On Three Early Rock Operas!!!

While I was in the process of writing this script, flipping through satellite stations on an emergency snow cone mission, I found myself privy to one of those beautiful moments of synchronicity. Cleveland DJ Kid Leo, broadcasting as usual via Little Steven’s accessible yet eclectic Underground Garage, was punctuating a play through of “I’m Free” from the Who’s 1969 rock opera Tommy with a quip of commentary about how that album was not, in fact, the first of its kind in the rock opera genre. It was S.F. Sorrow, a Pretty Things album from the year prior, that he cited as the originator of such an album, an album that contained more than, as the group’s frontman Phil May would put in the New York Times in 1998,

five A-sides and five B-sides with no connection. Pieces of music had been written for at least a 40-minute listen, and I thought the best way to do that was to overlay a story line and create music for the various characters and instances. It was the oldest concept in the world, but at the time nobody had done it before.

Of course, Kid Leo was noble in his nod to this landmark release, and the composition of S.F. Sorrow was revolutionary for the time. Yet it had been done before — at least twice, with heavy emphasis on the ‘at least’. S.F. Sorrow’s original release at the tail-end of 1968 was definitely marred by poor advertising and the group’s reluctance to perform its contents live, but it wasn’t the first conceptual pop-album to be doomed to obscurity in its time, forced to wait decades for a proper resurrection.

One Mark Wirtz, a music producer who would become a staple of the UK’s pirate radio stations with “A Touch of Velvet, A Sting of Brass”, had first thought of popular music as grounds for the conceptual as early as January of 1966, according to a lengthy recount for the Kollektionist. It was then that he was working on “A Touch of Velvet”, daydreaming of what he envisioned as

movies on record. Sonic, sensually graphic “movies” which, projected onto the “big screen” in the listener’s mind and heart, would touch the audience into an experience as seen through the eyes of their own imagination, viscerally interpreted by their own unique emotions.

(“A Touch of Velvet” was supposed to represent a love scene.)

This is a lot to digest — as are the rest of Wirtz’s descriptions of his meticulous approach to recording and producing in true stereo, which was still in its infancy. Given his wide scope, I cannot help but wonder if Wirtz’s strategies were subconsciously inspired by the proto-auteur work of one of his greatest idols from his youth, Jerry Lewis; Wirtz once aspired to be a comedian. And perchance his life as a producer could serve as the basis for a good physical comedy; the way his adventures through the recording industry, bumping elbows with Robert Stigwood and Kim Fowley, even Wirtz’s tale as he tells it, in some ways, resembles the rock operas his work would later influence in its plainly-laid yet mind-boggling prose — especially as delivered on the archived Kollektionist website, in barebones Times New Roman on a pale-grey background.

Unaware of the future follies of early internet design, the first tangible building blocks of Wirtz’s ideas came into fruition in the February of 1967, shortly after his signing to EMI and creative union with Geoff Emerick, who had done engineering work for the Beatles dating back to “I Want to Hold Your Hand”; his most recent work was on Revolver, with Sgt. Pepper’s, Odessey and Oracle, and Abbey Road on the horizon. The two set out to record “Grocer Jack”, a song that Wirtz had heard vividly in a dream, building a delightful yet lush landscape of sound over the course of a few months. Wirtz invited Keith West, whose psych-rock outfit Tomorrow he had produced, to perform its vocals.

The song’s subtitle, “Excerpts from a Teenage Opera”, came from Kim Fowley’s penchant for using the relatively-new word ‘teenage’ and a supposedly “tongue in cheek” notion, as Wirtz would later put it in The Strange Brew, saying, “I don’t like operas personally. It was like an anti-opera.” This distaste, however, is more than likely the remnants of a defense mechanism. At the time of recording the song, Wirtz feared that his “heavily orchestrated concept” would be “regarded as very ‘uncool’ and [was] likely to be condescendingly dismissed as ‘old people’ music”. Part of Keith West’s appeal as its singer was his undeniable ‘hip’ness, with Tomorrow rivaling a Syd Barrett-fronted Pink Floyd in their prominence in the London psych scene and supporting the likes of Arthur Brown and the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band at Camden’s UFO Club; Jimi Hendrix even once joined them. As music-chart culture was still migrating from singles play to the album-centered format which would later validate popular rock music as ‘legitimate’ art, his fears did hold some weight.

