The Spock's Beard Snow album is a chronicling of a man born in a rural town who is all albino and can like feel people's feelings and thoughts. He can touch them and heal their pain (basically the exact same characte from that crappy movie, Powder). The guy goes to New York where he joins with some other dude and he starts healing people. He becomes very popular, but in the end he falls for the wrong woman, and the irony is that he couldn't see his own fate when he touched her (as he could see everyone else's). He ends up on the street. This is a 2 disc album. The Dream Theater: Scenes from a Memory is about a guy that gets hypnotized and relives the brutal murder of a Victorian woman. She was married, but had fallen in love with her husband's brother. The husband caught her one night and shot his brother and his wife and passed it off as suicide. No one ever found out about it, but this guy under hypnosis somehow knows and it helps him fix whatever psychological problems he is having (I'm still a little uncertain of what happens in the end of this CD...but it's a great listen). Both of these albums are prog rock (you know...same basic genre as Rush...but good).
Thank you Batman, and MC Mark for bringing up some sweet Zappa, I'm now going to listen to some Joe's Garage and follow that with You Are What You Is. It's been forever since I've listened to that. Now for my contribution to the thread. The Blanks - King Fred
Yep. Operation: Mindcrime is probably one of my favorite metal albums from the 80's. The box set is amazing. I bought it before they had DVD's 2112 is pretty damn good as well. Cant knock the best power trio rock band of all time.
I went to 2 shows on the Operation Mindcrime tour in '91, Binghampton, NY and Bethlehem-Easton, Pa. Incredible shows!
Ziggy Stardust - Bowie From the All Music Guide: Borrowing heavily from Marc Bolan's glam rock and the future shock of A Clockwork Orange, David Bowie reached back to the heavy rock of The Man Who Sold the World for The Rise & Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. Constructed as a loose concept album about an androgynous alien rock star named Ziggy Stardust, the story falls apart quickly, yet Bowie's fractured, paranoid lyrics are evocative of a decadent, decaying future, and the music echoes an apocalyptic, nuclear dread. Fleshing out the off-kilter metallic mix with fatter guitars, genuine pop songs, string sections, keyboards, and a cinematic flourish, Ziggy Stardust is a glitzy array of riffs, hooks, melodrama, and style and the logical culmination of glam. Mick Ronson plays with a maverick flair that invigorates rockers like "Suffragette City," "Moonage Daydream," and "Hang Onto Yourself," while "Lady Stardust," "Five Years," and "Rock and Roll Suicide" have a grand sense of staged drama previously unheard of in rock & roll. And that self-conscious sense of theater is part of the reason why Ziggy Stardust sounds so foreign. Bowie succeeds not in spite of his pretensions but because of them, and Ziggy Stardust — familiar in structure, but alien in performance — is the first time his vision and execution met in such a grand, sweeping fashion.
I wasn't aware they had released a DVD of this? They did however reissue the Livecrime CD recently, by itself and remastered. I picked it up. Never wanted to have to by the video just to get the album.
I would suggest the Firesign Theater. A couple of my favorites are: Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers I Think We're All Bozos on This Bus
I agree with the others that recommended Operation Mindcrime. That is a killer album and one of my all time favorites.
Operation Mindcrime, saw that one in the summit. What about the 4 or 5 song section of Dirt by Alice in chains that is based on heroin abuse. Not technically a concept album, but IMO one of the all time great albums.
