However, the song suffers from excruciatingly anemic lyrics, imagery seemingly gleaned from a cheery Chamber of Commerce brochure: “Laugh at sizzling sidewalks/Don’t step on the cracks/Old folks try to catch their breath/As children catch their jacks” and “Melted tar in crosswalks/Crab shells in the park/Pavement frying our poor toes/Until long after dark.”īlame those tepid lyrics on non-band member Roy Freeman. Released as the first single from the group’s third album, 1968’s The World in a Sea Shell, “Barefoot in Baltimore” saunters along agreeably, its soft-rock melody buoyed by Association-style vocals, chirpy xylophone, and chattering percussion.

band, the jaunty “Barefoot in Baltimore.” Ditto the Los Angeles-based Strawberry Alarm Clock - guitarists Ed King and Lee Freeman, keyboardist Mark Weitz, bassists George Bunnell and Gary Lovetro, drummer Randy Seol – although the band cranked out some memorable material in the immediate aftermath of “Incense and Peppermints,” notably the breezy “Tomorrow,” the hallucinogenic “Rainy Day Mushroom Pillow,” and, incongruously for an L.A.

A psych-pop masterpiece - all buzzing guitar, churchy organ, an aggressively earnest lead vocal, and delightfully tongue-twisting trippy lyrics (“Good sense, innocence, cripplin’ mankind/Dead kings, many things I can’t define/Occasions, persuasions, clutter your mind/Incense and peppermints, the color of time”) - the song crystallizes the moment when pure counterculture psychedelia transmuted into mainstream masses’ manna.Īs ephemeral as any pop music genre, psychedelic pop quickly morphed, fractured, and, by 1970, disappeared entirely from the public consciousness. For an extended lysergic blink in the late 1960s, Top 40 radio turned day-glo, suffused by the sounds of psychedelic pop, which achieved its apocalyptic apogee in November 1967 when the Strawberry Alarm Clock’s “Incense and Peppermints” ascended to #1 on the Billboard singles chart.

A strawberry alarm clock