Throw in a self-described “complex” over his German ancestry in the aftermath of World War II, and you get a classic timid-creative story, as ambitious as he was scared shitless that his grand ideas would fall on deaf ears. A Smile-aftermath Brian Wilson may come to mind, but the story of the Wirtz’s so-called anti-opera would have a more muted, though nonetheless curious trajectory. “Grocer Jack {Excerpt from a Teenage Opera}” was released at the end of July, 1967 — about two months after Sgt. Pepper’s — and, despite apathy from EMI, would reach number two on the British charts, sending prominent waves across European airwaves. In a true triumph of the teenage spirit, it was John Peel playing it constantly on the infamous pirate station Radio Caroline who propelled it to such a status. Defiant string and brass sections versus West’s tight and upbeat rock beat backbone plus an inexplicable little-children’s choir would apparently prove Wirtz’s fears unfounded as a recipe for dominance, though it would not catch on in the States, which, given its novelty that was not only heavily orchestrated but unapologetically so, likely did not appeal much to either the muddy-hippie types or Monkeemaniacs that had separately come to define the country’s youth market.

Had the full project been able to reach fruition at the time, perhaps it would have left a greater impact in a media landscape rapidly being shaped by the work of the Fab Four, however — EMI did not trust the single as much more than a novelty, ordering a second ‘excerpt’ and not much else. The result, ‘Sam’, about a train driver who bolts town in his old Glory when he hears she is to be decommissioned, repeats many of “Grocer Jack”’s gimmicks at a less interesting pace, with the occasional train-chug sound effect added for lyrical emphasis. It was nowhere near as successful as its predecessor. Aside from its reliance on functioning as a sequel and emerging as subpar, the pirate radio stations that uplifted “Grocer Jack” and Wirtz’s other work had since been formally banned by the British government, and the BBC paid it barely any mind in return. The record business bu-ha-ha underlying the entire odyssey would only further destabilize Wirtz and his creative situation. Now married with a family to feed, he was forced to apply his skills of production and arrangement to the churning-out of unchallenging single fodder — the exact premise his Opera had been essentially proposed to interrupt. When EMI finally threw him a bone to resume work on it, he had already though amicably split creatively with West. “Grocer Jack” had directly resulted in Tomorrow’s disintegration; Wirtz would capture their rhythm section on a one-off single (lovely A-side, truly dreadful ‘B’). By that point, their drummer, known to the world as ‘Twink’, was off with another happening group — the Pretty Things. The next year, he will drum and sing on and help compose a little album entitled S.F. Sorrow.

A self-recorded number from Wirtz, ‘(He”s Our Dear Old) Weatherman”, was the last gasp of the Opera; it almost predictably failed. It would not be until 1996 that what could have been would be formally compiled on compact disc by RPM.

The nineties would prove to be a fruitful era for the progenitors of the rock opera as a genre, with Roger Waters’s performance of The Wall from German no-man’s land, Tommy’s debut on the Great White Way, and S.F. Sorrow finally being performed live with an all-star cast. In the backdrop of these beautiful moments of storybook unity over the power of music, quiet yet undeniable from a historian’s gaze, a squabbling noise similar in effect to those strange sounds heard on the Aquarian Age’s “Good Wizzard Meets Naughty Wizzard” (the previously mentioned dreadful ‘B’) can be heard from the rubble of the Berlin Wall, the heap of trash down the street from the St. James Theatre. A little known gaggle of psychedelic-era sonic cosmonauts are taking a reluctant-megastar independent rock group to court over a little something referred to as a ‘copyright dispute’.

The name of both warring clans was Nirvana. Funnily enough, when asked by Richie Unterberger about the former and whether or not his group had been influenced by them during the making of Sorrow, Phil May said he considered Kurt Cobain’s gaggle of unexpected provocateurs “one of my favorite bands of the last ten years”, but he admitted he had never heard of the elder group. He was convinced for all that time that his rock opera was one of a kind, which is understandable, for Nirvana’s 1967 release The Story of Simon Simopath, the first rock album to contain a written plot, was released to essentially zero fanfare.

