The working man's prog band? For a bunch of biker type hippies Hawkwind was also pretty damned literate, quoting Percy Shelly and Longfellow and featuring the sci-fi author Michael Moorcock as guest orator on several cuts (he wrote several sci-fi novels that featured Hawkwind as characters in the story!). There's also an off-handed tribute to Neu! in "Opa-Loka," and an amazing cover in its original fold-out (which can be seen as a number of optical illusions if you look at it long enough, mostly it looks like a face). The lead cut, "Assault & Battery," is another one of those cuts that points towards why they were a punk influence, with Lemmy's bass thumping along and the vocals imploring "assault and battery on the human anatomy." Plenty of genius in this band at the time, a sort of middle period for them, with Lemmy leaving after this album and their heading in a different direction for a bit as 1975 went into 1976 and then into '77. Unlike other bands of their ilk, they seemed less oblivious to change and adapted with 'Quark, Strangeness & Charm' and their temporary off-shoot band the Hawklords. They were also a prog band that could rock mightily, especially the Lemmy years, but this album featured two drummers, something that made them amazingly impressive on tracks such as side two's "Magnu." While I'd have to say that 'Hall of the Mountain Grill' is my favorite album by Hawkwind overall, this album is an easy second choice. I used to have this sucker on 8-track back when I was a junior in high school, and it got plenty of play in the pick-up truck the summer in between that and my senior year. In the states it was released on Atco records, so it was one of those bright pink 8-tracks, the same as King Crimson and Led Zeppelin. So while the 8-track format did the graphics no justice, they were still cool objects because of their size, shape and color. A format I have little nostalgia for, but readily admit their lack of finesse put the crux more on the power of the music within them, however badly it was treated by in-opportune fade-outs and a rapid decrease in quality. The Moorcock bits are a bit silly, but I ate it all up back then, even though I myself, in my most nerdy sci-fi reading reading period, found Moorcock's books to be no more than wanky poop. The instrumentals and the longer, more rocking tracks, are the ultimate pay-offs. The speed freaks versus the potheads, as Lemmy would later characterize his eventual departure (and what about that "Kings of Speed" track that closes the album?). They were poised on the edge of something akin to a grand abyss, and while they'd have their moments over the next few years, I always thought it a shame that they ultimately became a sort of UK version of the Grateful Dead.