I'm a sucker for a good rock opera and one of my favorites is The Who's "Quadrophenia." I can't tell you I understood the story when I first heard it because the music was so incredible, but here's the RollingStone's 1973 review of the album.

Quadrophenia is the Who at their most symmetrical, their most cinematic, ultimately their most maddening. Captained by Pete Townshend, they have put together a beautifully performed and magnificently recorded essay of a British youth mentality in which they played no little part, lushly endowed with black and white visuals and a heavy sensibility of the wet-suffused air of 1965.

Nonetheless, the album fails to generate a total impact because of its own internal paradox: Instead of the four-sided interaction implicit in the title and overriding concept, Quadrophenia is itself the product of a singular (albeit brilliant) consciousness. The result is a static quality which the work never succeeds in fully overcoming. Townshend has taken great pains with the record, has carried it within him for over a year, has laboriously fitted each piece of its grand scale in place. Yet in winning the battle, he's lost the war and more's the pity.

The hero of Quadrophenia is Jimmy, a young motor-scooted Mod in the throes of self-doubt and alienation. Unlike Tommy, to whom he's destined to be inevitably compared, Jimmy is no simplistic parable or convenient symbol. His loner qualities set him apart from both friends and foes, and though he's more than willing to be led, somehow even that security seems to elude him. Torn between identities, Townshend has gifted him with four, all competing for top seed in Jimmy's confused psyche. In one he is forceful and determined, a master of his fate; another finds him full of brazen daring and rollicking jingoism; yet another softens and romanticizes his nature, giving him a quiet inner strength; and still another reveals him as insecure, searching, the promise of

Here's a link to the entire album on Youtube.

List some of your favorite theme based records or rock operas -or- just tell us what you're listening to tonight.