Will Your Mystery Date Be a Dream or a Dud?
OK, so this wasn’t the most challenging Mystery Date ever, but BigSteve stumbled close enough to the Mystery Date’s identity in an honest way. It is indeed Daevid Allen’s band Gong, with Allen sounding the way BigSteve expected him to sound! The mystery song is entitled “I Never Glid Before,” from 1973’s Angels Egg. Here’s another track from that album, with the exquisitely hippified title “Love Is How You Make It.”
[audio:https://www.rocktownhall.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Gong_11_Love-Is-How-You-Make-It-Original.mp3|titles=Gong, “Love Is How You Make It”]
Many moons ago I spent a weekend checking out the Gong collection of a Deadhead girl I was dating. For the first few weeks we dated I assumed she owned nothing but Grateful Dead albums and Dead bootlegs. That was all the music she ever played. Then one day I found a half dozen Gong albums in her collection. I thought I’d hit paydirt on an underground band I’d only heard about but that promised as many Cool Points as stumbling across a collection of Hawkwind albums, but instead I’d hit nothing but a dime bag of dirtweed. Man, those were some goofy albums, loaded with pixie imagery and the most giggly pothead jokes ever committed to vinyl. You’d think they got high for the first time, but they maintained that first-time high feeling over the course of a half dozen releases, including a couple of double albums. More power to them for keeping it fresh. They were bad, but in an interesting way.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to spoil the fun by guessing it too early. I almost guessed Peter Blegvad, but when I went to check the spelling of his name I discovered he’s American, and the singer on this was obviously not.
No, that’s fine, BigSteve. The way you expressed your guess made it funny enough to justify the early reveal. Bravo!
They were bad, but in a not very interesting way that was weirdly reminiscent of Donovan at times.