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.