The Best Psychedelic Album by Year 1966-2024
- Jason LeValley with Brian Kuhar (70s)
Interview: George Bunnell of Strawberry Alarm Clock
Interview: George Bunnell of Strawberry Alarm Clock
LeValley:
I’m Jason LeValley with Psychedelic Scene, and I’m here with George Bunnell. Did I say that correctly?
Bunnell:
You did. Exactly correct. All right.
LeValley:
Of Strawberry Alarm Clock. Thanks for being here, George.
Bunnell:
Thanks, Jason. Nice to meet you.
LeValley:
Nice to meet you, too. Let’s go back to the start. You played bass on the first record, right?
Bunnell:
Yeah, I played bass on the first Strawberry Alarm Clock album, Incense & Peppermints.
LeValley:
Okay. Was that the only one that you played on?
Bunnell:
No, I played on the next two. Okay. I played on Wake Up It’s Tomorrow and The World in a Seashell.
LeValley:
You wrote some of the Strawberry Alarm Clock songs, too, didn’t you?
Bunnell:
Yeah.
LeValley:
What are some of the ones that you wrote?
Bunnell:
On the first album, I wrote “Birds in My Tree” and “Rainy Day Mushroom Pillow”, and “Strawberries Mean Love”, “Paxton’s Back Street Carnival”, “Hummin’ Happy”, “The World’s on Fire”.
LeValley:
Okay. Yeah, I know some of those. Some of those made the greatest hits.
They each were trying their best to sing this song, but it was already recorded.
Bunnell:
Yeah. On the second album, it was “Sitting on a Star”, and “Nightmare of Percussion”, and “Curse of the Witches”. The third album, I forget, but there was one called “Eulogy” and “Heated Love”, a couple of others.
LeValley:
Did you sing lead vocals on any of those tracks?
Bunnell:
No. I sang along with the lead singer, a harmony vocal on a couple of them. On “Paxton’s Back Street Carnival”, I’m doing that one. I’m singing harmony throughout the entire thing. I was a harmony singer. But the drummer, Randy Seol–he was lead singer, and then Lee Freeman was also a lead singer. Then Mark Weitz did a couple of the songs, too. He sang “Birdman of Alkatrash”, the flip side of “Incense”. He wrote the music to “Incense”. Currently, there’s five of us now in the band that were on the first album.
LeValley:
Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that song and where it came from. I wasn’t sure if it came from outside of the band or if it was just presented to you by the record label or….
Bunnell:
“Incense & Peppermints”? Yeah. No. The keyboard player, Mark, and the lead guitar player, Ed King– they wrote it as an instrumental. They wrote the music, and they recorded it, and it was all done. It was getting produced and mastered and everything. Then the producer Frank Slay said, because he was also a publisher, he had a stable of songwriters for his publishing company, and one of them was John Carter. He said, John Carter has lyrics, but no words to it. It’s “incense and peppermint” is all he has. He said, “I think it suits this music”. He said, “Just in my mind, it fits this music. I would like him to try and write a full set of lyrics to the music”. The band said, “okay, whatever”. Because it was… Here’s the deal. They were releasing singles as The Sixpence. It was before it was called Strawberry Alarm Clock. They were putting out single after single. In those days, they had A-side, B-side. Well, Mark had also written “Birdman of Alkatrash”, which was supposed to be the A-side, and he sang it. Then the flip side was going to be just an instrumental because it was going to be the B side, and it didn’t matter what it was.
Bunnell:
What ended up happening was John Carter comes back with the full set of lyrics to “Incense and Peppermints”, and he did it in a rush because there was a couple of weeks had gone by, and Frank Slay told him, “Look, I need it”. And Carter was in Denver. And so he said, “Okay, okay, okay. John Carter told me that he wrote them on toilet paper in the bathroom at an airport”. And I said, “What?” And he goes, “Yeah, I had a rhyming dictionary with me, and I just started putting things together that went with incense and peppermints”, and it was meaningless nouns. Then turn on, tune in, turn your eyes around, look at yourself, and all these different funny lyrics. It was to him, he was taking things that were somewhat had meaning to them, but then it was mostly nonsense. But “Dead Kings, Many Things I Can’t Define”, all these… The lyrics are odd, and they’re actually pretty cool. He was really clever word-wise. Anyway, he came back to the band, and this is before I was a member of the band. I was a songwriter. They were already doing some of my songs.