What makes the Teenage Opera stand out amongst the other early rock operas and general conceptual works other than the loosely-framed Sgt. Pepper’s is its intentional lack of plot — while the Moody Blues’s Days of Future Past and, of course, S.F. Sorrow follow concrete, discernible stories, Wirtz’s project instead sought to communicate ‘a kaleidoscope of stories, a bouquet of allegorical, tragicomic tales about a variety of characters and their fate, all related to each other by the common thread of living in the same imaginary turn-of-the-century village’. It was inspired by Disney’s Fantasia in its composition, and Wirtz even hoped of an animated film adaptation someday — which has unfortunately not yet occurred, though it was adapted into a stage performance by the British Youth Musical Theatre in 2017. Nirvana, on the other hand, were brash and unapologetic in adding fable to their psychedelic fun-having. Stretching beyond the previous territory of liner notes to provide description of the players and their music alongside photos and a track list, this group used that space to give a fictional, imaginative context to their songs, connecting them within a self-described “science fiction pantomime”.

And what a story it is, outlined within the record’s gatefold (or the back cover in some territories) — Simon Simopath (his surname is likely derived from a passage in William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch) is a “baby-boy citizen” of a “six-dimensional city — a place of unparalleled horror”. Despite his needs of care being met, Simon yearns to fly, his family supporting his seemingly-impossible dream of growing wings. He is isolated from his peers, however, as they prefer the delinquent life — this boy instead spends his time “in a dream bath of translucent space”, though much more lucidly than Tommy Walker’s state would prove itself to be two years later. Without need for poor babysitters, Simon grows up to be a bit too participant in society, drifting from job to job while fighting a “constant depression” that his fantasies of flying feed into. His “obsession” eventually triggers a “nervous breakdown” that leads to him being institutionalized for six days — though the doctors at the hospital are unable to help even themselves.

It is after this where the flaws of the story Nirvana was trying to tell — or at least its seeming secondary nature to the actual album’s contents — reveal themselves. Tommy has been described as incoherent in its telling of its hero’s ascension to cult leader-status — I would hate to see those same critics try to wrestle with Simon’s story!

Upon release, Simon “write[s] to the Ministry of Dreams for a supersonic test” — the sixties were amazing — and becomes a “satellite jockey”, which, according to the song of the same name, involves being sent “out into space for the space of a year” and reporting back to Earth with his “progress” — though what he is actually doing in space is unclear, and this song and the following “In the Courtyard of the Stars” directly contradict each other as to whether or not Simon is accompanied by his “lady”, who is not mentioned whatsoever in the story despite his sister telling him that love is the key to him obtaining flight. Things only get more psychedelic when a centaur named Cedric taps on the window of Simon’s shuttle, inviting him to ‘a land of peace and happiness’, an alien planet.

It is there that Simon finds the love he was waiting for upon meeting one Magdalena, a woman of “almost unbearable” beauty described as “a tiny goddess of

NIRVANA!!!!

Simon “[drinks] of the sweet wine of living things and death [is] eliminated”; he weds Magdalena, with the Minister of Dreams as officiator. As the land’s king and queen, they commemorate the coming year 2000, which should have definitely in real life had less millennium bug scare stress and more centaurs and general magical rainbow insanity.

Despite the dated ethos of the plot, listening to The Story in 2025 is less of a painful experience than what may be generally expected of similarly obscure relics of the psychedelic era, many of which are highly dated and blatantly derivative of other groups. Its sounds, however twee, don’t venture into sitar-appropriating mush or the now-stereotypical Piper-at-the-Gates-of-Drugs sound, making it hold up better than, say, the Strawberry Alarm Clock, that year’s helping of the Incredible String Band, or even many of the Maharishi-influenced ditties the Beatles produced. What we hear is certainly inspired by the Beatles, most obviously on the upbeat “We Can Help You”, though this can be excused by the fact of it simply having been 1967. Many of the Story’s conventions definitely place the album firmly in the year, with hippie musings on love, dreams, and electronic nature defining its lyrical content and psych-folk as the backdrop; “Pentecost Hotel”, the record’s first single, even features a cheery choir, though of the church variety and not the little-children variety. We never reach “Tomorrow Never Knows” territory of pretentiousness, thankfully, and the album’s running time of twenty-five minutes is the most jarring thing here sonically — especially given that this is an early manifestation of a genre now defined by double-albums with lengthy run times, these definitive statements of storytelling with much commentary on the human condition and its interactions with society, with plenty of austerity and Biblical allusions (if not literally based on the Bible).

