40 Year Itch : The Stream of Time

Steve Hillage :  It's All Too Much

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In September of 1976 ex-Gong guitarist Steve Hillage released his follow up to the fan favorite, Fish Rising. Produced by Todd Rundgren at Secret Sound in Woodstock with Utopia backing, L is bookended by two psychedelic covers, Donovan's "Hurdy Gurdy Man" and the Beatles' "It's All Too Much". Having recently recorded near perfect note for note covers of 60's classics for Faithful, Rundgren and Utopia provide clean, shiny back up. Fans of great prog rock will find more treasures in deeper cuts.

Gong : Expresso

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Gong replaced Hillage with Allen Holdsworth as it dispensed with psychedelia and wit and became a progressive jazz rock band led by percussionist Pierre Moerlen. Opener "Expresso" will wake you up better than anything you can order at  a coffee shop. Tom Moon, calling Gazeuse! a , prog-rock gas, listed the album among his 1,000 Recordings To Hear Before You Die. Still, many say they miss the anarchic days of the flying teapot.

40 Year Itch : Salty Solomon Salmon Soul of Man

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      How could Gong guitarist Steve Hillage be so lyrically trippy and such a mind-blowing guitarist all at the same time? For his first solo album, Fish Rising, Hillage recruits his Gong bandmates and Canterbury contemporaries for this psonically psublime psychedelic prog rock classic. A must buy!

      The fact that all the songs revolve around fish shouldn't scare anyone away. 

     "The Salmon Song" is a nearly nine minute suite made up of four tunes : Salmon Pool,  Solomon's Atlantis Salmon,  Swimming With the Salmon and King of the Fishes.

40 Year Itch : Those We Missed December '73

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Big ass riffs and stadium-quality power chords made Bachman Turner Overdrive's second album one of the biggest of 1974. It ain't anywhere near as sophisticated as what Bachman had pulled off with The Guess Who, but with hits "Let It Ride" and  "Takin' Care of Business", BTO found the formula to success.

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Producer Andrew Loog Oldham told reporters "If you hated Cosmic Wheels, you'll love this one." Whereas the former was Donovan's entry into the Glam Rock fashion styles, Essence to Essence is a quiter more spiritual album with Donovan whispering cosmic lyrics over acoustic guitars.

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By most accounts recorded on acid in a French castle, Gong's follow up to Flying Teapot

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Live Dates is a double live album featuring the double lead guitar attack of Andy Powell and Ted Turner. It should make fans of Wishbone Ash's masterpiece, Argus, happy. Turner would leave after this album and many fans would follwo his example.

40 Year Itch : I Am, You Are,We Are... Crazy

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For those of you who thought Syd Barrett or the Flaming Lips were as strange as Rock Music could get, fall upon your knees before Gong. Formedin 1967 in France by Daevid Allen, a former member of Soft Machine, and his wife, Sorbonne Professor Gilly Smyth, Gong celebrated the weird, the spacey, the outer fringes where jazz and psychedelia could intersect with repetitive chanting, improvisation and musical dexterity. Aw, fug it. You really can't write about what Gong sounds like. You simply must sit for a spell and listen:





In 1973, Gong released Flying Teapot, act one of the Radio Gnome Invisible trilogy. It's the first place to dip your feet into the Gong sound and find out whether you're strange enough to hear more. I think it's fun. And that's about as deep as I've studied the matter.