"I went to this20place called Blakes in London, which was a hangout for rockers," recalls Joey Molland. "It was a cool little place. One night I saw a friend of mine there named Mark Clarke; a bass player from Liverpool who'd played with Uriah Heep and Colosseum. We were just talking and having a laugh and I asked him, 'What are you doing?' He said, 'I'm going up to Jerry Shirley's this weekend. I'm going to stay there and we'll probably have a jam – why don't you come with us.' I didn't really know Jerry, but I thought it would be cool. So Mark calls him and Jerry says. 'Come on up.' We go on up to Jerry Shirley's house – he had a lovely little farmhouse outside of London. We found out that day that he had just left Humble Pie. Later on that night we had a jam; I think it was Clem Clemson, Jerry, Mark, myself and there may have been one or two others. We had a lot of fun, just playing rock 'n' roll songs and blues songs.The next morning Mark, Jerry and myself decided to put a band together. We thought, 'Why not. But do we have any songs?' I had a couple of songs, which I played to them. One was called 'Once Again A Love Song' and the other was called 'Dark Cloud'. Likewise, Mike had a couple songs. We also got a keyboardist, a guy named Dave Kafinetti from the band Rare Bird. He went on to be the keyboard player in 'Spinal Tap'. What a knockout guy!" Kafinetti was replaced before the recording of t he album by Peter Wood who co-wrote 'Year of the Cat' with Al Stewart.

The Natural Gas album was recorded at Crystal Studios in Los Angeles and produced by legendary Mountain member Felix Papalardi. "Felix was really nice," says Joey, "a real sociable guy and talented fellow. As far as a producer went, we really wanted Mal Evans to do it. But the label wanted Felix Papalardi, the bass player from Mountain who'd done Cream and all that – the label wanted him to do it. Apparently Felix wanted to do the project as well, so that was that. I think Mal was pretty disappointed actually." - more on this story

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