candidates for radio hits, and was more of an 'opera' by virture of featuring musical and lyrical themes that were reiterated and developed over the course of the album, things which "Sorrow" doesn't attempt.
But that whole idea carries not-inconsiderable liabilities in the rock idiom, and "Sorrow" is a relatively unpretentious and very solid single-disk album of good tunes that just happen to tell something of the life tale of its fictional title character. Recorded and produced at Abbey Road by Norman Smith, who also helped engineer "Sgt. Pepper" and "Piper At The Gates Of Dawn" at the same studio during the same time period, only here working with a much smaller budget from EMI.
A sadly forgotten cornerstone of British psychedelic hard-rock from the band that only a few years prior had been regarded as The Stones' prime competition for the mantle of England's most down'n'dirty blues-rock/R&B band, but who, due largely to personnel changes brought on in part by the lack of marketplace recognition, were never to operate artistically on this level again. (A random note: the track "Old Man Going" seems to me to contain most elements of the later Black Sabbath's sound which that band didn't lift off Led Zep's first LP, and could just be the most truly scary heavy song ever.)
