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Buying a ticket to see a concert by a musical artist who got their start in the ’60s and ’70s means entering a state of suspended disbelief. No, they aren’t going to sound as good as they did back in their heyday, and, in some cases, the group on stage might only feature one member from the original or classic lineup.
Even with that unspoken understanding, what then to make of the band that played at the White Eagle Saloon this past Sunday calling itself Gong. Daevid Allen and Gilli Smyth, the mercurial musicians who founded this project back in 1967, died in 2015 and 2016, respectively. The five men currently touring the U.S. under the name Gong have all logged time in latter-day lineups of the group when both Allen and Smyth were still alive. And according to singer-guitarist Kavus Torabi, it was Allen’s deathbed wish that these men “inherit” the band.
The logic of this clearly mattered little to the few dozen folks who packed the White Eagle to hear this modern-day Gong rip through a set of heady prog rock and neo-psychedelia. They were rapt from the jump, hanging on every complex time signature and LSD-drenched lyrical vision of intergalactic travel and spiritual drift.
What I can’t decide is whether this iteration of Gong did the right thing by sticking almost entirely to material from their three post-Allen recordings. The music was appropriately knotty and spacey, with moments of uplift provided by Ian East’s arsenal of woodwinds and the group’s lovely vocal harmonies. But there wasn’t much else to distinguish it from the quagmire of other modern prog artists all aiming to recapture a touch of that genre’s former glories.