Under The Influence

This 1968 LP stands as a particularly strange UFO in the UFO-filled sky of the psychedelic and kitsch record collector.

In 1968, producer Enoch Light commissioned an LP from Hugh Heller, a publicist who used to put together albums of skits and short musical spoofs his agency privately distributed to industry people.

Heller teamed up with his agency's commercial jingle composer Dick Hamilton. Together, they wrote 12 light comedy tracks and brought in visionary electronician Robert Moog (inventor of the Moog synthesizer) to give their project a space-age feel.

This half-hour of material has aged tremendously, but to most connoisseurs of the genre, that is where its value resides.

You'll know the vocal in the featured track "Life Story", as it was lifted by Grandmaster Flash for his "Adventures on the Wheels of Steel" track.

For their second album, 'Wake Up...It's Tomorrow', Strawberry Alarm Clock built upon the solid writing and musicianship that inevitably carried over from the 'Incense and Peppermints' project.

In retrospect, it is baffling as to why they were relegated to the "one-hit wonders" file, as their most social and musically relevant statements had yet to be made.

The album does fit together in an odd way, and was more of a musicians' record than a producer's record -- and had more people heard it, they might've been remembered in subsequent years as a band and not just as an AM radio phenomenon with a funny name.