Bunnell:
They were playing in a club in Santa Barbara called Dino’s Pizzeria. They had, I don’t know, two or three, four or five, maybe, of my songs in their set. I was in another band with the guy that I was writing the songs with, Steve Bartek. Anyway, and we would go up to Santa Barbara and watch them play and stuff. Then what ended up happening was they said, “Why don’t you and Steve come over to the rehearsal and maybe learn? Because we’ve got a deal to record these things. Maybe you can play bass on them since you already know them so well and sing the harmonies and Steve can play flute”. I said, “Okay”, so we did. We went down, and that’s how we ended up on that first album, that way. Anyway, so Incense & Peppermint, they go in the studio with the new lyrics. John Carter came to LA, and he sang along to show the band how the melody and everything went. What ends up happening is everybody in the band, not me, but everybody in the band was trying to sing the lead vocal. Mark tried it. Lee Freeman tried it.
Bunnell:
Lee Freeman was actually the stand-up front lead singer guy. He was the Mick Jagger guy. Then Randy Seol tried it. They each were trying their best to sing this song, but it was already recorded, so it was in E. So there was no way for a couple of the guys, it wasn’t in their key. They couldn’t do it. And Greg Munford, who was a real good friend of the band, and Greg was also with the same manager and the same producer.
LeValley:
And he was just 16 years old, right?
Bunnell:
He was actually 17, I think, at the time. And they always say he’s 16, but he’s not. He was born in 1949. Okay. He turned 18 later in ’67.
Ed Caraeff
LeValley:
I see.
Bunnell:
I was 17, too, when they were recording it.
LeValley:
Oh, wow.
Bunnell:
Yeah.
LeValley:
So it was a very young band.
Bunnell:
And Steve Bartek, who I wrote with. Yeah, Steve was only 15. And his mom said, “No, you’re not joining this band. If you want to be in a band in high school, that’s fine, but you’re not leaving on tour, period”. And I had to beg my mom. And then I turned 18 in June, and my mom says, “No, you’re going to college”. And I said, “No, I’m going to go on tour”. Anyway, that was a problem with all of us, except for Mark Weitz. He had already gone to Valley College in Van Nuys, or Sherman Oaks, wherever it is over there. He already had finished school, and he was 21. So the rest of us were 17 and 18. Anyway, and Steve, 15. Anyway, the song, finally, the producer says, “Greg, why don’t you try it?” Because they all knew Greg was a good singer, and that’s what he did. He was just being his own solo act. They said, “Greg, just try it. It’s only a demo”. Greg sings it, and he sings it exactly the way it’s supposed to be. His voice was exactly right for the key and the song and the attitude and the whole thing.
Bunnell:
Everybody liked it because he took on that English, slight English accent, which everybody was doing. We were wearing Beatle boots and everything at first. This is before we had the East Indian clothes. Anyway, Greg sings it and the producer goes, “Perfect! That’s it!” Because everything was time is money. That’s it. He sang it one time and that was it. Then they mixed it and mastered it, and that was the single. They released it as a single. They asked Greg if he would be in the band, and he didn’t want to be. He said, “No, I’m in my band”. That’s how I was at first with Steve and I. We wanted to stay in our band. Randy Seol was in our band. He was our drummer. But then
They said, “Greg, just try it. It’s only a demo”. Greg sings it, and he sings it exactly the way it’s supposed to be. His voice was exactly right for the key and the song and the attitude and the whole thing.
Gene Gunnells, who was the guy that played drums on “Incense & Peppermints”, quit. His girlfriend told him that he had to make a choice between the band and her. He came to the band to a rehearsal and said, “I’m sorry, guys, I have to quit”. He quit right after recording the drum track to “Incense & Peppermint”. And although it was called, I think, “The Happy Whistler” or something funny. A lot of the songs had other titles before they ended up on the album.
LeValley:
I thought you said it was an instrumental called “Incense & Peppermints”.
