悲哀 (1968)

S. F. Sorrow is the fourth album by the English rock band the Pretty Things. Released in 1968, it is known as one of the first rock operas ever released.

Background

The Pretty Things' April 1967 album Emotions was their last made under the Fontana label. It was an album they were dissatisfied with, but agreed to make in order to be released from their contract. The band had not had a major hit since early 1965, so in September 1967 they signed with EMI Records for a small advance that wasn't even enough to cover the huge amount of debt they had amassed. However, EMI did promise them complete creative control, and with that they asked Norman Smith (who had engineered all The Beatles' albums through Rubber Soul and had just finished producing Pink Floyd's The Piper At The Gates of Dawn) to produce the new album. Smith said yes and the first product released for the new label was the November 1967 single "Defecting Grey", which did not chart but introduced the group's new, heavily psychedelic sound. In the meantime, the band continued to play live shows and produce film soundtrack music under the name Electric Banana in order to pay off its debt.

Composition

S. F. Sorrow is a psychedelic rock opera that explores the life of a single character "from rural birth to Prodigal's Oliver Twist freakout". PopMatters says that the album "mixes the story of the protagonist Sebastian and his journey towards learning to trust people and ultimate disillusionment with a psychedelic pop score that fittingly captured the mood of 1960s Swinging London". Phil May said regarding the Pretty Things' decision to record a rock opera, "We were looking for another way of making a 40-minute disk. I could never understand why an album had to be 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."

The initial seed of S.F. Sorrow was taken from a Phil May short story titled "Cutting Up Sergeant Time", about a man fighting in the trenches of World War I. Once the idea to tie the songs on the new album together with a narrative storyline was agreed upon, the story began to evolve, with new songs subsequently written in the studio or while waiting to go on set for their appearance in the film What's Good for the Goose. As May noted, "I was writing the story as the songs were written. And the story wasn’t complete when recording began. The music drove the story and the story drove the music, when it was necessary...It really did evolve on the studio floor." The first track written specifically for the album was "Bracelets of Fingers", and when new characters in a song like Baron Saturday were introduced, the plot would change accordingly.

The Pretty Things' album is generally considered to be the first rock opera. Members of the Who have claimed that S. F. Sorrow did not have an influence on Pete Townshend or his writing of Tommy, although the Pretty Things and several critics disagreed with the Who. Phil May claims that Townshend urged the group to release S. F. Sorrow in America before Tommy. Arthur Brown, who Pete Townshend produced at the time, states that Kit Lambert pressured Townshend to come up with a storyline to rival what The Pretty Things were creating in the studio. It is also claimed that Nirvana's October 1967 release The Story of Simon Simopath was the first rock album to contain a narrative storyline, although Phil May denies having heard the album at the time.

Story

According to the printed story in the album's original liner notes, the lead character Sebastian F. Sorrow is born to parents

who live in an ordinary factory town on a night when no star is to be seen. As a child he has a strong imagination and often dreams of the moon. As he comes of age he joins his father in the factory but the boom period is over, with many older workers now laid off. He falls in love with "the girl next door" but war is soon declared and out of a sense of duty, he enlists in the army. At the end of the years-long war he finds himself in the new country of "Amerik" and decides to move there, sending a balloon ticket to his girlfriend to come join him. However, just as the balloon arrives it explodes, taking the girl with it and plunging Sorrow into deep grief as he wanders the streets of New York City alone.