Ladies and gentlemen, this is going to be a long one.

Concept albums.  Is there any worse idea in the history of rock and roll?  I would argue no.  In fact, I would rather listen to Pat Boone sing Alice Cooper's "I'm Eighteen" while my balls are squeezed in a vice and Emeril Lagasse slowly fillets strips of flesh off my ample buttocks than listen to another self-righteous band come up with a concept album. 

But hey, that's just my particular kink.  

The truth is, I was briefly involved with a band whose existence centered on a concept album idea.  I was hired on as a guitarist and backup singer.  Three months later, I split for a band that would allow me to play for people and actually get laid, as opposed to playing for people and then spending the evening explaining our band philosophy and why our record would change the world.  That experience lent me an inside perspective.  I was up close and personal with the very special set of circumstances that lead a band from believing they're a good rock band to believing they have an important message to spread to the world. 

What I came away with was this: 

Concept albums are the product of constant praise from hangers-on resulting in massively inflated egos.   

Pepper that with a sprinkling of LSD and you get my situation in a nutshell.

That isn't to say I hate all concept albums.  Some I like quite a bit, but primarily I tend to like them for their songs, not their stories.  For instance, I dig The Who's Quadrophenia.   Great songs, and oh... by the way... there's a story involved also.  The same with Pink Floyd's The Wall and My Chemical Romance's Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge  (didn't see that one coming, did you?).

However, when the story overcomes the songs or (and this is important) is so self-righteous that it makes all the songs completely laughable, you've just wasted both my time and yours.  Therefore I would submit to you the list of the five most egregious offenders in the shitty concept album genre.

1.  KISS - Music From The Elder.  Okay, this one was a no-brainer.  It's reputation for being an ultimate clunker is very well known.  However, what you may not know is the perfect storm of pretentiousness that led to its creation.  From 1974 - 1977, KISS released eight albums of solid rock and roll, including their seminal Alive and Destroyer albums.  They literally became the most popular band in the world, even topping Led Zeppelin at one point in concert revenues and record sales.  Then, thanks to inflating egos stoked by their manager Bill Aucoin, the music began to suffer.  KISS put out their four solo albums, a movie, the reasonably solid Dynasty and then the lackluster Unmasked (featuring comic book art on the cover). 

Now, one would think that this would lead to lesser egos, perhaps even second-guessing their marketing strategies, etc.  However, this band had Gene Simmons in it.  There is no ego bigger than Gene Simmons’.  In fact, the scale for gigantic ego is measured in “Simmons”.   

For instance, David Caruso comes in at 8.5 Simmons, while Nicolas Cage measures a 6.0 Simmons.   

Anyway, I digress.  Gene Simmons convinced Paul Stanley that the problem was that KISS weren't being taken seriously as musicians.  This is what happens when you stop fucking groupies and start fucking Diana Ross and Cher.

The resulting album (which took months to record) is the mess titled Music From The Elder.  Filled with symphonic passages and a barely tangible storyline about a secret society choosing a champion to fight the lords of darkness, Music From The Elder is as far from a KISS album as anything you can imagine. 

I'm proud to say I have it on vinyl.

That it was created in a near vacuum is not surprising in the least.  Just listening to it, it's easy to see that Peter Criss had been fired, Ace Frehley was drunk through most of it and all the big decisions on musical direction were made by Stanley, Simmons and producer Bob Ezrin.  They wouldn't even allow other people to listen to rough mixes of the tracks.  It was unveiled to the record company and within the KISS organization at a listening party prior to the album's release.  Imagine the silence in that room.

The only song on the set that's worth playing on your iPod is "Dark Light" (Frehley's one contribution).  The rest is pure crap.  Not a singable chorus or catchy hook in sight but no shortage of strings, horns and... dialogue!  The resulting lack of sales would haunt KISS for over a decade as it took incessant touring to pay off their advance.  Thanks to Music From The Elder, KISS easily takes the prize for worst concept album of all time... but it's not like they didn't have challengers.

