The clapping gathers pace and suddenly they’re into a restatement of the main instrumental theme for How You Love, basically a guitar solo before Freiberg’s bass steps in to take over for Which Do You Love, a bass and drums groove that leads into a low-key atmospheric vocal repeat of the first verse of the Bo Diddley original, dropping right down before the band kicks back into the main theme again on Who Do You Love to round out about twenty-four minutes of classy stuff.
While the average listener might be inclined to second thoughts when faced with that length of time devoted to what is, in essence, an extended workout of a single track it’s worth spending the time just so you can appreciate the majesty of Side Two.
It’s back to Bo Diddley territory for Mona, with someone announcing this here next one’s rock’n’roll over a thudding beat as Cipollina’s guitar comes in again floating over the riff in much the same manner as before. The vocal, when it arrives has a sort of gruff intent as that guitar bubbles away underneath it, bursting to the front again at the end of the verse while the drums thud away down below.
At around seven minutes, Mona explores the same territory as Who Do You Love, but after a second verse a neat little tempo change leads into Maiden of the Cancer Moon, the drums busier behind the floating guitar before some warped flamenco takes the listener into Calvary, a soundscape that has elements of the sound you heard on the live cuts, but a good deal more light and shade, something like a soundtrack to some old-style western movie, the same sort of soundscape that turns up later on the Allman Brothers’ Les Brers In A Minor.
It’s music that seems to have been crafted with sensory enhancement in mind, and while I don’t indulge in that sort of thing myself, the extended suite on Side Two works just as well at volume late at night in a dark room with a bottle of Liqueur Muscat at hand, in much the same way as, say, the post-Barrett pre-Dark Side Pink Floyd (Echoes or Atom Heart Mother, for example).
After the soundscapes, a minute and a half of the old Roy Rogers theme song Happy Trails brings proceedings to a satisfactory close. A pleasant way to round things off.
With cover art by George Hunter and his Globe Propaganda company featuring a painting that’s straight out of the old Wild West, Happy Trails is undoubtedly their greatest work, with a spark that later incarnations of the band failed to recapture, at least not on anything I’ve managed to track down.
An album which deserves a spot in the collection of any aficionado of loud electric guitar.