TOMORROW

I'll admit that I came here looking for pre-Yes Steve Howe. What I left with was a pretty cool proto-prog album bearing little relation to Yes - - even early Yes - - or to the Steve Howe whose guitar work I've come to enjoy.

To begin with, Tomorrow isn't progressive rock insofar it isn't progressive. It's late-1960s psychedelic pop-rock with the right balances of originality and derivativeness and of eccentricity and approachability to have warranted contemporary airplay. I imagine a George-Martin-produced Gerry and the Pacemakers album of Jimi Hendrix tunes. Throw in the fact that the songs were of pretty high quality, and this actually sounds like a marketable combination. So what happened?

One explanation for Tomorrow's lack of success in the UK was that it was recorded in the spring of 1967, but released nearly a year later, long after its shelf life had expired. While the timeline is accurate, the record company put out the single "My White Bicycle" / "Claramount Lake" in May and another 45, "Revolution" / "Three Jolly Little Dwarfs," in September. A more likely reason is that there was a glut of good psychedelic pop music and that the songs on Tomorrow were great album filler, but not catchy enough to rise to the top of a crowded market still dominated by singles.

Since Tomorrow (the album) lacks the outstanding songwriting and production of Sgt. Pepper, to which it is clearly indebted, and since Tomorrow (the band) was neither as daring as the Doors or the Pretty Things nor as progressive as late-1960s Yes or the Moody Blues, it seems fitting that they're remembered, at least among prog-rock fans, primarily as one of Howe's pre-Yes gigs - - despite the fact that Howe's playing is generally unremarkable.

Having said all of that, I'll add that Tomorrow is a solid album with little filler and a lot of charm. The edition I'm reviewing here (the 1999 EMI reissue) has very good sound for an album of the period, and has twelve "bonus tracks" (by Tomorrow and associated acts), some of which are as good as the canonical songs.

If you dig psychedelic pop from the Age of Aquarius, and can pick Tomorrow for cheap, why not? Even if it's only aged as well as my vocabulary, it's still pretty groovy.