Good rock opera isn't just born. It evolves. First comes a seed of inspiration, possibly triggered by mind-altering substances. Then it sprouts into a concept (something plausible, like a deaf, dumb and blind pinball champion). Next it is cultivated - the story line plotted, the characters developed and the songs written.
After that, it lays around on a shelf. When it does come up occasionally, much in the way last night's anchovies do, its creators make a face, wonder "what were we thinking?" and put it back on the shelf. Finally, the day comes when, with nothing better to do, with nothing to lose, with the realization that equally outlandish ideas have succeeded, the decision is made to show it to the world, or at least to Baltimore.
That may not be exactly how Tommy or Jesus Christ Superstar came to be, but it does explain the origins, pretty much, of The Giant Clam, a 19-song "rock opera" written by a local magazine editor and an animal pathologist.
Inspired by aquarium ornaments, latent childhood fears and, both writers admit, too much beer, the rock opera - dusted off, fine-tuned and rehearsed over the last several months - will premiere, five years after its creation, tomorrow at the Ottobar.
You could call it a rebirth - not just of The Giant Clam, but of the art form itself. But, depending on how you define it, the "rock opera" never totally died. A couple of cities even have rock opera companies, performing everything from Jesus Christ Superstar to rock-opera versions of Dracula and Macbeth.
Still, by the 1990s, more than 20 years after The Who started it all with Tommy in 1969, leading to a surge of rock musicals in the 1970s and beyond, true rock operas had become - like giant clams (tridacna gignas) - a threatened, if not endangered, species.
So it was only natural that Geoff Brown and John Keating, while sitting around one day pondering life's big mysteries - like why fake giant clams and miniature deep sea divers always showed up at the bottom of home aquariums, like why there was such a modern-day dearth of rock opera, like whether to order another beer - were struck, nearly simultaneously, by two thoughts:
What would happen if a diver got stuck in one of those giant clams? And why not write a rock opera about it?
As Brown, an editor at Baltimore magazine, explains it, "Stupidity took over from there."