Bunnell:
No, it was an instrumental called “The Happy Whistler”. And then the producer said, “John Carter has a title, ‘Incense & Peppermints’, that I think fits this song. I want them to write a body of lyrics that goes with that title”. That’s where that came from. Anyway, Greg didn’t want to be in the band, so nobody really thought much of it because it was going to be the B-side. It wasn’t going to get the airplay, they thought. The manager had this disk jockey in Santa Barbara because the band was playing every week in Santa Barbara at the pizzeria. Johnny Fairchild was a friend of the band, and he said, “Yeah, I’ll play it”. He had already been playing when he could. There are other songs that were as The Sixpence. He played “Incense & Peppermints” up there, and it started to get requests, and it became the most requested song of the week. At the same time, the record company said, “You guys got to change the name of the band”. Because what was first, the song was on the manager’s label, All-American. Then we got a deal with…
Russ Regan signed us to Uni Records. That’s when I came in, right at the same time that they got signed to Uni Records because they needed an album also. The song, “Incense”, had just started to get popular in Santa Barbara. At that point, I was there in Santa Barbara with them, with that disk jockey. There was little ads in the paper about it and stuff. Then we went down to Palm Springs because the disk jockey had another DJ friend that said he would play it if you brought it to him in Palm Springs. We brought it to that guy, and he played it. Then we brought it to a guy in San Diego. Then we came up to Los Angeles and Dave Diamond, who was a pretty popular… He was this underground DJ guy. He was underground as AM radio got, but it was called KBLA Radio. His show was called The Diamond Mind. He played it, and I think there was a little payola involved there to get the LA station to do it. But who knows? We never really knew. The guys in the band didn’t know what was going on because literally, we were teenagers.
Bunnell:
It was pretty funny. Anyway, we started getting a lot of airplay from all these different things. Then when Los Angeles started to do it. The song had this thing about it, but it still has. It’s very catchy and everything. People latch onto it, and they want to hear it again. It’s like, you can’t just hear it once. Anyway, it really took a life of its own then. Then Uni Records said they were going to go. They had this guy, Bill Drake, who owned a bunch of radio stations across the country, like 250 or something. I think they were the CBS stations. He said he’s going to run with it and put it on all of his stations. Well, after that, it was like we had nothing to do with anything after that. It was just like, there goes the song, and it flew up the charts eventually. The funny thing is Greg never wanted to be in the band, and then Randy became the drummer. Randy was also lead singer in my band. When we did TV shows and stuff, instead of using their own lead singer, the manager thought that Randy was cuter and wanted him to do the lip syncing on TV because he was the heartthrob in the band a guy.
Bunnell:
Lee got pushed aside, even though he was the front lead singer. The manager was like… He was ruthless and crooked. But anyway, he also was responsible for the success of the band.
LeValley:
That’s how it turns out sometimes.
Bunnell:
Yeah, it’s really weird. But anyway, that’s the story of it. Then after the third album, Randy and I found out we had hired our own business manager and found out that Bill Holmes, his name was, the guy that was the original manager. We found out through our business manager that he was embezzling money and ripping the band off and double-booking us and shows that we’re sending deposits in. Nobody knew. We went to the band and said, “We got to fire him”. In the meeting to fire him, he tells the band that he has cancer and only six months to live. He just died last year or the band, they had grown up with him. He was the manager of a market, and they were box boys. Greg Munford was a box boy, and all the guys in the band, except for Mark– they were box boys. At this market. He was the manager of the band.
Bunnell:
They had a band, and then it was really funny. Anyway, they didn’t want to fire him because they all had this beholding to him because he got them where they were. Randy and I quit. Well, they brought Gene Gunnells back in who played drums on “Incense & Peppermints”. He got his second chance. He did the fourth album, which was Good Morning, Starshine. That’s Gene playing on all that.
LeValley:
Well, now, what I read was that you and one of the other members quit because of your manager Bill Holmes.
Bunnell:
Yes.
David Guilburt
LeValley:
Then Bill Holmes, out of spite, started a second band called Strawberry Alarm Clock, and you and he joined that band.
Bunnell:
He asked us, well, we went back to our band that we had been in high school. In high school, we were called Waterford Train. Then after high school, we were called Buffington Roads. He asked us to go on tour because the Alarm Clock wouldn’t take this tour, and the tour was already booked. And so we said, Oh, okay. You’ve got three of the guys. You have Randy Seol, me, and Steve Bartek.
LeValley:
You had just quit the band to get away from that guy.
