More on the creation of "Incense and Peppermints," as told by the keyboard player.
Quote:MW: I was sitting at the piano at my parents’ house and I came up with this Oriental sounding riff. I called our guitar player Ed King [who would years later gain notoriety as a member of Lynyrd Skynyrd and as the temporary replacement for the late Duane Allman in The Allman Brothers Band] and said ‘Hey Ed. I’ve got this idea for a song. Can you come over and help me out?’
I already had the intro, a verse and the ending. Ed came over and came up with the bridge. Within 45 minutes, we had the entire structure of the song down. Except for the lyrics. The rest of the band and our manager liked it and we went into the studio and recorded what we had. Originally our manager called the music The Happy Whistler. We had no idea why.
Frank Slay, our producer at the time, had also produced a band called Rainy Daze who had a hit with Acapulco Gold – written by John Carter and Tim Gilbert. Slay mailed a copy of our finished music track to Carter and it wasn’t long before it came back with the lyrics to the song that would be titled Incense And Peppermints.
The song was Carter’s lyrics as written. The only thing we changed was that, originally, the song had four verses. We cut that to three because radio wasn’t playing anything over three minutes in those days.
...It’s not a myth, the guy (who sang it) literally did walk in off the street.
He was this 15-year-old kid who was managed by our manager and who had his own band. He was hanging out at the studio the night we recorded the song. When it came down to recording the vocals, everybody in the band took a shot at singing the song but nobody was satisfied.
(The problem was) we were singing lyrics that somebody outside the band had written. It was kind of like auditioning and nobody seemed to have what the song needed. Finally we decided to let Greg try. Greg had this nasal, almost English to his voice that actually sounded the best with these lyrics. We thought ‘Well Greg sounds the best on the song but he’s not in the band.’ Frank Slay said that was okay and that we should just let him do it. Nobody seemed to care a whole lot because nobody felt it would be a number one hit.
He and Ed King didn't receive any songwriting credit for I&P.
http://www.rockcellarmagazine.com/2012/0...HR0e1.dpbs
Haley's Friday Spotify lists (of song inspirations for album #3)