2.  Styx - Kilroy Was Here.  Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto, indeed.  Styx holds a special place in my heart as one band that I really have a hard time appreciating at all.  Probably the biggest impediment to me liking them is Dennis DeYoung's contributions, which are aimed directly at AM adult contemporary radio ("Babe" is only the first of many transgressions in that regard).  However, let me put that aside for a second and admit to you that I do indeed like their Paradise Theater album... a concept album no less.  The reason I like it is (as mentioned above) it has good songs.  "Too Much Time On My Hands", "Half-Penny, Two-Penny", "Snowblind" and "Rockin' The Paradise" in particular are solid examples of decent AOR music and I won't turn them off if they come across the radio.

However, during this period in the band's history, they were fighting a war of egos.  DeYoung's songs were getting airplay and thus selling records, but Tommy Shaw and James Young (the other two songwriters) were not excited at all about the path DeYoung's songs were taking the band.  Still, it's hard to argue with record sales and since DeYoung's songs were the hitmakers, he steered the band toward a more narrative concept album for their next outing.

Kilroy Was Here is the story of a world where rock and roll is outlawed, japanese robots performed menial tasks and rebellion of any sort was dealt with harshly by an evil government overlord.  Our hero was a rock and roller, supposedly dead, who was leading an underground rebellion to bring back rock and roll (and thus freedom).  Since there was such a restrictive narrative arc to develop, Styx treated us to such drivel as "Heavy Metal Poisoning", "Cold War", "Just Get Through This Night" and... it was all tied together with a short film that pretty much sucks major ass. 

If Styx was becoming a joke by this time, Kilroy Was Here ended up being the punchline.  The band broke up while DeYoung went solo and Shaw formed Damn Yankees with Ted Nugent and that jackoff from Night Ranger.   

This album will be my soundtrack in Hell. 

3.  Radio K.A.O.S. - Roger Waters.   Even the great ones can falter.  Especially when they become obsessed with the concept album idea.  Waters took concept albums to new heights in the 1970s and 1980s.  With Pink Floyd he scored almost unequaled success with the genre thanks to Animals, The Wall and while commercially unwieldy, the otherwise brilliant The Final Cut.  After going solo, his first new album The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking was a great concept that didn't quite translate to a great album, but it was nothing to be ashamed about.

Enter the follow-up, Radio K.A.O.S., a concept album about a wheelchair bound man who is considered a vegetable.  The thing is, he's not.  He can hear radio waves in his head and thanks to a cordless phone his brother steals, he learns to hack into computer systems with his mind.  He uses this ability to trick the world into thinking nukes have been launched and then when everyone is shitting themselves, he reveals the truth and everyone laughs and starts getting along together better.

I'm not joking.

Now, some would say that this is no more implausible than The Who's Tommy and they would be right but Tommy had great songs.  Radio K.A.O.S. had none other than the lead off track ("Radio Waves"), which is good but not great.  Additionally, the story was so convoluted that Waters ditched the idea of making the album a complete narrative, instead putting all the backstory in the liner notes.  So, what you're hearing when you listen to the album is supposedly "the meat" separated from "the fat".  In actuality, you get a bland mess of an album with songs that speak to some story but are not memorable and are hard to follow.  The real punch line to all of this is that Waters also hid verses via Morse code at the beginning and ending of the album.  One of these translates into (from Wikipedia):

Now the past is over but you are not alone 
Together we'll fight Sylvester Stallone 
We will not be dragged down in his South China Sea 
of macho bullshit and mediocrity

That's right.  Waters had a beef with Rocky and that's why we get this album.

4.  Black Sabbath - Tyr.  This one is personal.  For a band that gets parodied as the ultimate pretentious heavy metal band, you might find it surprising that Black Sabbath doesn't have many concept albums in their catalog.  Seriously, Tyr is the only one I can find and I own every single Black Sabbath album... even the shitty ones.  I can't get enough of Tony Iommi's guitar playing and that's why in 1989 I almost crapped my pants the first time I listened to The Headless Cross, possibly Sabbath's heaviest and darkest record ever.  Featuring Tony Martin on vocals that album laid down gigantic slabs of metal with dark, brooding lyrics about Satan, temptation and demonic war.  It was as if someone shook these guys and said, "Hey.  It's been about eight years since you did anything but tread water.  Put up or shut up."

The album was critically hailed as a rather unlikely comeback in metal circles and when Tyr dropped, I went to my local Sam Goody and plopped down the cash for it on release day. 

Then I cried tears of disappointment.

