7 and 7 Is
"7 and 7 Is" is a song written by Arthur Lee and recorded by his band Love on June 17 and 20, 1966, at Sunset Sound Recorders in Hollywood. It was produced by Jac Holzman and engineered by Bruce Botnick. The song was released as the A-side of Elektra single 45605 in July, 1966. The B-side was "No. Fourteen", an outtake from the band's earlier recordings. "7 and 7 Is" made the "Billboard" Pop Singles chart on July 30, 1966, peaking at number 33 during a ten-week chart run and becoming the  band's highest-charting hit single. The recording also featured on the band's second album, "Da Capo". Writing and recording. The song drew inspiration from a high school sweetheart of Lee, Anita "Pretty" Billings, who shared his birthday, March 7. It also describes Lee's frustration at teenage life—the reference to ""in my lonely room I'd sit, my mind in an ice cream cone"" being to wearing (in reality or metaphorically) a dunce's cap. Describing how the song came to him, Lee stated: "I was living on Sunset and woke up early one morning. The whole  band was asleep. I went in the bathroom, and I wrote those words. My songs used to come to me just before dawn, I would hear them in dreams, but if I didn't get up and write them down, or if I didn't have a tape recorder to hum into, I was through. If I took for granted that I could remember it the next day—"boink", it was gone." It took a great deal of work to record, with Love's drummer, Alban "Snoopy" Pfisterer, being challenged with its frantic demands after 30 takes or so, and being  replaced on drums, intermittently, by Lee himself. In an interview for John Einarson's book "Forever Changes", lead guitarist Johnny Echols credits the drumming on the released record to Pfisterer. In a 1989 interview, Arthur Lee stated that he himself taught Pfisterer how to play the part, and that the final record featured Pfisterer. In what has been described as a "flirtation" with "musique concrète", the song climaxes in an apocalyptic explosion—the supposed sound of an atom bomb—before a peaceful conclusion, in a blues form, which then fades out. Although many listeners thought that the explosion at the  end of the song was a reverb unit being kicked or dropped, it was (according to the engineer Bruce Botnick), in actuality, taken from a sound effects record. He speculated that it was a recording of a gunshot slowed down. For live performances, the explosion was reproduced by kicking a reverb unit. Music critic Robert Christgau called the song "a perfect rocker". "Cash Box" described the song as a "pulsating, rhythmic extremely danceable blueser with a clever gimmick wind-up." Covers. Described as garage rock and proto-punk, the song was later covered by numerous bands, most notably the Ramones , Alice Cooper, The Electric Prunes, Billy Bragg, The Sidewinders, The Fuzztones, Rush, Robert Plant and Deep Purple, as well as a re-recording by Lee himself. The song was also featured in the TV series "Entourage" in season 5 episode 1 during the closing credits. Former Chemlab vocalist Jared Louche covered "7 and 7 Is" with The Aliens for his 1999 solo debut "Covergirl".