merican patriotism is a noise in the finale of the United States of America’s lone, eponymous album. Field recordings of military band marches and carnival calliopes try to shout over each other for a moment until the psych-band’s mastermind Joseph Byrd interrupts. “How much fun it’s been…How much fun it’s been…How much fun it’s been,” he croons to his closing-time glass—the parade continues into the after-hours and keeps the citizenry distracted from the riot of the 1960’s. A string orchestra then seeps in behind him with a serenade that could cradle the masses to sleep before the Lawrence Welk Show ends.

It’s shameful that so few heard the USA during their scant three years of existence in the late 60s—their ideas could be mined for decades. They were a rock band of musicians that had never played rock before; the UCLA students performed African and East Indian music, along with noise and electronic works by prestigious “new music” composers John Cage and Karlheniz Stockhausen. The USA came together when Byrd toyed with the idea of creating a blues band to keep concert audiences entertained while he and his comrades spent 30 minutes inflating a weather balloon as part of a LaMonte Young composition. The USA’s inexperience is its secret weapon: the band rocked quite well and, in the process, delivered some of the most intoxicating examples of how rock could be electronically treated.

All of which brings us to “The American Way of Love.” The three-part song is a mess that begins with “Metaphor for an Older Man” where Byrd beckons sad sacks and suburban work-a-daddies into an adult theater against a thrash-rock backdrop. After a rave-up that falls into an epileptic fit, the band then indulges in “California Good-time Music,” where they jump between flashing and screaming at the Straights, flying synthesized UFO noises, and snapping fingers to cliché-as-sin Beach Boys pop.

What follows is the album’s payoff. On “Love is All,” Byrd sings those damned words about “How much fun it’s been.” It’s actually a sample of the band’s previous gutbucket blues number, “I Won’t Leave My Wooden Wife For You, Sugar.” The snippet is among several samples of past songs in a call-and-response collage that ends the track with scattered flashbacks. The aforementioned Lawrence Welk moment of schmaltz is soothing after so much abrasion and madness, but it doesn’t last long: the band then parodies the love ballad by mixing in a deadpan voice saying “LOVE” to punctuate a narration of stitched-together samples of Byrd and co-vocalist Dorothy Moskowitz that dance between the stereo channels: “LOVE, Waiting for an answer, LOVE, Sweet in my mouth, LOVE, In time….the looking glass…LOVE…In time…California, LOVE, LOVE, LOVE.” Moskowitz then belts out “In her eyes…In her eyes…In her eyes,” her final utterance of the line floating into the air via an effects box. Welk’s orchestra then softly halts.

The collage that I just described could be glib comedy or it could be something oddly sublime. The band knew they were playing with clichés in the love songs they wrote, however, a sense that everything could just as easily fall apart keeps everything on the edge. Given that the song was released in 1968—the year of the Tet Offense, the Paris riots, and Martin Luther King’s violent death—one could speculate that the escapist, feel-good pop that the USA dissected, rearranged, and released back into the wild is nothing more than a recognition of how such pop music is a veneer that covers a world torn apart by death.

My grandmother tells me that people will always know your true character when you’re intoxicated. Her words always arise in my mind when Byrd sings, “How much fun it’s been.”