Association

The Association is an American pop band from California in the folk rock or soft rock genre. During the 1960s, they had numerous hits at or near the top of the Billboard charts (including "Windy", "Cherish", and "Along Comes Mary") and were the lead-off band at 1967's Monterey Pop Festival......Their national break would come with the song "Along Comes Mary", written by Tandyn Almer.[.. .] The song, which brought the group a bit of controversy at first due to "Mary" allegedly being slang for marijuana, went to No. 7 on the Billboard charts and led to the group's first album, And Then... Along Comes the Association, produced by Curt Boettcher, which had originally been started at Gary S. Paxton's converted garage studio with the vocals being done at Columbia Studios. Another song from the album, "Cherish",.... would become the Association's first No. 1 in September 1966 (covered 6 years later with great international success by David Cassidy.)

In late 1966, Warner Bros. Records, which had been distributing Valiant, bought the smaller label (and with it, the Association's contract). In May 1967, (Gary) Alexander left the band to study meditation in India, and he was replaced by Larry Ramos (born Hilario Ramos on April 19, 1942, Waimea, Hawaii; died April 30, 2014) on vocals and guitar. Ramos joined the band while Alexander was still performing with them after bassist (Brian) Cole's hand was injured by a firecracker; Alexander subbed on bass while Ramos played lead guitar. Ramos had previously performed with The New Christy Minstrels and recorded solo singles for Columbia Records. He went on to sing co-lead (along with Giguere and Kirkman) on two of the Association's biggest hit singles, "Windy" and "Never My Love". (Read more at Wikipedia

Links to Peel
The Association were one of the bands to emerge on the Los Angeles scene while Peel was working at radio station KMEN in San Bernardino, California. Their early singles all featured in the station's playlist during his time there, and also picked up airplay on Radio London and other British offshore pirate radio stations. Peel also played tracks by the band on Radio London, including "Windy", which had a run in the station's Fab Forty charts and appeared on the playlist of 01 July 1967. In the introduction, Peel talks about a recent personnel change in the group.

In the British music press, the Association were at first bracketed with the new wave of psychedelic groups emerging from the West Coast, as their early material, like the singles "Along Comes Mary" and "Pandora's Golden Heebie Jeebies", had an experimental feel. But they were equally proficient at pop ballads and this seemed to determine the direction of their later career. Peel wrote in International Times that their 1968 album Birthday was "somewhat disappointing", and their vocal harmony style. became unfashionable with rock critics. They had little commercial success after 1970, but in later years became popular with collectors of 1960s music as practitioners of the vocal harmony-based genre that came to be called "sunshine pop". However Peel is not known to have revisited any of their material in his later shows.