Bunnell:
Exactly. He was really nice. He was what he did. We went on tour. We did about three or four concerts in different cities. And we even played in Colorado. We played in Colorado Springs. But He didn’t pay us. We couldn’t get him to give us our money for the shows we did. He ripped us off. It was like the stupidest thing in life for us. I mean, we felt really duped and stupid. And then Mark Weitz and Ed King had to put an injunction on… Well, I think they went after Bill Holmes, a cease-and-desist thing. We never saw it. And so Bill Holmes had to quit doing what he was doing. He had the name. He was controlling it at the time. We got it back. We got the name back, but still, it was crazy. Then in later years, there was no manager, and there’s still no manager. We’ve done different, what we call interim SAC’s, and they are Strawberry Alarm Clock interim bands. Going all the way back to ’74, because the other guys had abandoned the name, Mark Weitz didn’t want to have anything to do with playing music anymore.
Bunnell:
He started his own business. He had a family and everything else. Then Ed King joined Lynyrd Skynyrd. That came out of Strawberry Alarm Clock, too, because Gene and Mark, and Ed, and Paul Marshall. I think Mark had already quit by that time, but they were on tour. There was another tour that came up, and they said, “You want to do it? They did another tour of the South, and Lynyrd Skynyrd was their opening act. I never really quite got the story right from Ed. He told me that he was in some club and saw them playing a song and thought they were great and asked them if they wanted to open the concert for them with the Alarm Clock. I guess it was that night or something. They said, “Yeah”. That was the thing that I heard from Ed, but I don’t know if that’s the documented thing or what. But Ed joined. Then Lee Freeman, who was our lead singer, also went with Skynyrd. But first, they toured together, and they became friends. Then their bass player quit, much like Gene Gunnells, our drummer, quitting. Their bass player quit because his wife wanted him to work at her dad’s ice cream company.
Bunnell:
He quit Lynyrd Skynyrd before they recorded their first album. That’s when Ronnie Van Zandt got a hold of Ed and said, “Hey, Leon Wilkerson quit the band”. He goes, “Will you play bass? We have a recording deal. We’re going to do an album”. And so Ed goes, “Yeah”. Because the earthquake had just happened here in LA, and Ed and me both wanted to leave town And Gene, too.
LeValley:
What year is this that we’re talking about?
Bunnell:
’71.
LeValley:
Okay.
Bunnell:
It was the Sylmar Earthquake in California. It was big. And they said, “That’s it. We’re moving out of California. We’re never coming back”. And Ed really never came back except to do a Skynyrd concert, which I went to.
LeValley:
Did you stay in touch with him when he was in Lynyrd Skynyrd or was he just untouchable?
Bunnell:
No, we were all close friends. When we quit the band, there was no animosity with the band members. It was only with the manager. The band members all remained friends, pretty good friends. We’re all still in touch, except for Ed, of course. But we did a show with Ed. In
Then Ed King joined Lynyrd Skynyrd
2007, he played with us. We did for Roger Ebert, we did a show. It was Roger Ebert’s ninth annual Overlook Film Festival in Champaign, Illinois. He was dying, and it was his make-a-wish thing because he had written Strawberry Alarm Clock into the script of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.
LeValley:
Roger Ebert wrote that?
Bunnell:
Yeah, he wrote the screenplay. Yeah. And he wrote our band into it. And so he wanted our band in the movie and stuff. I wasn’t in it. It was after I left. But in 2007, he was going to have that movie be the last movie for his ninth film festival. It was like a week-long thing. And then at the last thing, the curtain would open and there’s us, the original guys. There were nine of us because there was all the whole incarnations of band members on stage together.
Bunnell:
It was pretty fun. But anyway, that was a great one. As a matter of fact, here’s a show and tell. You probably can’t read it. But what this thing is, is the Roger Ebert thumbs up, and it says, Strawberry Alarm Clock, Roger Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival, 2007. That’s what this is.
LeValley:
That’s great.
Bunnell:
We were passing it around to each other after the concert, and then it ended up with me, and then it just didn’t get passed around anymore—‘cause Ed got sick. Anyway, we stayed in touch. We were all friends. So here’s another funny bit. Gene Gunnells, he gets a double whammy here. After Strawberry Alarm Clock broke up and Ed went off to Skynyrd, Gene went on tour with the Everly Brothers. He was in the band with Waddy Wachtel and Warren Zevon. They were on tour in Europe. Well, Ed King calls them and said, “Bob Burns is, I guess, firing him from Skynyrd and said, Gene, do you want to be the drummer? They want you to be the drummer because they all knew Gene. And he said, “Oh, I don’t want to give the Everly Brothers two-week notice”. He didn’t do it. They weren’t famous yet, though, either—Skynyrd. So he turned down the offer to be the drummer.
