Turn on, tune in, turn your eyes around 

With the sun having set over the Summer of Love several months before, a few rays of psychedelic sunshine were still beaming down on the Top 40 charts in January 1968.

Driven by its Hammond organ and fuzz guitar -- and the cowbell, the Strawberry Alarm Clock’s Incense and Peppermints was slipping down the charts after holding the number one spot for one week in November. It was easy to question the band’s Haight-Ashbury Street creds, always neatly attired for television in kaftans, paisley pants and beads as if they had a key to the costume closet of a theatrical company, plus their contributions to the soundtrack of Dick Clark’s hippie exploit flick Psych-Out. Nonetheless, still groovy after all these years.

Strawberry Alarm Clock

According to Eric Burdon, what broke up the Animals was that he got turned on to acid and pot, while the rest of the band preferred Guinness. The reinvented Burdon found a new band of like-minded musicians and together they wrote Monterey, which may help explain the obvious lyrics and production.

Referring to their fellow musicians who played the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967 as "young gods" and "religion was being born" was pure hippie drivel, calling Brian Jones “his majesty Prince Jones” is just embarrassing. Hey Eric, you may have forgotten that you and Jones are peers.

The clumsiness continues by namechecking musicians followed by their corresponding instrument: Ravi Shankar by a sitar, The Who with power chords, Hugh Masekela by a trumpet. I will admit to really digging this record when I first heard it as age 13. Monterey went to #15 on the Billboard Hot 100.

The experimentation of Sgt. Pepper (and Revolver) likely gave producer James Guercio permission to drop a snippet of Avant-garde music into the middle of the pop ballad Susan by the innocuous Buckinghams (without the band's knowledge). The sample (Central Park in the Dark written for chamber orchestra by Charles Ives in 1906) made Susan the scariest thing on Top 40 radio, monster movie music crashing out of nowhere, a thunderstorm in the middle of a sunny afternoon. Most radio stations played the edited version without the noise. It peaked on the charts at #11.

Unassuming and pretty aren’t words very often used to describe Rolling Stones songs, yet She’s A Rainbow is both (which may explain why it only got as far as #25). The lyrics are pure acid trip (“She shoots colors all around, like a sunset going down”), although the strings (arranged by future Led Zeppelin John Paul Jones) can border on what used to be known as elevator music.

By the end of the month, Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In) by the First Edition was beginning to move up the charts, as good a satire of psych music as there ever was (although I always doubted whether the band was in on the joke), signaling an end to Top 40’s brief flirtation with psychedelia.