It all started with Pink Floyd ... No! It hardly started with Pink Floyd, though it may have started with Jules Verne or Cyrano de Bergerac. Musically, the rock & roll edition of the extraterrestrial impulse probably began somewhere long about Chuck Berry's "Our Little Rendezvous": "We'll build a spaceship/With a heavy payload/And we'll go beep! beep! beep! way out in the wide open blue!"

But that was only the Fifties when the rocket roll was just beginning, fertilized cross-idiomatically by the movies, which were grinding out such certified brain-busts as Forbidden Planet, Destination Moon, The Angry Red Planet, etc. etc. etc. With the coming of the Sixties the real age of the Starship commenced in rock & roll. Pink Floyd were first to couple it with the new sonic zoom technolorock, of course, but such hardy perennials as the MC5 ("Starship"), Black Sabbath ("Into the Void") and Deep Purple ("Space Truckin'") wasted no time in jumping on board. And least we forget, Wild Man Fischer himself honored the genre with an entry called "Rocket Rock," whose singular lyrics ("The sun rocks/The moon rocks/Everybody's doin' the rocket rock") put to shame the diarrhetic broadsides of Paul Kantner, who tended to come off in his mellower moments like Bing Crosby: "Have you seen the stars tonight?/Would you like to go up on A deck and look at them with me?"

Well, Sun Ra was into this stuff when some of these wimpoids were still wettin' their knickers, but Sun Ra at his best was no match for Pink Floyd at their best, because Sun Ra had too many notes, always too many notes just like a lot of those jazz cats, whereas Pink Floyd only had about three. At their best, that is; later they wandered off down the garden path with symphony orchestras and such, becoming altogether too prolix and a lot less nifty than in the days when they were writing songs with titles like "Set the Controls For the Heart of the Sun."

And Pink Floyd still take the sweepstakes in the rock race for space, but hold onto yer Buck Rogers beanies, kinder, because Hawkwind are coming up fast. If Pink Floyd were setting the controls for the heart of the sun, Hawkwind have the consummate sense of the present decadent state of astropolitics to stick to their rayguns in maintaining that "We Took the Wrong Step Years Ago." This is music for the astral apocalypse, and even if it does contain "Master of the Universe," their sound as well as their message is much closer to Pink Floyd than Black Sabbath, with a little bit of Sun Ra thrown in even, as in "You Shouldn't Do That" with its sonic squiggles that I am not at all sure are alto sax rather than audio generator or synthesizer.

Meaning to say that what this albums, friends, is Psychedelic from the cover to the fadeout of the last groove. The music itself mostly sounds pretty much the same: monotone jammings with hypnotic rhythms and solos unravelling off into ... well, space. The synthesizers warble, woof and scream and gurgle like barfing computers, the drums pound, and the singers chant Unknown Tongue rebops reminiscent of such blasts from the past, present and future as the first Mothers album, Hapshash and the Coloured Coat featuring the Human Host and the Heavy Metal Kids, and Germany's great psyche-overload band Amon Dyul II, of Yeti and Dance of the Lemmings fame. As well as the Stones' "Sing This All Together (See What Happens)," which may be at least as much a source point as Pink Floyd.

If you're glad that most of that stuff is part of the past now, you'll probably think this album is a pile of dogshit. If, on the other hand, you remember the absolute glee of filling your skull with all those squawks and shrieks and backwards-tapes and telegraphic open-tuned bridges between indescribable inner worlds conjured best neither by this music nor psyche-deliteful elixirs but rather by a fortuitous combination of the two–if that was one of your favorite eras in the decline of Western Civilization, then you'd better glom onto this album, which features not only the previously described musical treks but the most beautiful packaging I have seen in some time and an elaborate 24 page booklet called "The Hawkwind Log," enclosed to give you something to read while blowing out a few more chromosomes and chock full of prose, poetry, robots, DNA molecules, marijuana, novas, Stonehenge, 2001, gurus, phallic rocketships and tits 'n' ass, which may not be rock 'n' roll, but certainly beats "Fire 'n' Rain." (RS 111)

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