Green Tambourine

The Lemon Pipers didn’t like their two hit singles, “Green Tambourine” and “Rice Is Nice,” calling the songs ‘funny-money music.’ That’s what happens when a young R&B group, who shared stages with the likes of psychedelic rock monsters like Moby Grape and Spirit, sign a record deal and get pushed into the bubblegum lane. “Green Tambourine” itself is one of the best songs from the sixties bubblegum corpus, a Brill Building write that hit #1 on the charts. The Lemon Pipers, on record, felt more ornate, liquid, with clanking pianos and sweeping strings wrapped around songs that re-route Merseybeat and psych-pop into American chart fodder. The coyness of it all has its charm, though, and you can sense the group’s frustrations with their new context in little touches, like the wah-guitar woven through “Shoeshine Boy.” They didn’t quite seem to fit with the ornate, baroque pop of “The Shoemaker of Leatherware Square,” but the songs themselves are great, the nine-minute “Through With You” is smartly ambitious, and Green Tambourine is one of the most consistently rewarding bubblegum albums.