The Group “Touch” A Progressive Rock Classic Tonight 12AM cst

Year: 1969, 2012 - Label: Esoteric Recordings

This is another review I ran across on the 60’s progressive rock band “TOUCH”.  First airplay was on WJDX-FM in 1968

Bubbling psychedelia of Touch allows himself crazy digressions blending beat, jazz, folk, and classical music, drawing intaglio paths that will soon borrow the masters of prog-rock.

As its name suggests, the progressive rock not did in one day. And if it is generally accepted that his maturation occurred somewhere between the 1967 Sgt. Pepper's detonator and the developer In the court of the Crimson King 1969, with both brave and brilliant pioneers named Procol Harum, Moody Blues, Soft Machine, Pink Floyd, The Nice or even Renaissance, the supposed official history has perhaps forgot to remember also less conspicuous pioneers but not less deserving. Touch, the inescapable Esoteric Recordings label made us happiness to republish the unique album is those unjustly forgotten adventurers. In a genre whose main inventors are almost all English, do not be expected while to add to the "short list" of the great Scouts today unknown American group. And yet...

The history of Touch merges much with that of its keyboardist and main composer Don Gallucci, which has experienced in 1963 at the age of 15 years early glory within the Kingsmen, with a famous cover of the song "Louie, Louie". Back in high school, Gallucci monte Don & The Goodtimes, a group that will soon mutate into Touch, when he forsakes his Goody-goody pop for more adventurous ways in the wake of psychedelia and the acid rock of the end of the Decade. The group moved to Los Angeles and began working on ambitious psychedelic murals he will get canned in 1968, under the leadership of producer Gene Shiveley, at Sunset Sound studios. "This disc has been designed as a kind of spiritual quest, his goal was to allow the listener to change his State of consciousness passing by meditation or drugs, but by the music," confided: Don Gallucci much later. The ambition of the project does not go unnoticed during its recording and many curious then press Studios Sunset Sound, including some very prestigious like Grace Slick (from Jefferson Airplane) or even Jimi Hendrix and Mick Jagger. Leaving early 1969, the Touch album received acclaim critically, on both sides of the Atlantic, and particularly in the circle of rock musicians. Kerry Livgren, future Member of Kansas, and English bands like Yes and Uriah Heep will quote it later as one of the major influences of their debut.

Listening to the seven titles of this forgotten Nugget, one easily understands why: bubbling psychedelia of Touch with never actually eyes on influences typically American. But affords crazy digressions blending beat, jazz, folk, and classical music, drawing intaglio paths that will soon borrow the masters of prog-rock. It is sometimes a little messy (title introductory "We feel" fine, maybe the more sickly) but more often delightfully inventive and bold, both formats under 5 minutes (the delicate 'Friendly birds', groovy 'Down at Circe's space') on erections psyche/proto-prog flirting with ten minutes when they do exceed not ("The spiritual death of Howard Greer"(, "Seventy five"). Psychedelia imaginative and fertile touch knows thus wield the cosmic and the delicate, shackling acidic guitars and notes of classical piano or solemn organ, alternating colors beatlessiennes or downright jazz passages, book of tasty lulls to better accelerate in frenetic electric madness. Beyond the obvious historic value for the disk, his music remains to rediscover first because it reveals itself often exciting, by this fresh and unbridled inventite typical of a time decidedly particularly inspired. Don Gallucci refused to turn his group after the release of the album (on the pretext that the complexity of his music was impossible to recreate on stage), it will be quickly released by record labels, which immediately will precipitate its end (Gallucci will become a producer, including the "Funhouse" by the Stooges).

The reissue of Esoteric Recordings that more relevant is all that, faithful to his habits, the label has added to the original work a demi-dizaine bonus, including three demos of 1968 and a title remained unreleased, "Blue feeling", which the almost 12-minute cosmic pop would not mismatched on the album. The last unpublished proposed, "The second coming of Suzanne» (!), originally intended for a surrealist film, later to the Group since it dates from 1973: there is Gallucci and Joey Newman, guitarist of Touch, flanked by three new musicians for an instrumental that has this time indeed both feet in the prog-rock, especially in a second half quite dark and tortured evoking the labyrinths of King Crimson or black van der Graaf Generator. More reason to not miss this essential and valuable reissue...