Instead we have an album that functions as a modern-day fairy tale, almost humble in its willing cutseyness, despite its concept’s boastfulness. It is telling that it opens not on a grand overture or leitmotif to be repeated, but on a statement of want, of hope, and what has, with listen after listen, become one of my favorite pieces of poetry of the psychedelic age:

Little swallow in the sky
Permit me to entice you with a bargain —
I will give you all my sweets;
A comic book, a clock that sings —
If you will let me have your lovely wings —
Silver aeroplane above the clouds,
I will shoot you down with diamond bow and arrow
So come down to our front lawn,
Ride away with all your things —
And let me take away your mighty wings —

We can so easily envision our hero — the starry-eyed blonde boy-child of the cover art — gazing at the technicolor sky as these winged beasts, both born and man-made, inspire both hope and envy within him. He is polite, almost achingly so, in his futile attempts at joining them in their freedom, which is certainly rooted in spirituality. While the ‘story’ as written in the liner notes goes off the rails quickly, the album itself is coherent and well assembled in its flow — considering the nature in which albums often engrain themselves into our lives, I would argue that the collection of loosely-connected songs do a better job at communicating something than the prose it is associated with.

Too, the Teenage Opera, in its inherent lack of definitive structure — and even lack of a proper initial release, something that should send any music historian into a tizzy of interest and even worship, to allude again to Brian Wilson — holds an essence to it in its symbolization of its place and time of conception. Sgt. Pepper’s is framed as a concert by the titular Band — perchance a fanciful send-off for their previous touring days — even including a now-legendary encore, “A Day in the Life”. But the label of ‘concept album’ was seemingly forced upon it by critics seeking a root to what was so revelatory about the Beatles’ approach to pop music, blind to the simple reality that what they got ‘right’ was their natural evolution as creatives in a fast-paced and highly-influential time and place. Wirtz approached the matter of such a project more so the way albums like The Village Green Preservation Society later would — snapshots of lives and the lessons we as listeners can learn as we peep in almost voyeuristically, using more antiquated times to both contextualize and subvert the hypermodernity of the sixties.

The Kinks comparison feels apt, as the Davies themselves would take their own focused shot at their own ‘rock opera’ with Arthur, though it lacks a formally explained plot in its gatefold. Tommy, too, despite its gorgeous artwork, also has not such liner notes, and its plot has shifted often radically throughout the years and its many adaptations. But the nitpicking — will we ever truly know if the father kills the lover or vice-versa? — does not by any means overshadow its power as a piece, no matter how it is heard or seen. The Wall to come much later doesn’t, either, though its story is more cohesive and cinematic. This wider consideration introduces a potentially intense debate to the historiography of this genre — what is required for a rock opera to be considered a rock opera? Is explicit presentation as such required for a work to be canonized as such, and could this explain why the fragmented Teenage Opera and the partially-failed experiment of The Story of Simon Simopath continue to languish in obscurity? This is a matter that goes beyond liner notes and lengthy interviews in Rolling Stone — cover art in general goes a long way in regards to how any album is remembered and recognized. Had the Teenage Opera been manifest when it should have, EMI’s apathy could have manifested in unimaginative packaging — hell; it could have even been un-‘hip’. Simon Simopath’s delightfully amateurish album cover, meanwhile, is an obvious far cry from anything Mike McInnerney or Gerald Scarfe ever made. With its clashing colors and slightly-off line art, it just looks like something that was made for the bargain bins, despite its wonky charm; I would not be surprised if that is part of why it remains obscure to most.