LeValley:
Oh, man.
Bunnell:
That was his second mistake. The first one was quitting for his girlfriend.
LeValley:
It sounds like he did play on some Strawberry Alarm Clock records, at least.
Bunnell:
Yeah. Yeah. He did the fourth album. And then he did the album. We did a fifth album in 2012, and he played on that.
LeValley:
Okay. He fared a lot better than, say, Greg Mumford
Photographer unknown--courtesy of George Bunnell
Bunnell:
Greg never wanted to do it. We asked Greg.
LeValley:
Right. No, I know. He stuck with his other band, but his other band did nothing.
Bunnell:
They had a release, but It just died.
LeValley:
You guys were obviously known as a psychedelic rock band. Did you participate? Did you partake of psychedelic substances?
Bunnell:
Not on tour. Because we were teenagers, we weren’t even allowed to drink. None of us drank either. But we were on tour with the Beach Boys and the Buffalo Springfield a lot of the time. Then we did two tours with them. There were extended tours. With those guys, everything was above board. Now, since then, Dennis Wilson became a maniac. Everybody, they all went off the deep end a little bit, but not totally. Mostly Dennis, I guess. But back then, no, nobody did anything. There were agents and managers. We had guys from William Morris Agency with us on tour. And there were managers, there was road managers, and they were in suits. They weren’t like… It was different.
LeValley:
It was a different time.
Bunnell:
Yeah, it was a different time. They were all like, the over 30, you don’t trust anybody over. Anyway, we were being babysat, and they basically sheltered us and shielded us from any illicit stuff. But when we got home, if we were off tour, we indulged in whatever we felt like doing. We took whatever things there were. Back then, it was just smoking pot and taking…
LeValley:
Was the music inspired by psychedelics or pot?
Bunnell:
No.
LeValley:
Not really?
Bunnell:
Not at all. No. The songs that Steve Bartek and I wrote, I was 14 or 15 when we started writing songs together. Steve was 11 or 12. We lived next door to each other, and our parents were best friends. Steve and I became best friends. His brother also played guitar and played with us. His brother Jim. We would look in dictionaries and find things to write about. We also studied art and stuff. A Rose is a rose is a rose, Gertrude Stein. We were inspired by that stuff, and Salvador Dali paintings and everything. We were not doing anything. We just thought
We were inspired by Salvador Dali paintings and everything. We wrote Raining Day Mushroom Pillow.
that those things were way cool. We wrote Raining Day Mushroom Pillow. We found this thing that if you’re lost in the forest to look for a particular a mushroom for food, but then there were some mushrooms that would be poison and some mushrooms that would have you have demented thoughts and weird dreams and stuff. We wrote, Raining Day Mushroom Pillow was about that. Being in a rainforest, lost in a rainforest. And that’s what we were writing about, even though that’s not what it really says.
Bunnell:
And it does say it. It says, “Poison dreams, distorted dreams, mushroom dreams”. Everybody thought, Oh, yeah, they’re singing about psychedelic mushrooms. But we weren’t. We were little kids. We were not even knowing that at all. We were just reading things in the dictionary and in an encyclopedia. And we every day pulled them out. And looked for ideas to write songs about. Then “Paxton’s Backstreet Carnival”, that song, there was an episode of the Twilight Zone where the guy… What is that? I forgot what it was. It says, “Next Stop, something. They’re on this train. The guy is a commuter. He’s on a train and he’s on his way home from work, and he’s got all kinds of troubles”, I guess, with his family or home life. But he stops. I think it’s like Whetherby or something like that. And he gets off the train, and it’s this carnival town. And he goes through all these weird things in this Twilight Zone. But then It’s not real. It’s like he gets back on the train somehow. Anyway, that’s what “Paxton’s Backstreet Carnival” was about. It was just taken from that. And there was a street that’s off the 405 freeway out here that’s called Paxton Street.
