Search - Strawberry Alarm Clock :: Anthology

Harmless Psychedelia - And A Hit (Admit It!) You Had To Love

BluesDuke | Las Vegas, Nevada | 03/25/2002

(4 out of 5 stars)

"You can't get much better than the Strawberry Alarm Clock for what seems to have been a mild joke that turned into the blockbuster hit of early 1967: with a teenage friend of the band (who never became a full member) taking the mike on the session, what was supposed to be a B-side turned into "Incense and Peppermints" and, it's about time we all admitted it, you had to be among the smugger-than-thou True Hippie Culturesmog to say anything other than you were getting a terrific kick out of this cagey little rocker. If you were REALLY hip, you were catching onto the song's slightly whacky lyric sendup (probably of Simon and Garfunkel's "Scarborough Fair," what with the spice half-puns that make up about half the lyric), the sleek fuzz guitar break by future Lynyrd Skynyrd string-strangler Ed King, the magnificently cheesy electric organ, and the overall sense that what you had here was a band who couldn't decide whether they wanted to be the "Sgt. Pepper" Beatles or the Beach Boys of "The Beach Boys Today" (a later member of the band has said they liked surf music as much as Indian music) and decided indecision was a virtue if you had some great organ licks to tie it together and the chutzpah to play it with a straight face.The trouble was, what started as a b-side shot to the top of the charts. And they never again hit the kind of in-the-pocket freak accident that "Incense and Peppermints" was, but neither were they complete stiffs. Their experimental eclecticism was actually more endearing than the hipsters' ideas of psychedelic earnestness were producing (any two minutes of the Strawberries' madness beat the living bejesus out of any two sides worth of the Great Jefferson Dead Messenger Starship), and they had a cheerfully offbeat melodic flair that anticipates some of the late 1970s-early 1980s retropsych experimenters (the early Echo and the Bunnymen, Icicle Works, and Teardrop Explodes come to mind). They seem to have been sunk predominantly by some shenanigans involving an early but fired manager (who put a bogus version of the band on the road while they were trying to push their followup singles, including the underrated "Tomorrow" and an early version of "Good Morning Starshine" - which might have been a hit but for, rumour has it, someone once associated with the band who sent their pre-release demo of the song to the singer who ended up charting with it: Oliver) and a round of personnel changes; by 1971 they were through. The anthology here gathers up the better of the band's peculiar output. And you find, as you listen on, that it's no great shakes to keep repeating "Incense and Peppermints" until the rest of the material grows on you slowly, whichever selections do. They weren't the first band who couldn't live up to the inadvertent promise of an unexpected blockbuster and they won't be the last. But they gave it one of the more memorable shots and, anyway, "Incense and Peppermints" has outlived its critics (probably to the band's surprise as much as anyone else's) and still sounds as refreshing as a roll of Lifesavers."

Strawberry Alarm Clock rocks!

running_man | 06/23/1999

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Strawberry Alarm Clock is beyond cool. When I bought this CD, I listened to it whenever I was in a room with a CD player-- this went on for weeks. I LOVE this CD."

Great CD, what a surprise!

Michael Frank | Bellevue, WA United States | 08/02/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"The music is wonderful-- soft-and-psychedelic rock from 1967-69 or so, and is a COMPLETE representation of the best work from SAC. I was very pleased to find "Pretty Song from (the movie) 'Psych-Out'" on this CD, exactly the same version as used at the opening of the Susan Strasberg/Jack Nicholson 1968 film.



Several other songs of similar type are on this CD, taken from all of SAC's albums, making this a very complete compilation. Sound reproduction and clarity are excellent. Great stuff."