There are many who likely bought this albums upon its original release and did not realize fully that they were participating in the genesis of an entirely new frontier for music. Many who bought a 45 of ‘Grocer Jack’, too, probably didn’t pay too much mind to the subtitle, despite public anticipation for a full Opera. But a good song is a good song; a good album is a good album. Those who pay their hard earned money to support music define it on their own, personal terms. Today, artists such as the Weeknd; Tyler, the Creator; and Janelle Monae pour their hearts and souls into albums that constitute experiences more than simple discs you can buy. They invite listeners into immaculately crafted worlds, all united by the shared act of upturning the past to excavate new and reimagined ways of creative expression, honoring their influences while never succumbing to the ease of imitation. But they are all immensely popular; yes, they rely on the economy of analysis of their work by diehard supporters, but most listeners are still mere vacationers to their individual lands; hit singles, Super Bowl halftime performances, and the occasional controversy remain the surface level.

There is another shared quality between the three artists I have intentionally chosen to mention here: they are all black. Let us take a step back, then — no, let us take a step into a daffodil-yellow hot air balloon.

Let us take a vacation across the Atlantic, away from the painted pavement of Carnaby Street to sunny Los Angeles. We hop off at 6000 Sunset Boulevard, home of United Western Recorders — it’s the heat of July of 1967, and what is on its way to becoming one of the most prominent groups in the country is recording the follow-up to their debut album. With songwriter Jimmy Webb, penner of their latest — and massive — hit at the helm, they are bound to avoid sophomore-slump-dom.

The hit was ‘Up, Up and Away’, and the group is the 5th Dimension. The results of a few months’ recordings will be The Magic Garden. It is something a bit more than a simple second full-length — if you will, a song cycle, if not an earnest concept album. There are no liner notes delineating its story, though there are a ‘prologue’ and ‘epilogue’, as well as short, instrumental interludes between songs — most notably Mendelssohn’s wedding march at the end of ‘The Worst That Could Happen’, which would become the album’s namesake after a rerelease at the tail end of 1968. Despite the 5th Dimension having won a stunning five Grammies for ‘Up, Up and Away’, it was a cover of ‘The Worst’ by the Brooklyn Bridge that would trigger interest in the Garden. The back cover photo of the Garden, a montage of the group’s members, would become the front cover, while the butterfly bearing their faces, inviting in its rich color yet mysterious against the gilded backdrop of golden flora, was booted to the back.

From the front, the album’s tale of woe begins within the garden itself — or perhaps from its outskirts, with a lover beckoning us into its ‘the gates of dark and light’; it is there, the title song’s narrator tells us, where peace, laughter, and love are to be found. But the environment soon grows somber: a hard rain begins to fall, and the male half of the couple becomes subservient to his ‘Summer’s Daughter’ in her volatile depression — a ‘Carpet Man’, humorously. With a spirited cover of Lennon-McCartney classic ‘Ticket to Ride’, she is off and the first side has concluded. Side two opens with a ‘Requiem’: the man reflects on the embrace he once cherished from his lover, identified earlier as ‘Susan’; with ‘The Girls’ Song’ following, she reflects on her regrets for leaving, waiting on a phone call. When the man finally reaches out to her, it is too late: she is to be betrothed to another — ‘the rich young son of some old friend’, as described in ‘Orange Air’, in which the two face one final confrontation and Susan pokes fun at her ex for his ‘hair too long to work at the local bank’ and strange clothes. Now destitute, he tries to look on the lighter side of the crummy, cramped-apartment life: ‘Here inside my paper cup, everything is lookin' up’.

We end on the epilogue, a repeat of the chant that opens the album: ‘Have you tried love?’ According to this narrative Webb has prepared for us, love is a cyclical thing, as is life: it dips, swoops, soars high and finally withers and dies. Yet there is always hope; there is always resurrection. Fittingly, a few of its songs would live on through covers by the likes of Johnny Rivers and Dusty Springfield. But its singles were not to successful, and the rerelease of the album with ‘The Worst That Could Happen’ as its title feels disappointing given both the historic value and genuine quality of what is contained within. Hoping to push more copies not based on the story it sought to tell but one amputated fragment of it — it’s as if Tommy were renamed Pinball Wizard somewhere down the line. (Well, that may be a bit more egregious, but the point still stands.)