TYR is a concept album in that it's loosely based on Norse mythology.  With songs about Odin, sacred stones and Valhalla there would seem to be no doubt about that although in a bit of revisionist history one band member started denying it was conceptual in 2005.  Even if it wasn't it is still a muddy mess.  Drums way louder than normal.  Songs that meander and have no hook.  Worst of all... keyboards dominating a Black Sabbath album! 

It's so bad that when the studio heard it they begged the band to give them one song they could market.  So, Sabbath went back to the studio and wrote a song about cheating on your girlfriend called "Feels Good To Me".  Needless to say, it completely spoils what little conceptual cohesiveness there is and the song is a meandering mess in itself. 

So, how did this happen?  Why would Black Sabbath follow up what was obviously the album from which to launch their comeback with this dreck?  The simple answer is they let Tony Martin co-write every song but one and all the while, they kept telling him how great he was.  That's right, their thinking was, "The new guy must be the answer" and they capitulated to his direction.  Instead of songs being credited to "Black Sabbath" or "Iommi, Martin, Powell" (Cozy Powell was drumming during this phase), all the credits read "Black Sabbath, Martin" except for one.  That one was a throwaway track from the Dio days. 

Anyone disagreeing with me on how one man could possibly ruin this album need look no further than Martin's solo album Scream from 2005.  It's like Tyr with slightly better production.  After Tyr, Martin was booted and Dio was welcomed back for Dehumanizer.  The slide had already begun though.  Sabbath would never again get the opportunity they had after The Headless Cross and eventually; they ended up playing endless reunion gigs at Ozzfest.  

5.  Pete Townshend - Psychoderelict.  My, my, my.  I bet at least one of you out there didn't expect to see this guy’s name on here.  In particular, I expect to get an ample dressing down by DIMP's managing editor, but let me explain myself.  For anyone who doesn't know, Pete Townshend practically invented the rock and roll concept album with The Who's Tommy.  It blew minds.  That a band could put together a "rock opera" and make it both work in a traditional sense and as a collection of great singles was a massive feat. 

Soon though, it became apparent that Townshend was in effect, a frustrated author who happened to be a brilliant musician.  The next project was Lifehouse, a concept album that ultimately was disassembled and shortened into the brilliant Who's Next.  That was followed a few albums later with Quadrophenia.  Each one was a true narrative concept album and each one worked.  They worked primarily because Pete Townshend writes great songs and since he also has a knack for stringing them together he tends to be more successful than others when it comes to telling a musical story.

However, after The Who disbanded, Townshend didn't give up on concept albums.  In fact, his next four records can be considered concept driven.  All The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes (his mid-life crisis examination) and White City (based on a story of urban decay) were damn fine albums featuring some of Townshend's most solid post-Who songs.  The Iron Man:  A Musical (a concept album built around the children's story The Iron Man) was the first one to start slipping and given the subject matter, it's somewhat understandable.  It's obvious this wasn't coming from the deep recesses of Townshend's soul like so much of his better work does.  Then, in 1993, Pete Townshend released  Psychoderelict and to this day that fucker has yet to give me my $9.99 back.

Psychoderelict tells the story of a reclusive washed up English rock star.   His manager conspires with a journalist to goad him into making an unwanted comeback.  On the surface it's not a bad concept except that the journalist poses as a 14-year-old girl who wants to make it in the music industry.  She trades letters and pornographic (again, she's supposed to be a 14-year-old) photos with him to get him to start writing songs again.  The plan works, he becomes successful again and when it's all said and done, everything works out perfectly.

Aside from the creepiness factor, how did this go wrong?  Well, Townshend had a cast record dialogue and linked the songs together accordingly.  As such, the album plays like one continuous piece and actors reciting lines constantly step on intros and outros to songs.  Additionally, most of the songs aren't up to the caliber of Townshend's previous work so what you end up with is a really, really, really, really, really, really, really annoying album that is an absolute chore to sit through. 

When sales of the album tanked, the studio rushed out a "non-dialogue" version but the damage was done.  Psychoderelict marks the last release of newly recorded solo material from Townshend, proving that a bad concept album can even bring down the best of them.

So, if the three of you reading this are in a band and are looking to make it big, I implore you to remember these words:

Rock and roll is about having fun and getting laid.  If you have to explain your bands mission to your audience (or anyone for that matter) then my advice to you is to open a vein and spare the rest of us.

My job is done here.