Bunnell:
And so that’s where that came from. And none of it was from drugs. I see. And strawberries. So the other one The strawberries mean love. Well, the manager changed the title. It was called “What’s It Made Of”. The manager said, “Well, that’s not about anything”. And he goes, “We’re changing it to “Strawberries Mean Love”. You guys will sing “strawberries mean love” instead of “what’s it made of”. We went, “Okay, whatever”. That’s how it got its title. There were a couple of other things like that, too. “The World’s on Fire”. The manager wrote the lyrics. It was originally called “Colors on the Wall”. That one was about… Because that one we wrote later, it was like we were probably in the 11th grade or something like that. We were probably 16 or 17. That one there, it was from taking pot and taking acid and that thing. It was “Colors on the Wall”. It was written by the keyboard player in my other band, The Waterfront Train Band, Fred Schwartz. He passed away since. But he’s the one that had the idea of it. He and I sat. I have a cassette tape of him and I figuring out the bass part to that song and his organ part.
Bunnell:
He did the organ. He mostly wrote the lyrics about that thing. Then the manager said, No, it’s about drugs. We can’t use it. So he changed the lyrics to… He called it… What did he call it? “A Beautiful World” or something first. And then he changed it to “Worlds on Fire”, and dancing flames. So he changed the lyrics. Oh, and there was a reason behind him, abruptly changing the lyrics. My old band… We played a concert at a club in LA called The Hullabaloo, and we were playing with Love, Arthur Lee and Love. Then my other band that I was in before and after Strawberry Alarm clock. When I wasn’t in it, they were called Public Bubble. It was with Steve Bartek and all my other friends, Randy Seol.. They were the opening act for us. Then we were the opening act for Love. But during the thing, the manager told Fred, the guy that wrote “Colors on the Wall”, which was “Worlds on Fire”, that we finished recording the music, and Fred said, “Well, you can’t have the song. We’re going to record it, and our band is going to do it. You guys can’t have it”.
Bunnell:
The manager got really mad at him, and then Fred chased him around the dressing room with a phone. It had a cord attached to it then. He was chasing him with the receiver. It was nuts. It was like… So that night, Bill Holmes went home and wrote “World’s on Fire”, those lyrics. We went in the next day, basically, or the day after that, and did the vocal sessions with all the harmonies and stuff. Wow. Yeah, that’s how that came about, and he didn’t take credit for it. Now, here’s a really funny thing. It’s not funny at all, actually. Mark Weitz and Ed King had written the music to “Incense and Peppermints”. They didn’t get credit for it because the producer, first of all, the manager wanted his name on it because he paid for the session. The producer goes, “No, that’s not going to happen. Who wrote the music?” He wouldn’t come up with the name. He goes, “Well, then we’ll put everybody’s name on it”. He goes, “No, we’re not putting everybody’s name on it”. The producer, Frank Slay, got fed up, and said, “Okay, I’m just sending in the copyright with Carter and Gilbert”.
Bunnell:
Gilbert was John Carter’s songwriting partner, even though he didn’t really have anything to do with “Incense & Peppermints”. But they were partners. They were a Lennon-McCartney thing. Anyway, Gilbert got credit, Tim Gilbert, and he didn’t have anything to do with it at all. He got a nice paycheck there, and still does. Anyway, I’m going to forget what I was going to… Oh, yeah. The credit, Frank Slay said, “when you send in a copyright, it’s whoever wrote the lyrics and the melody. You can’t copyright the chord changes”. Mark and Ed were like, “What?” The song was already recorded. The whole thing that you hear on the record, on the actual record, was already done and had nothing to do with John Carter. Yeah, all that came in after.
Mark Stephen Weitz
LeValley:
The real songwriters, Ed King and who?
Bunnell:
Mark Weitz.
LeValley:
Mark Weitz. They never got compensated for writing the song?
Bunnell:
Nothing. Never got a dime.
LeValley:
Wow. It’s hard to believe that they didn’t eventually sue or something.
Bunnell:
David Gates, his son, wanted to help out. Then he even said, “This is impossible”. He gave up. Then somebody else, Bobby Columbia, sent me to a lawyer that he had in New York. That lawyer also said, “This is too hard. This is too much”. But I think nowadays, there’s been precedent. There’s been other songs that have come down the pike. Somebody got sued by Marvin Gay’s family for some song, and it never even really, to me, sounded like the same song at all. This one here is really crazy. This “Incense and Peppermints”. They wrote the music, period. Nobody else did.
LeValley:
People who didn’t write the song got rich off that song?.
Bunnell:
Yeah. Because they got all the royalties.
LeValley:
Wow.
