7 and 7 Is

Lee wrote it at the Colonial Apartments on Sunset Boulevard. The title nods to his high school girlfriend Anita Billings, with whom he shared a March 7 birthday, and the lyric describes the frustration of being a teenager. It began as a slow folk song in the manner of Bob Dylan. In the studio it turned into something faster and harder. A Vox endorsement gave Forssi a bass fuzz unit, which was dropped for overpowering the other instruments. He found a similar sound in feedback from his semi-acoustic Eko bass, and Echols used feedback, reverb and tremolo on guitar.

Love recorded it on 17 and 20 June 1966 at Sunset Sound, with Holzman producing and Botnick engineering. The drum part was so intense that it took many attempts. Estimates of the number of takes run from 20 to 60, most of them false starts. Botnick said the sound effect that ends the song may be a gunshot slowed down, and Echols would reproduce it live by kicking his amplifier. Echols says he wrote the coda, inspired by Santo and Johnny's Sleep Walk. A largely acoustic demo made during the same sessions, called Hummingbirds, was shelved and became The Good Humor Man He Sees Everything Like This on Forever Changes.

Elektra issued the single in July 1966 with No. Fourteen, an outtake from the debut, on the B-side. It entered the Hot 100 on 30 July and spent ten weeks there, peaking at number 33 on 24 September. Robert Christgau called it a perfect rocker, and Cash Box a pulsating, danceable blueser with a clever gimmick wind-up. It is counted among the earliest rock songs to influence punk. It appears fourth on Da Capo, between ¡Que Vida! and The Castle.