There are a multitude of other unfortunate reasons why The Magic Garden may get so overlooked in the wider scheme of music history. The one that looms largest over the album is the circumstances of its performers themselves. That the Fifth Dimension were an all-black band isn’t the full explanation — surely, if, say, Jimi Hendrix or Sly Stone had ever made a serious contribution to the rock opera genre, we would still be discussing it today, and such contributions could have easily changed the entire trajectory of not only the genre, but popular music as we know it. No, it wasn’t just their skin color that led to this album getting ignored — it was that the Fifth Dimension were a black pop band. And their approach to pop music was all their own and obviously successful on the charts, but it forced them into an odd career position. In the age of black power, some saw them in their let-the-sunshine-in-ness as not ‘black’ enough, which is discussed by original members Billy Davis and Marilyn McCoo in Questlove’s documentary Summer of Soul. A monumental film, it tells the once-obscure story of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival concert series, which included gigs from a dazzling array of black artists from all genres and leanings — how do you ‘color a sound’, we are forced to ask, as these songs from all stripes and angles are illuminated by the setting sun’s natural glow, all equal and equally as impactful in their contributions to not just black culture, but American culture, to the culture of a world united by song and dance. It is a shame that history is rocky, states this documentary, as the music soundtracks everything from the political upheaval that tore up innocent New York communities to foil-wrapped home cooking in the park. And it is a shame, it says, that this history — that of the Cultural Festival — remained ignored and stored in vaults for so long. Archival work only goes so far if that which is archived is not unleashed upon a public that would otherwise lack enthusiasm to unearth it. The diminishing of such artists within the wider canon of mainstreamed music, regardless of their relative popularity at the time, whether for reasons of what charts they were on or the supposedly historic notion that black artists should receive the short ends of most sticks, is a poor truth of that notion.

There’s plenty of factors to The Magic Garden’s obscurity not related to race, as well. Webb is one of them; despite being an extremely prolific songwriter covered by just about everybody, he is mostly known nowadays for his earlier 5th Dimension smash and “MacArthur Park”, which would become the encapsulation of late-seventies cheese with Donna Summer’s version in ‘78. These aren’t the popularly lauded sides of commercially successful music of the past — starry-eyed happiness and extravagant melodrama are not the emotions associated with much of what is remembered. The more masculine emotions of anger and angst and the usually more masculine music that stems from such emotions are. Especially in today’s world, where pop songs will sometimes have at least half a dozen credits, songwriters and the art of doing their work justice unfortunately get pushed to the wayside when they were once commonplace. With digital music consumption consolidating elaborate packages into crammed squares, there is also much less consumer motivation to check to see who wrote a song in the first place. But prolific songwriters of the era maintain their cult followings — Harry Nilsson; Randy Newman; Paul Williams; the 5th Dimension’s beloved Laura Nyro, to name just a few. Where’s Jimmy Webb’s?

Despite their immense popularity, incredible Hair medley to come, and embodiment of sixties optimism, the decade’s end would not be kind to the Fifth Dimension. They didn’t care for Nixon at all, but they could not-not accept the honor of an invitation to the White House; they still loved their country, after all, regardless of their Declaration of Independence medley getting banned from the Armed Forces radio. (It was performed as part of their set.) But it was the peak of un-cool to perform at such an institution, regardless of the message of racial and cultural unity they sought to proliferate. This historical footnote has been mostly forgotten, and, thankfully, the earnesty in their “Flesh Failures” have prevailed in its place. But I would have never heard of The Magic Garden had I not bought a worn copy of Stoned Soul Picnic at a thrift store and figured I would look more into their discography after I enjoyed it. I stumbled into this world they and Jimmy Webb cultivated completely by accident, and it almost angered me that this knowledge and the wonderful record contained within had been so overlooked, reduced to barely a footnote.

