Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email


2026 April 06 • Monday

Before Stu Phillips achieved automobile immortality by writing the theme and music for Knight Rider, he created some a fantastic biker score for Hells Angels on Wheels, the 903rd Soundtrack of the Week.

The main title theme is an off-kilter groover with amazing fuzz guitar sound and a chorus of male voices singing "ba ba ba". Yeah, it's awesome.

Then there's slinky electric bass guitar with sitar and tambura playing over it and percussion that includes drum kit and what sounds like an attempt to produce tabla sounds without having tabla for "Flowers".

"Biker Ballet" is a hippy dippy type song that brings back the slow-motion scatting chorus from the main title theme and adds a spacey "Movin' but goin' nowhere" line that gets sung a bunch of times.

After that comes "Skip to My Mary J", a straight rocker with really tough fuzz guitar sound. This might be Davie Allan & The Arrows. Sure sounds like them.

The next track is "Study in Motion #1" which has vocals by The Poor and was co-written by Phillips with Chuck Sedacca. It starts out with the "Movin' but goin' nowhere" line and similar flower-power feel as "Biker Ballet" but expands it with more lyrics and more elaborate harmonic structure.

The scatting chorus returns over a groove that's like a hybrid of "Blue Rondo a la Turk" and a conventional surf/hot rod number in the energetic "Tea Party" number. Flutes get featured and the guitar and drums are really good.

There has to be a slow and pretty song on here and Phillips delivers with "Poet", which sails by pretty to arrive at gorgeous. It's just a beautiful ballad with hauntingly lovely chord changes and a bewitching keyboard sound. Clavinet maybe?

"Sunday Art and Football" is kind of a hybrid of "Flowers" and "Tea Party" while "Poet Scores" is a jazzy, atmospheric number for a combo of flute, electric harpsichord, flute, electric bass guitar, drums and vibes. More people should do stuff with this instrumentation.

The same combo comes back for the final piece, "Four, Five, Six", another jazzy number with a relaxed swing feel.