Gracious! (the ! was their idea, not mine). Initially starting off as a blues band, morphing into hard rock before landing on riffs, Mellotrons and Symphonic Rock as their legacy.

They lasted from 1969 until 1971 and had two albums to their credit, both for Vertigo, the adventuresome subsidiary of Philips Records in the UK.

Tonight's track comes off their debut album Gracious! (S/T). This track opens the album and is appropriately called Introduction.

I'll be dead-honest and say that a lot of what was considered Symphonic Rock was pretty pretentious, rolling in self-conscious grandiosity with a short shelf life with listeners. Some of it morphed into mainstream pop (a-la ELO), but even those were eventually given over to more conventional presentations, usually dropping the references to Vivaldi and Bach in the process.

Symphonic Rock was a short-lived phenomenon, an outgrowth of Psychedelia and touching on Progressive, but it did exist and Gracious! were busy practitioners as tonights track illustrates.