In a brief Rolling Stone article profiling Davis and McCoo’s appearance in Summer of Soul, David Browne describes The Magic Garden as “the airport-lounge version of Sgt. Pepper”. (Note the use of the shortening ‘Sgt. Pepper’, not ‘Sgt. Pepper’s’, which should at least partially separate myself from the popularized ilk.) I do not know what to think of this description; the album’s mention is very brief, with a bit more time devoted to the brilliance of their Nyro covers. Is it that a song written by a woman in the sex-empowered sixties has more weight than one written by just another twentieth-century white guy? Does David Browne feel something about being just another twenty-first-century white guy in music journalism? Did he just think The Magic Garden was sort of ‘meh’? Regardless, it deserves more than the foot notations, or the brief though honorable mention it gets in Bob Stanley’s Yeah Yeah Yeah. Regardless if listeners post-Brooklyn Bridge considered its nature, what Browne calls their ‘quiet revolution’ is utterly worth discussion alongside both the oft-cited and oft-overlooked British contributors to the rock opera’s beginnings.

Mark Wirtz would live to see his work take shape in numerous forms, but not his wanted film; he passed in 2020. Nirvana’s Story of Simon Simopath would be released in Australia without mention of its story and retitled for single “Pentecost Hotel” (sound familiar?). Their album covers became darker, more drab, and better; their followup album, All of Us, would be their final to be released in the United States. Upon the occurrence of the nineties, the two factions of Nirvana eventually reached a settlement out of court; after Kurt Cobain’s untimely suicide, the sixties group would release a decidedly trippy take on “Lithium” that would make you think the song was first written in the first group’s heyday before receiving an uneven, nineties sheen.

I look back on that initially almost repulsive album cover, and I am not reminded of my own attempts at realism in art classes of days past. Instead I think of another illustration, one much more familiar — the timeless front cover of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, which I read multiple times as a youngster. It is one of those stories that carries a distinct intelligent whimsicality that anyone of any age can learn from, be brought to a chuckle by, have their heart warmed by. I suppose that quality is what draws me to these conceptual albums — music and stories are such crucial parts of life, and those which we hear at formative ages stay with us. The age of psychedelia was essentially a microcosm of young people seeking new ways to return to that stage of innocence, to see the world for what was beyond the tangible. The dedicated soar of the airplane overhead harboring the precious cargo of dreams and disparate destinations; the chants of children in the schoolyard you walk past on your way to pick up groceries — these seemingly inconsequential things carry magic through the memories they conjure, memories of the feeling that anything was possible. You could run for as long as you possibly could, legs and arms pumping with an eagle’s might, without getting tired, and that eventual collapse at the end of an energetic day was into a warm bed with Mother tucking you in and kissing you on the forehead to wish you good-night. Or maybe it wasn’t — maybe ‘home sweet home’ didn’t feel like much of a home at all. So many people who have experienced this disconnect in any capacity credit art and especially music as helping them through the turmoil of any sort of isolation or disillusionment — head under the covers in the pitch black of night, foam-padded headphones twirling over to the Discman clutched tight in little hands, the magic of Cobain or Love or Bjelland or Daltrey or May or McCoo drowning out screams from outside or from within. I said the line earlier was “I will shoot you down with diamond bow and arrow”; according to sources other than my ears, the true lyric is “I will shoot you down with gun and bow and arrow”. There is a serious fury to Simon’s longing, one aware of dangerous modernity and the “unparalleled horrors” it can entail as opposed to fully trapped in a nubile’s fantasy land.

Motivated by my discovery of The Magic Garden, I gave Jimmy Webb’s official Facebook page a follow, only to realize that just days earlier he had made a post that was quite topical, addressing the presence of the American military in MacArthur Park. He called it an “unnecessary show of force”, crying out into the digital vastness

How many gang members did they find in the park? And how many of our fellow Americans - white or black or brown – did they frighten? The image of armored vehicles, mounted officers, and armed troops running through the park will not be forgotten. Is anyone else having flashbacks of Kent State? Or of Americans being thrown down by fire hoses during the civil rights protests? This is not acceptable. We must remember what we stand for as Americans, and stand up. Once we give it away, we will never have this recipe again, this recipe for freedom and democracy. And it took so long to bake it.

Who else in America, angered in his dedication to his country’s values, is more qualified to quote the song about leaving a cake out in the rain in such a rant than the man who wrote it? And who but these songwriters, these craftsmen of emotion, are more qualified to speak — sing —for us?