Moody Blues’ “Question” might have enough changes to qualify?
From the same album there’s also “Rubber Ring/What She Said.” Nice!
There’s a lovely Devil With a Blue Dress/Good Golly, Miss Molly/Great Balls of Fire that the classic rock station plays. Don’t know for sure who does it, but it’s live.
I should look this up, but I believe that is Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels.
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Given the OP’s loose parameters, I can nominate a few more medleys. Or at least singles containing distinct movemtents.
– The Sweet’s “Love is Like Oxygen” from Level Headed
– INXS’s “Need You Tonight/Mediate” from Kick
– Rush’s seven-part “2112” from 2112 weighs in at over 20 minutes
Someone’s going to jump on me for skipping “Necromancer” or “Fountain of Lamneth” or Rush’s other medleys. They’ve done quite a few.
Easily the Abbey Roadiest album I know is (the wonderful, and sadly out of print) Motor Cycle, by legendary alternative Christian rock band Daniel Amos. I’d describe it as “This is what Abbey Road would have sounded like if the Beatles had been reading Frederick Buechner” The album has Abbey Road’s Side 1/Side 2 structure and, stylistically (and to some extent lyrically), sounds very, very much like late-period Beatles, though without being a ripoff or pastiche.
Their much earlier album, Shotgun Angel, also has Abbey Road’s structure, with Side 2 being a musically gorgeous, dramatic, but perhaps somewhat theologically off-putting medley based on the Biblical book of Revelation.
Electric Light Orchestra’s album El Dorado has some of the same medley-like musical structure and flow as Abbey Road, as do some of the Moody Blues’s albums.
Some that spring to mind are
Brian Wilson’s “Rio Grande Suite” (from his self-titled solo album)
Paul McCartney’s own “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” and, to some extent, “Band On the Run”
Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”
The Kinks’ “Shangri-La”
I consider that more of an anti-medley. Those “songs” aren’t designed to flow into one another but to jump around wildly. “Fingertips” was written to take advantage of CD players’ Random Play feature.
Wait a minute – where would Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” fit in all this?
Yep, you’re right. Always thought it was the other way around.
Admittedly, the Doors probably patterned the song after “The End” and “When the Music’s Over” from their earlier albums, so they didn’t need the Beatles as influences.
You might add “Who Do You Love” from Quicksilver’s second album, Happy Trails to the list. It’s one long song, but broken into a half-dozen components:
“Who Do You Love Part 1” – 3:32
“When Do You Love” – 5:15
“Where Do You Love” – 6:07
“How Do You Love” – 2:45
“Which Do You Love” – 4:38
“Who Do You Love Part 2” – 3:05
An even better example is Neil Young’s “Country Girl” from CSNY’s Deja Vu, containing three parts: “Whiskey Boot Hill,” “Down, Down, Down,” and “Country Girl (I Think You’re Pretty).”
After Bathing at Baxter’s by Jefferson Airplane - all of the songs on the record were organized into “song suites”, basically songs w/ thematic & musical similarities. The final song(s) are fused together as one - “Won’t You Try / Saturday Afternoon.”
Also Blows Against the Empire credited to “Paul Kantner & Jefferson Starship”, all the songs on side 2 meld together to form an extended story about hippies who hijack a spaceship and fly off to an outer space utopia (I guess Kantner never saw that “Star Trek” episode w/ the space hippies).
Then there’s the Grateful Dead’s “Goin’ Down the Road Feelin’ Bad / Not Fade Away” medley.
Springsteen does “Detroit Medley”: Devil with a Blue Dress/Good Golly Miss Molly/CC Rider.
And I think of We Will Rock You/We Are the Champions as a two-parter, since everyone plays it that way. Imagine my consternation when the college station here played just We Will Rock You. I guess they were trying to be alternative. :rolleyes:
On the live album More Miles Than Money, Alejandro Escovedo works the Waltzing Matilda segment of this song into a medley with his own Gravity and Falling Down Again.
The Allman Brothers B.B. King Medley includes Sweet Little Angel, It’s My Own Fault, and How Blue Can You Get?.
Not to mention a Queen single song medley entry, a little tune called “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
How about Weird Al’s polka medley sendups of popular music:
Angry White Boy Polka
Polkarama!
Polka Power!
The Alternative Polka
Polka Your Eyes Out
The Hot Rocks Polka (all Rolling Stones songs)
Polka Party! Hooked on Polkas
Polkas on 45
Of course it’s debatable whether you want to classify Weird Al as “rock.”
NOFX has a 19 minute song called The Decline which sounds like a bunch of mini songs pieced together. Its a pretty remarkable effort considering the genre, and some of the parts are really really good.
The Moody Blues did other medleys – “In Search of the Lost Chord” and “On the Threshold of a Dream” (especially the first side) run songs together.
Procol Harum’s “In Held 'Twas I” is a suite of six songs taking up one side of the original LP: “Glimpses Of Nirvana,” “'Twas Teatime At The Circus,” “In The Autumn Of My Madness,” “Look To Your Soul,” and “Grand Finale.”
If we’re talking two-song segues, there’s Lyle Lovett’s What Do You Do?/The Glory of Love," Led Zeppelin’s “Black Mountain Slide/Communications Breakdown,” and Santana’s “Black Magic Woman/Gypsy Queen” (most people don’t realize it’s two songs).
Hm. Looks like it’s Bruce’s medley of Mitch’s songs I hear. (Or possibly a medley Mitch did. The ‘Detroit Wheels’ seems to match my memory of what my radio streamed across the display.) On the other hand, I discovered Mitch did a medley called Jenny Take it! of C. C. Ryder and Jenny, Jenny.
Note that the title of the song (actually five words, “In Held 'Twas In I”) suggests dividing up the sections slightly differently from the official subtitles:
In the darkness of the night…
Held close by that which some despise…
’Twas teatime at the circus…
In the autumn of my madness…
I know if I’d been wiser…
I just thought of another one - “Horses” by Patti Smith, a long mult-part song suite that includes a bit of “Land of 1000 Dances” which (IIRC) was a hit by some mid-60s proto-punk band.
If the mini-operas A Quick One While He’s Away and Wire and Glass qualify, then so should the full-blown Tommy and Quadrophenia.