A private-pressing rock opera LP from 1973, An Eye In Each Head by Anthony Adams (Harlequin Records), captured the music of a decidedly offbeat and counterculture stage production, launched right here in San Diego. The show earned a measure of local fame and notoriety, not only for its (perfectly legit) nudity and (witty) drug references, but for its offbeat storyline subject matter. 

The show concerned a fly who eventually becomes king of the world, due to man’s evil and self destructive nature. Then the fly reveals that he’s really Jesus… 

Show creator Anthony Adams – who was in a local sixties teen garage band, the Norsemen – is credited by many as having launched the first true recording of a rock opera. The Who’s Tommy is often regarded as a song cycle, Jesus Christ Superstar is most accurately classified an oratorio, and SF Sorrow by The Pretty Things was never truly staged, leaving An Eye In Each Head a clear contender for the title, having been staged as well as recorded. Pictured here is the mind-blowing cover art By Conchita Vesco. 

“I saw this performed at UCSD with my parents,” says Gravedigger 5 vet Ted Friedman. “I think my cousin was in it. For real, I was real young. It was weird. I was maybe 10, if that, there may have been some nudity in it. A fly takes over the world. I remember my parents saying maybe it wasn't a good idea to take us there. I just remember it being really trippy and kind of long. I think it kind of scared us.”

Anthony Adams went on to a prolific and storied career in the theater, as well as working on TV series like Disney’s Duck Tales and Jim Henson’s Fraggle Rock. Among his original plays and musicals that he’s directed in San Diego and London are The Adventures of Olig and Obster, A Song For Gar, the Living Cell, and The Great Relativity Bomb Plot.  He also composed music for the national touring production of The Grapes Of Wrath, starring Ed Harris and John Carradine. 

Adams’ Los Angeles-based Adams Entertainment has filmed DVDs of two musical stage productions produced at the Birch North Park Theatre; 2006’s Primal Twang: The Legacy of Guitar and Love-In, a celebration of 1967’s “Summer of Love.” Both episodes are part of a DVD series on the history of musical styles, featuring a mix of storytelling and performances from guest musicians including Eric Johnson, Jesse Colin Young, and San Diego’s own Rockola and Strawberry Alarm Clock (“Incense & Peppermints”).

Barefoot Hockey Goalie has created several bizarre mini rock operas, such as Darius, An Interview With Thomas Edison, and Fedik's Butcher Shop, the latter about Estonian Butchers and their adventures in America, with songs about raccoons and hoodlums. Their 2011 EP Kid Champion, about an ill-fated boxer VS the Devil, was recorded in San Diego with Marcos Fernandes and Matthew Pray. 

They debuted Clairemont: A Suburban Rock Opera in 2022. According to the band, "The story concerns the plight of Ian Golden Peterson as he navigates a filterless childhood and espouses suburban exceptionalism in the era of radio. Fast forward to the present as the consequences of neglect and indulgence bring Ian to consider his travails in the context of the infamous Clairemont tank ride of 1995. Can a homecoming help secure his comeback? Is it the last one?"

Tapestry Blu was a 1980s electronic pop duo, highlighted by the fabulous falsetto of William Gregory (who went by the French pronunciation, Guillaume Gregory) and Nick De Herrera, AKA Niko, a velvet virtuoso on Yamaha DX7 keys who, like Gregory, graduated from the School of Creative and Performing Arts in Chula Vista. Both also attended Southwestern College. 

William Gregory was both an engaging singer and a local fashion icon. Niko's virtuosity on the keyboard was astonishing, evoking the best of Bronski Beat, Pet Shop Boys, Visage, Depeche Mode, New Order, Soft Cell, and Yaz. As Tapestry Blu, they were very popular in the late 80s coffee house/gallery scene in San Diego. The duo composed a rock opera called Electric Butterfly that was performed at least twice at UCSD. Few recordings of Tapestry Blu seem to exist, though Gregory thinks he may still have a VHS video recording of their Electric Butterfly rock opera. 

"We professionally recorded one song, I actually have a good tape version of that somewhere. We had entered this competition where the winner got to get a professional recording of one song. We won. That song was called 'She’s Gone,' a pretty song that could have been recorded by Kenny Rogers or Lionel Richie. It's a very nice recording with an acoustic guitar. We just recorded ourselves. I regret not having  recorded us professionally."  