Bunnell:
I remember going to… I stayed friends with, not Bill Holmes, but with Frank Slay after I had left the band. He produced a couple of things that I did, and I wrote songs for different artists. I wrote a song for Butch Patrick, and I did a couple of things with him. One day, we were in his office, and he was about to get us an album deal. He said, “My books are always open to you boys”. I said, “So what was made off of Incense and Peppermints”? And he goes, “I’ll show you right here”. And he pulls out a big filing cabinet, and he goes, “The writer’s royalties and the publishing is the same thing. Here’s my publishing. This is what I made. It was $380,000. And this happened in 1967. That’s tons of money. Yeah. It’s at least 10 times, but it’s probably way more than 10 times more.
LeValley:
Well, you guys got ripped off by your manager, but did that ever right itself? I mean, did you finally get compensated for your efforts and so forth? Did you ever feel like it worked out fairly?
Bunnell:
No. The band got the rights to the name, but we never got any money back from him. He disappeared. He ended up… we found out later that he moved to Italy and lived on some island in the Adriatic Sea. He started a record company called A Karma. He eventually passed
There’s critics that’ll say, “Oh, it’s bubble gum”. It was not really.
away, but he was a lot older than us. I think he was in his 80s when he passed away, like 86 or something. Because he was over 30 when we were 17 or 18. Now, that doesn’t sound like big difference.
LeValley:
At the time, sure. When you’re a teenager, somebody over 30 seems really old.
Bunnell:
Oh, yeah. Well, the only good part of it is we did end up getting mechanicals. But it’s nothing, really. It’s nothing like wherever the publishing the writer’s royalties go to. The manager produced it, too. He was a co-producer with Frank Slay, so he made a lot of money off it. It was a travesty, but Ed King made up for it. He wrote “Sweet Home, Alabama”. He co-wrote it.
LeValley:
Oh, wow. Well, he played with Lynyrd Skynyrd during their prime. He obviously got lots of… He did well.
Bunnell:
Yeah, he did really well. As it turned out, our other guitar player, Steve Bartek, is still in our band. But by not going on tour with us in ’67, he ended up finishing high school first, and then he went to UCLA and got a degree in music composition. Then he became the lead guitar player of Oingo Boingo, and now he’s Danny Elfman’s orchestrator and sometimes conductor. He does all the Danny Elfman stuff, all the movies that Danny has done.
LeValley:
That’s quite a few.
Bunnell:
It’s a lot. It’s a hundred of them at least. Then Steve, he’s been the composer on about 20 or 25 of his own movies, Romy and Michelle’s high school reunion, a bunch of them he’s done. So he’s had a very successful career.
LeValley:
Well, how do you feel about Strawberry Alarm Clock’s legacy within the history of rock?
Bunnell:
It’s funny because we felt like we had a whole lot more to say. We got cut off at the knees. A couple of different things went wrong in the beginning. The first album, I really liked the first album. It’s genuine and it was a good thing. But of course, there’s like, critics and stuff that’ll say, “Oh, it’s bubble gum”. It was not really… It was because we had a hit record is what the problem was. It was hard to be psychedelic and have a hit record. We weren’t trying to be psychedelic. We just got pulled into that. Our stuff, it is… It’s all colorful, but we weren’t trying to do any particular thing. We were all art majors, and we were all into the whole thing of color, and the music was reflecting the color and everything. We’ve always been like that. It was never really about being psychedelic, per se. As a matter of fact, I don’t even know if they ever used that word towards a band back then. Maybe they did, but I don’t know. It’s possible. But anyway, we got cut off at the knees, basically, after that first album.
Bunnell:
On the second album, we were given our freedom to do whatever we wanted to do. But we were, at that point, writing the songs in the studio and learning them in the studio and figuring out what to do. We spent all our royalty money in the studio. We didn’t make anything off that second album because of that.
LeValley:
That second album had “Pretty Song from Psych-Out” on it, right? Yeah. I hear a lot of people speak glowingly about that song.
