The album combined rock and psychedelia with then-uncommon electronic instrumentation and experimental composition, along with an approach reflecting an anti-establishment, leftist political stance.

The album has been reissued several times and has garnered widespread critical acclaim in the decades since its original release for pioneering styles and techniques that would later become common in rock music.

The two began a "profound musical and personal relationship", and moved to Los Angeles later that year after Byrd received a teaching assistantship at UCLA.

[6][7] While at UCLA, Byrd formed the New Music Workshop, an avant-garde art collective, alongside Moskowitz, jazz musician Don Ellis and others.

[6] Around the same time, Byrd and Moskowitz also contributed to Vocal And Instrumental Ragas From South India, an album of Indian classical music released on Folkways Records, alongside Gayathri Rajapur and Harihar Rao.

[8][9] In early 1967, Byrd approached Art Kunkin, founder and editor of the Los Angeles Free Press, requesting money with which to form a band, in collaboration with anarchist composer Michael Agnello as organist.

[12] During the 1960s, Byrd was drawn towards the Communist Party USA, explaining that it was "the one group that had discipline, an agenda, and was willing to work within the existing institutions to educate and radicalize American society."

[12] The album is littered with references to Byrd's obsession with old-time American music, such as the Dixieland jazz intro on "I Won't Leave My Wooden Wife for You, Sugar".

[5] Byrd described "Stranded in Time" as "a weak Beatle-esque copy of "Eleanor Rigby", and could not be performed live because it called for a string quartet.

[17] On "The Garden of Earthly Delights", Ed Bogas wrote the lyrics for the first verse and chorus,[7] while Moskowitz came up with the track's title and other tuneful changes and accents.

[19][20][21] The closing track, "The American Way of Love", references gay prostitution on 42nd Street, then known as a red-light district of New York City.

Byrd says he had been "interested in doing notes, and I figured this was a chance to get my voice heard – Dorothy and Rubinson had both done extensive interviews referring to me in unpleasant fashion (as justification for their coup, I imagine).

In his 1968 Rolling Stone review, Barret Hansen wrote that "the tunes are infectious, the harmonies adventurous yet eminently satisfying.

He nonetheless found that the album "falls short of being really satisfying" due to the band's musicianship being "not quite on a level with their ideas", noting: "The voices are flat and uninteresting, showing little technical or interpretive power.

"[3] In the Rock Encyclopedia by Lillian Roxon, published in 1969, shortly after the group's break-up, the band was described as "apparently too good to last, or before its time, or the victim of one or another dreaded rock-group disease", and noted that the album itself had met a "mixed reception", with "unbelieving enthusiasm on one hand, and boredom on the other".

Richie Unterberger of AllMusic deemed it "one of the most exciting and experimental psychedelic albums of the late 1960s" and compared some of the band's more hard-edged material to early Pink Floyd and the Velvet Underground.

[32] Pitchfork's Cameron Macdonald said that the album "still stands above the work of most of their Monterey-era, psych-rock peers", despite the presence of some dated electronic effects typical of "many electro-acoustic pieces from the analog years.