A suite of song fragments put together on an album. Who really was the first to do it?

I've lost count of the amount of music documentaries I've watched over the years where people credit 'Abbey Road' as being the first example of a suite of song fragments running together as one piece. Well, I can certainly say that the Grateful Dead beat them to it by over a year with the 'Anthem of the Sun' album in 1968. But I'm now wondering who the very first was to do it on a pop/rock album. I'm not talking two songs being put together as one. But a run of five or six songs or fragments that sit together on the album as a collective whole.

 

Zappa Lumpy Gravy, 1967

Lumpy Gravy (1967 album) - Wikipedia

 

This thread will become nasty.

 

It won't because it has to be backed up with facts. This isn't opinion based. It's historical investigation.

 

Your optimism is endearing.

 

Procol Harum's In Held 'Twas In I from the Shine on Brightly album (1968) is the earliest I can think of, made up of five parts bolted together - Glimpses of Nirvana, Twas Teatime at the Circus, In the Autumn of My Madness, Look to Your Soul and Grand Finale.

The title was made up from the first word of the lyrics of each of the first four movements with the final 'I' coming from the first word of the sixth verse in the first movement.

 

Threads only derail when people start presenting opinions as facts. In this instance I'm curious from a historical and cultural point of view.

 

That's a great example, and exactly what I was looking for. It was released nearly six months after the Grateful Dead's 'Anthem of the Sun' though. So sadly no first prize there.

Terrific album though! Arguably their best.

 

The Who - A Quick One While He's Away released Dec '66

 

Does the Who's "A Quick One" meet the definition? December 1966, per Wiki.

late edit:

 

From 1967 not sure if it fits, the whole album has a swirling seamless feel:

The Holy Modal Rounders - Indian War Whoop

 

This one is leading the pack so far.

 

Looks like the earliest example so far is The Who's 'A Quick One' from December 1966. Any examples before this date?

 

From ‘66 piece composed of various tape edits:
John Fahey - The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party

 

Incredible String Band were doing this long before "Abbey Road". As was Zappa, of course. Zappa being very similar to what the Beatles did on "Abbey Road".

 

Pretty sure this one has always been seen as the first of its kind in rock/pop.

 

I was going to offer “The Bomber” by James Gang but that was after other examples given.

 

Help I'm A Rock - Mothers of Invention 1966

 

A three part suite, if I remember correctly. I've not played that album in ages. Freak Out was May '66? Okay, we might have a new leader.

 

June 27 1966 per Wiki which also states
"Help, I'm a Rock" is a three part suite consisting of: "Okay to Tap Dance", "In Memoriam Edgar Varese" and "It Can't Happen Here".

 

Okay so June 1966 is the earliest example so far from a rock group. There's also this: John Fahey - The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party. But Wiki makes no mention of which month of 1966 this was released.

 

This is a form of a very, very old musical device called a "potpourri", where you basically just throw one tune after another at the listener. As I understand it, it started out as something more like a medley -- where you'd combine compositions by whomever into a single performance -- and then, later, composers started writing pieces in that style.

Don't misunderstand me -- it's still worth investigating when a rock band did it first! But this kind of "take little ideas and fuse them into a longer piece" approach is definitely an old one.

Even if you stick to the 20th century, that's more or less what Stravinsky does in The Rite of Spring -- a rapid series of short and often thematically unrelated movements (i.e. movements that don't share the same tunes), played consecutively, though of course they're related by being in Stravinsky's style. The piece is almost like an LP, decades before that was a thing.

 

Oh yes, no doubt about that. But I'm interested in when modern popular music adopted that approach. So far we can't seem to get back further than 1966 for pop and rock music.

 

I think the key thing will be finding cases where people debuted original material in this format. Doing so with other people's pre-existing tunes has been around since the early days of pop, e.g.:

Fred Burton - Medley / Medley

Or, 50 years earlier, this (which looks fun!):

Samuel Siegel - Ragtime Medley

 

The medley format was a relatively standard thing in pop music, mostly stringing together familiar tunes (Ray Conniff's Christmas album comes to mind). And the Beatles (or at least George in the famous radio interview) used to refer to Abbey Road as a "medley" rather than a suite. So the Beatles, Who, Zappa etc basically refined an idea that was already around.