Song of the Day 3/25: The Lemon Pipers, “Green Tambourine”

I’m as anti-insurrection as the next guy, but I think the feds may be overreaching in the case of Sara Carpenter, 51, of Queens, who was arrested for entering the Capitol on Jan. 6. She cooperated with the authorities and turned over the clothing she was wearing when she was pepper-sprayed, as well as the prop she brought with her — a green tambourine she was videoed shaking as she danced in the Rotunda.

The Lemon Pipers are the ones who made “Green Tambourine” a familiar phrase in 1968, when their lone hit reached No. 1 in the U.S. The band, formed by students at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, in 1966, gained attention the next year when they finished second in a statewide Battle of the Bands to the pre-Joe Walsh James Gang. They landed a record contract with Buddah, which at the time was heavily into bubblegum pop, and would soon unleash “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy” and the 1910 Fruitgum Company upon the nation’s airwaves.

When the Lemon Pipers’ mix of blues with hard and folk rock failed to sell, house producer and songwriter Paul Leka was assigned to work with the band. He wrote music to a poem by Brill Building writer Shelley Pinz, who dug up a poem she had written after seeing a busking musician with a tambourine on the street. Leka also produced the record, which he spruced up with a string section. It’s considered a foundational example of bubblegum, and the first to mix it with psychedelic rock.

The band was not enthusiastic about its new direction, and though Leka wrote two more songs for them that reached the lower levels of the charts, they disbanded before the end of the decade.

Three members of the Lemon Pipers, including guitarist Bill Bartlett, went on to join a band called Starstruck that recorded a rocked-up version of a Lead Belly tune, “Black Betty,” which was released under the band name Ram Jam in 1977. It’s an example of what the Lemon Pipers actually sounded like before their Dubble Bubble days.