THE GREATEST SONGS OF THE 1960s THAT NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD
901) The Strawberry Alarm Clock — “Sit with the Guru”
This ’68 A-side (reaching #65) and track from the Strawberry Alarm Clock’s second album (see #127, 272) is “jaunty and poppy, with an aggressive guitar vying for supremacy with the lovely, melodic vocal work. . . . [It’s a] garage psych classic . . . [that] pretty much has it all: blistering electric guitar, lush vocals . . , ringing keyboards, enjoyable slapdash drumming, and hippie lyrics. There’s even a sudden, sitar-led freakout section towards the end.” (Jeremy, https://www.unwindwithsac.com/songs/sit-with-the-guru)
Richie Unterberger tells us that:
[Vocalist/keybordist Mark] Weitz came up with [“Guru”] as an attempt to get a follow-up single for “Tomorrow” . . . . [Guitarist Ed] King says it was “written to please the record company,” and Weitz recalls, “I called Ed over to my house, we worked out the bridge, and the song was finished musically. ‘Sit with the Guru’ had lyrics written by an outside UNI [the label]-hired writer, Roy Freeman . . . . I guess you might say it was with the flow of the times, especially since we were indoctrinated into Transcendental Meditation for a brief period of time while on a Beach Boys tour of the southern U.S. Originally the song ended too normal. We came up with the middle eastern horn raga thing. I remember that UNI didn’t like that ending. It dirtied it up. In a way they were right, but we kept it that way anyway. We were fighting that kind of thing all the time.”
http://www.richieunterberger.com/sac1.html
Speaking of those hippie lyrics — here’s a representative taste:
“Yesterday’s invalidated
Hip mankind on, turn your mind on
Sit with the guru
Meditation, ooh! . . .Lyrically, “Sit With The Guru” is a jumble of such new-agey descriptions of an evening with some all-important ‘guru’. Who is it exactly? Well it may be an actual person, or LSD or some similar drug, or the experience itself. Maybe it’s something else entirely. Ultimately it doesn’t really matter. . . . In this song, the lyrics are actually more psychedelic than the music, at least until the trip really starts and the atonal, arrhythmic sitar takes over for a few brief seconds.
https://www.unwindwithsac.com/songs/sit-with-the-guru
Of the Clock’s second album, Wake Up . . . It’s Tomorrow, Bruce Eder tells us:
Strawberry Alarm Clock toured nationally for the second half of 1967 and much of 1968 off the success of “Incense and Peppermints” [see #704 for the genesis of ‘I&P’] . . . . The five-man version of the band cut a follow-up single, “Tomorrow[]” . . . that reached number 23 nationally in early 1968. The song had lots of great hooks, vocal and instrumental, with a killer feedback-soaked guitar break . . . . [A]long with the rest of the album, it also benefited from the presence of vocal coach Howard Davis who was brought in to help the members push the harmony singing displayed on Incense and Peppermints to new levels of sophistication. . . . Despite the success of “Tomorrow,” the album . . . never sold as well as it should have, mostly because Uni Records was late in getting it out, a month after “Tomorrow” had started its run up the charts. . . . [But the album] was much more an expression of the five members, complicated by the sometimes very direct (and sometimes interfering) influence of the record label, which was always looking for the most accessible, commercial sound, and also by some disagreements. . . . [T]he album did fit together in its odd way . . . .
https://www.allmusic.com/artist/strawberry-alarm-clock-mn0000633079/biography
As to SAC, Bruce Eder:
Strawberry Alarm Clock occupies a peculiar niche in the history of ’60s rock. Their name is as well known to anyone who lived through the late-’60s psychedelic era as that of almost any group one would care to mention, mostly out of its sheer, silly trippiness as a name and their one major hit, “Incense and Peppermints,” which today is virtually the tonal equivalent of a Summer of Love flashback. But there was a real group there, with members who had played for a long time on the Southern California band scene, who were proficient on their instruments and who sang well and generated four whole LPs . . . . The band’s origins go back to Glendale, CA, in the mid-’60s, and a group then known as the Sixpence. It was 1965 and all things British were still a selling point, so the name made as much sense as anything else. Their lineup was formed from the members of various other bands coming together . . . . They mostly did covers of then-popular hits and developed a considerable following in Glendale and also in Santa Barbara, playing there so often that a lot of histories have them coming out of Santa Barbara.
https://www.allmusic.com/artist/strawberry-alarm-clock-mn0000633079/biography
The SAC “perform” “Guru” on The Dating Game (and try to get a date!) —
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