The record was released in early 1968, at a time when there was a receptive audience for “underground music” which combined musical experimentalism with radical social and/or political lyrics – other examples, in their very different ways, including the Velvet Underground (who shared a common background in the New York experimental music scene; according to Moskowitz, Nico at one point tried to join the USA), Frank Zappa (whom Byrd disliked, considering him a niche-marketer "subsumed in a self-referential loop"), Love's "Forever Changes", Country Joe and the Fish, and Jefferson Airplane.