Rot Otters

I've been listening to the Who's Live at Leeds in the car over the last couple of days, and what a wise choice of music to motor to it has been. This is not the Live at Leeds of my university days though, an all-too-brief sprint to the finishing line of the wonderfully extended My Generation. This is the 2 CD full concert, with Tommy on disc 2 and all sorts of extra goodies on disc 1. This is also proof that The Who were possibly the greatest live band of their period and the originators of all that was good in heavy metal

Anyway, today was a Tommy day, and one that left me thinking about the whole business of rock operas and concept albums. Whatever was Pete thinking of when he came up with the notion of 4 r'n'b merchants performing an opera? At Leeds University (amongst others) of all places. Wouldn't it have been wiser to stick to releasing great singles from great albums that were nothing more than collections of songs? Well, oddly, no. Just listening to the overture from Tommy and a track like Sparks explains everything. This is music that knows it cannot be contained in a 2 minute 50 second masterpiece. This is music that is spilling over into new forms to find the room to grow. These are musicians expanding the vocabulary of what it's possible to say to an audience. It doesn't always work, but people who create things are generally more concerned with creating them than whether they actually work. And when they do work you get something wonderful, like the best bits of Tommy. Of which there more than a few.