Bunnell:
Yes, it’s genuine. So, yeah, here’s the deal. Dick Clark was a good friend of the band. He brought us to a screening of Psych-Out. He said, “Here’s what I want you to do”. He said, “I’m using Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel’s ‘Sounds of Silence’ because it was about a deaf girl, and it was all this psychedelic stuff going on, acid trips and stuff. Well, he said, “I want you guys to write a song that is like that. In the movie, there’s a wedding in a park. It’s like a bunch of hippies. But in the movie, they used The Seeds. They used a song by The Seeds for that scene. But anyway, “Pretty Song from Psych-Out” is about a wedding. That’s what the song is actually about. Where the guy sees the bride and everything, and the little children have the flowers, and there’s the Ark and everything. If you look at the lyrics, it’s about a wedding. It’s real clear once you know that it’s about a wedding, that’s what it is. It’s a “Sounds of Silence” thing. It has that aspect to it, too. You see the wedding happening, but you can’t hear it.
Jill Jarrett
Bunnell:
It’s interesting. That was written by Ed King and Lee Freeman, and they sang it together. They sang it as a duet. It was a Simon and Garfunkel thing. That’s what they were doing. But the song came out great, and I loved that song.
LeValley:
Do you have a favorite SAC song?
Bunnell:
That could be it. There was… That’s probably about it. There were other songs. Now, we’re still a band, and we play it. We don’t play a lot, but we just do special things. But we play at the Whisky every year.
LeValley:
Yeah, I wanted to ask about that. Do you always just play in the LA area or do you ever…?
Bunnell:
Yeah, pretty much. We’ve done a few things around. We’ve gone out. In 2007, we’re doing a lot of stuff out because it was what? The 40th anniversary, I guess, of Incense & Peppermints of 1967. And so in 2007, and then in 2017, we did, too. As a matter of fact, in 2017, we re-recorded “Incense & Peppermints”. We haven’t released it. But it’s with Ed King, and it’s with Greg Munford. And the whole original band is on it. It’s a lot of fun.
LeValley:
I’m sorry, I must have missed something. What is it exactly?
Bunnell:
“Incense & Peppermints”, the song.
LeValley:
Right. Okay.
Bunnell:
We re-recorded it in 2017.
LeValley:
With Greg Munford. I see. Okay.
Bunnell:
With Greg and with Ed.
LeValley:
I see. Okay, cool.
Bunnell:
Yeah. It’s pretty fun. We tried to get Ed to use a fuzz tone, and he goes, “Hell, no”. He goes, “This is a…” He called it a $250,000 Les Paul, but the guitar ended up selling for something like around 650,000 or something. But he didn’t want to use effects on it, on his Les Paul, his ’59’ Les Paul. But anyway, that was a fun recording, and we’re going to put it on our new album. We’re about three quarters of the way through a new album.
LeValley:
Do you have a single picked out for it?
Bunnell:
Not really. Because we don’t think in those terms. Although “Incense of Peppermints” is going to be on it, and that could be a single because it sounds basically… We didn’t change it. We just did it. You know what we did? We went in the studio. The producer was his idea. His name is Ken Roberts. He said, “Okay, I’m going I’m going to put your record on in the studio, the original record”. He goes, “I want each guy to come in on his own and play exactly the part that is on the record”. I played bass, and Gene came in and played his drum part, and Mark played his organ part and his piano part. The thing came out exactly like the original record. Ed went in and played his part. Ed did his part in Nashville, though. He wouldn’t come to California. He was still on the earthquake watch. But anyway, that’s how we recorded that song. We copied our original record.
LeValley:
I see. Okay. Well, I need to wrap up this interview. Is there anything else you want to say before we do?
Bunnell:
Well, it’s been fun. The new album, we have a website. It’s strawberryalarmclock.com. If we’re doing shows, we put them on there, and it’s got the Whisky on there, and it’s got the ticket link for the Whisky, and we have a GoFundMe for the album, too, which is how we’ve been doing it. That link is on there. I’m hoping that the Whisky will be an album release party. One of the ideas, of course, is that we want to have a vinyl record as well as whatever else you have to do these days. But nobody cares about a CD because nobody has a CD player anymore. And so it’s digital. But people do care about vinyl. And so the vinyl, I guess, has been out-selling the CDs.
LeValley:
Yes.
Bunnell:
So that’s pretty cool. And they’re fun. You can read stuff on it. Yeah.
LeValley:
All right, George. Well, thank you so much. I enjoyed talking to you, and I’ll look forward to hearing the new album.
Bunnell:
Yeah, thanks. I’ll definitely send you something.
LeValley:
Awesome.
Bunnell:
Okay.
LeValley:
Thanks so much.
Bunnell:
Okay. Take care.
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