The music contained on this LP was created in a unique historical moment -the late 60’s and early 70’s-when the lines that had long divided “serious” from “popular” music had begun to dissolve. In its ambition and eclecticism, the Neon Philharmonic’s work compares favorably to that of such contemporaries as Burt Bacharach, Jimmy Webb, and The Beatles -all of whom viewed pop song forms as vehicles for more than two-and-a-half minutes of verse/chorus/verse.
Not a group so much as a project, the Neon Philharmonic compromised vocalist Don Gant and Tupper Saussy, a decidedly unconventional songwriter/arranger/keyboardist who was the duo’s guiding creative force. Signed to Warner Bros. Records, their debut single “Morning Girl” quickly climbed to No. 17 on the Billboard chart in April 1969 and was nominated for two Grammy Awards. By year’s end the duo had released two more singles and two LP’s, The Moth Confesses and The Neon Philharmonic, recorded at the Acuff-Rose studios in Nashville and featuring a host of top-flight session players (Norbert Putnam, Jerry Kerrigan, Kenneth Buttrey, Chip Young…).
The Neon Philharmonic recorded the material collected on this album during an extended period of studio activity in 1970-71. The thirteen songs assembled here on To Be Continued—five A-sides, five B-sides, and three songs unissued at the time—comprise a third Neon Philharmonic album quite different from its predecessors, largely because it was never envisioned as an album at all. After waiting for another “Morning Girl” for more than two years (only “Heighdy-Ho Princess” grazed the outer limits of the Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks in 1970), Warner Bros. gave up and dropped the group in mid-1971, leaving this period of The Neon Philharmonic’s work unknown and unavailable to all but the most dogged collectors of promo 45s for the next several decades. Now all those songs are available once again on vinyl, for the first time in 50 years!
