The Neon Philharmonic (album)

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The Neon Philharmonic
The Neon Philharmonic (album).jpeg
Studio album by The Neon Philharmonic
Released 1969 (1969)
Genre Pop
Length28:12
Label Warner Bros.
Professional ratings
Review scores
SourceRating
Allmusic Star full.svgStar full.svgStar half.svgStar empty.svgStar empty.svg [1]

The Neon Philharmonic, subtitled Dedicated to the Baroness d'A, is the eponymous second album by The Neon Philharmonic, again consisting of songs written by Tupper Saussy and sung by Don Gant. "You Lied" and "No One Is Going to Hurt You" were released as a single in July 1969.

The Neon Philharmonic

The Neon Philharmonic was an American psychedelic pop band led by songwriter and conductor Tupper Saussy and singer Don Gant. They released their only two albums in 1969, and they scored a Top 20 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 chart with "Morning Girl", which featured the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, when it hit the Top 40 in May of that year and rose to number 17 on Billboard and number 15 on the Cash Box chart. The band hit the charts again with "Heighdy-Ho Princess" in 1970. The group was produced by Saussy, Gant, and Bob McCluskey, and engineered by Ronald Gant, Don's brother. The group disbanded in 1975 after releasing numerous non-album singles. Although the first album stated "Borges Forever!", the group's concertmaster is really named Pierre Menard, and it is not a reference to the Jorge Luis Borges story Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,, Saussy was not conscious of the connection.

Frederick Tupper Saussy III was an American composer, musician, author, artist, and conspiracy theorist. His contemporaries describe him as a self-styled theologian, restaurant owner, ghostwriter of James Earl Ray's biography, King assassination conspiracy theorist, anti-government pamphleteer, and radical opponent of the federal government’s taxation and monetary authority. He was born in Statesboro, Georgia; grew up in Tampa, Florida; and graduated from the University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee, in 1958. His jazz combo there put out a university-subsidized album, Jazz at Sewanee, which included several original compositions. Thereafter Saussy taught English at Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville, Tennessee, co-founded an advertising agency, McDonald and Saussy, and kept his musical career alive with recording dates and club sessions. With the Nashville Symphony, he composed a work called The Beast with Five Heads (1965/66), based on "The Bremen Town Musicians", designed to replace Peter and the Wolf as a work to teach schoolchildren about orchestration, which continued to be used for the next fifteen years. For its 1968/69 season, the Nashville Symphony commissioned him to write a piano concerto for Bill Pursell; it was performed by the Symphony on January 14, 1969, with Thor Johnson conducting.

Donald W. Gant was an American singer, songwriter and record producer.

Contents

Each song has a brief parenthetical description of the intent of the song.

Track listing

Side one
  1. Are You Old Enough to Remember Dresden? (Questionnaire)
  2. Forever Hold Your Peace (Burning Bridges)
  3. You Lied (Going Away)
  4. Harry (Letter to a Friend)
Side two
  1. No One Is Going to Hurt You (A Promise)
  2. Long John the Pirate (Allegory)
  3. F. Scott Fitzgerald & William Shakespeare (You Can't Go Home Again)
  4. The Mordor National Anthem (A National Anthem for Rent to Emerging Nations)

Reissue

The album was reissued on the same disc as their first album, The Moth Confesses , in the box set Brilliant Colors: The Complete Warner Bros. Recordings in 2003.

<i>The Moth Confesses</i> album by The Neon Philharmonic

The Moth Confesses is the 1969 debut album by The Neon Philharmonic. Described as "A Phonograph Opera," it was inspired, according to the liner notes, by a production of Samuel Barber's Antony and Cleopatra, which Saussy attended after The New York Times claimed that it was a terrible opera, and wanted to see what a terrible opera looked like, which he surmised was its deliberate attempt to appeal to a one-time audience. In response, he conceived this album as a condensed opera, with a moth-like protagonist, focused on the "literary theme" of desperation. Saussy did not imagine it could be staged like Tommy, but offered it up as a challenge.

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Recorded in Acuff-Rose's tiny studio in Nashville on Ampex by Wesley Rose.

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References

  1. Mason, Stewart. "The Neon Philharmonic". Allmusic . Retrieved 16 November 2011.