Illustration by Sean McCabe __Long before __the Flaming Lips decided to turn the idea of malevolent mechs into a high-concept Broadway musical, Alan Parsons set the stage with his bot-fearing prog rock. To anyone familiar with black lights and apple bongs, Parsons is best known as the engineer behind Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and founder of the Alan Parsons Project. To those of us raised on color TV and tallboys, he's a memorable Simpsons punch line.
In 1977, Parsons and collaborator-singer Eric Woolfson, presumably high — off their success — recorded I Robot, an ethereal, outré homage to sci-fi author Isaac Asimov's similarly titled collection of paranoiac Cold War parables. The album's thesis? Robots (exhale slowly) will take over the world, man. "Our album was a warning that machines were potentially going to become smarter than us," Parsons says of his platinum-selling opus. "They were destined to become very dangerous."
Ultimately, it was industry drones and not killer droids who destroyed the concept album by embracing tech-savvy '80s pop. That is, until now: The just-released 30th-anniversary reissue, along with other Parsons remastered works, are worthy of a revisit for the iPod generation — and a Parsons revival. Apple bong not included.
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