It turns out that Electric Butterfly was not the pair's first ambitious attempt to do a grown-up Little Rascals by putting on a whole show. "Nick and I love, loved, loved, musical theater, especially Andrew Lloyd Weber and Les Miz sorta stuff. Our first show was produced at Southwestern College, where Nick and I attended. It was called Welcome to the Shangri-La.  We had a great cast. It was a 1920s style musical. [Southwestern College Professor Emeritus] Bill Virchis loved us, he wanted us to write an adaptation of Royal Hunt of the Sun. I wish we had. But Nick and I had personal issues. Like most musical teams do. Then we decided to write Electric Butterfly, a post apocalyptic punk homage to Madame Butterfly, long before Miss Saigon came along. That pissed me off. It had lots of problems but it could have been something big I think, with some work. It was at UCSD. I think the L.A. Times did a small writeup. We did it over a few nights and it was sold out. People loved it. It was edgy, punky, and passionate." 

Chapman Stick player Tom Greisgraber is considered one the best Stick players in the U.S. (behind King Crimson's Tony Levin). He has toured throughout the United States and Europe with artists like Bert Lams, Agent 22, the California Guitar Trio and Jerry Marotta. He has also performed several times for the Grammys and has opened shows for a who's who list of rock and jazz groups like Tony Levin (Peter Gabriel), Stanley Jordan, Paula Cole, Andy Summers (The Police), Tim Reynolds (Dave Matthews' Band), Steve Hackett (Genesis), Tower of Power, Al Dimeola, Adrian Belew (King Crimson), and Tuck and Patti.  

In 2021, Griesgraber recorded a sort of prog-rock wagon train western set in 1840, recorded with Bert Lams of the California Guitar Trio, Unnamed Lands, telling the Reader that it's “My most ambitious project yet...it's a concept record, complete with twelve-page booklet.” 

“I had this three-part story idea come to me, about a group of covered-wagon travelers,” he says of the narrative, which developed after the duo distilled around 30 hours of recorded instrumentals down to 14 potential tracks. “I knew nothing about the period, hadn’t been reading or watching anything about it, [so] it was really strange the way it came to me. That gave us the title ‘Prairie Suite’ for that piece.”

"We wrote most of the material together over a period of about four years. Bert would fly out and stay here for a week or so at a time. Most of the pieces started with improvisations in the studio. We would just set up all the gear, hit record and see what happened. Eventually, we would listen back to the improvs and find our favorite moments. Using these as rough ideas, we then started trying to combine and elaborate on them and slowly turned them into pieces that could be played live."

"We took these out on tours around the US, further refining them each night. Along the way, we wound up with about 30 hours of material recorded. Eventually, we realized there was a core group of fourteen tracks that seemed to really work together as an album."

Combined with Bert Lams’s adventurous guitar work (which continues to evolve, long after touring with Crimson’s king Robert Fripp), Unnamed Lands, explores tonal territories rarely covered. “I’ve played with quite a few musicians over the years, but most of them drummers. In that scenario, it’s easy, because the Stick and drums each have their own sonic space. With Bert on acoustic guitar, the two instruments are much more similar.... Bert doesn’t think anything like a conventional guitarist. In fact, I don’t think you’ll find him strumming chords on the entire album! He plays tuned in 5ths, Robert Fripp’s ‘new standard tuning,’ and spends a lot of time playing counter riffs and melodies to what I’m doing.”

Even the most famous rock opera of all, the Who's Tommy, now has a lot of San Diego DNA in its lineage. It's summer 1992 production at La Jolla Playhouse, to which Pete Townshend himself contributed by co-writing the book, was a critically acclaimed success directed and co-written by Des McAnuff that revitalized the rock opera in advance of its famed Broadway run. A touring version came to the San Diego Civic Theater a few years later. When Tommy was again staged locally in 2011, the production starred local pastor and Grammy-nominated gospel artist Anthony Charles Williams II, AKA Tonex (pronounced “To-nay”), who won a Craig Noel Award for Dreamgirls in 2008 and later changed his name to B. Slade. The original 1992 La Jolla cast of Tommy reunited in La Jolla for a one-night-only performance in October 2019.