The Lemon Pipers were a short-lived 1960s American rock band from Oxford, Ohio. The Lemon Pipers comprised drummer William (Bill) E. Albaugh, guitarist Bill Bartlett, vocalist Dale “Ivan” Browne, keyboardist Robert G. Nave, and bassist Steve Walmsley, who replaced the original bass guitarist Bob “Dude” Dudek. The band played a mixture of blues, hard rock and folk rock, with a few covers from The Byrds and The Who. They gigged regularly in an Oxford bar called The Boar’s Head, and Cincinnati underground rock venues, The Mug Club and later The Ludlow Garage, before releasing a single on the Carol Records label, “Quiet Please”. The original band existed as a quartet, and then gained notoriety by reaching the finals in the Ohio Battle of the Bands in 1967, losing out to the James Gang.
The band then recruited Browne as frontman, and also engaged Ohio music industry impresario Mark Barger, who steered the Lemon Pipers to Buddah Records, then run by Neil Bogart. The Lemon Pipers, relying in part on advice from Barger, agreed to enter into a deal with Buddah. The group began playing larger auditorium and concert hall venues around the US, including an appearance at the Fillmore West in San Francisco on the same bill with Traffic, Moby Grape and Spirit in March 1968. Buddah’s plans for the group focused on bubblegum pop rather than rock music, and the Lemon Pipers joined a stable already containing Ohio Express and the aptly named 1910 Fruitgum Company. Paul Leka was assigned to be their record producer.
The group’s debut on Buddah was a Bartlett composition, “Turn Around and Take a Look”. When the song failed to make the charts, the label asked Leka and his songwriting partner, Shelley Pinz, to come up with a song. The pair wrote “Green Tambourine” and the band reluctantly recorded it. The song entered the Billboard at the end of 1967 and reached No. 1 in February 1968 on the Billboard and Cashbox charts. The song peaked at No. 7 in the UK, and was also a hit worldwide. It sold over two million copies, and was awarded a gold disc R.I.A.A. in February 1968.
The success of “Green Tambourine” caused the label to put pressure on the group to stay in the same genre, and in March 1968 the band released another Leka/Pinz song, “Rice Is Nice”, which peaked at No. 46 on the US Billboard charts, No.42 on the US Cashbox charts and No. 41 in the UK in May. The band had little enthusiasm for either song, however, dubbing them “funny-money music” and recording them only because they knew they would be dropped by Buddah if they refused. “Ordinary Point of View”, written by Eric Ehrmann and featuring a Bartlett country solo, was recorded, but rejected by Buddah. Disenchanted with Buddah and the music industry, Ehrmann stopped writing songs and went on to become one of the early contributors to Rolling Stone magazine.
The Lemon Pipers’ evolution from 1960s rock music into a gold-record pop group created what Nave has described as “the duality of the Lemon Pipers”: “We were a stand-up rock ‘n’ roll band, and then all of a sudden, we’re in a studio, being told how to play and what to play.” The chasm between the label’s aspirations and the band’s own musical tastes became apparent on the Lemon Pipers’ debut album, Green Tambourine. Produced by Leka, the album contained five Leka/Pinz songs, as well as two extended tracks written by the band, “Fifty Year Void” and “Through With You” (the latter, written by Bartlett, bearing influences of The Byrds and, according to the original LP label, running 8:31 in length). “Ask Me If I Care” written by Ehrmann, was also included. Writing in Bubblegum is the Naked Truth, Gary Pig Gold commented: “It was the Pipers’ way with a tough-pop gem in the under-four-minute category which was most impressive by far: “Rainbow Tree”, “Shoeshine Boy” and especially “Blueberry Blue” each sported a taut, musical sophistication worthy of The Move and, dare I say it, even the Magical Mystery Beatles.”
The band recorded a second album for Buddah, Jungle Marmalade, which again showed both sides of the band – another Leka/Pinz song, “Jelly Jungle (of Orange Marmalade)”, (released as a single and peaking at No. 51 on Billboard and No. 30 on Cashbox in the US), a version of the King/Goffin penned song “I Was Not Born to Follow,” and an 11-minute, 43 second epic, “Dead End Street”/”Half Light”. The band left the Buddah label in 1969 and later dissolved.
