The Royal Guardsmen - Snoopy And His Friends The Royal Guardsmen (1967)

In contrast to their debut album, which mixed straight rock & roll -- plus a few delightfully odd pop-related covers -- with their novelty hit, the Royal Guardsmen's third album is pretty much novelty themed all the way through. Not that they don't try to rock out on numbers like "The Return of the Red Baron," but on this album they never get away from the Snoopy/Red Baron theme until the second side. That's when you get to hear some mainstream pop-rock, on the Billy Taylor/Barry Winslow "I Say Love," a fine piece of pop laced with blue-eyed soul. But even on the LP's second side, they can't quite get away from the Snoopy/Red Baron motif for very long, so that song is rather wasted here, as is another original, "So Right (To Be in Love)." What those two numbers are doing on this album is anyone's guess (though one imagines that the ex-group members would probably have a story to tell about it, if asked) -- they don't fit with anything else on the record, but they're the only part of this album that gives it anything value beyond being a pop culture curio, four decades on.