My Top 1000 Songs #912: The Last Thing I Remember

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

I've long lamented the frequent omission of The Turtles from the list of truly great 60s bands. And, sure, they may've been less groundbreaking than the UK Big Four (Beatles/Stones/Who/Kinks), or even The Byrds of the Beach Boys here in the US, but they had a remarkable knack for the perfect AM radio pop song--catchy and unpretentious, yet more transcendent than much of the genre. (See also, e.g., The Monkees.)

It's not their best album (I'd probably go with 1969's Ray Davies-produced swan song Turtle Soup), but 1968's The Turtles Present The Battle Of The Bands was certainly their most entertaining. A sort of counterpoint to the same year's The Who Sell Out, with that band imagining the playlist (commercials and all) of a fictitious radio station, The Turtles opted to create an album full of imaginary bands playing silly nuggets of varying styles. On "The Last Thing I Remember," they morphed into The Atomic Enchilada and offered some faux psychedelia, partly a silly mocking of the genre, partly a surprisingly effective recreation of pop-psych. They had better songs (the same album's "Elenore," while self-mocking in its own way, is pretty undeniable), but somehow this one has stayed with me.

Later decades would see various artists making their own attempts at slightly mocking/slightly reverent 60s psychedelia (most notably XTC side-project The Dukes of Stratosphear), but The Turtles were ahead of the game.

Alternate version: