The Red Telephone

Lee's lyric opens on a hillside. Ben Edmonds called the song a masterpiece of macabre. He heard the harpsichord and strings, normally vessels of warmth in California pop, carry an undertow of menace. Don Randi plays the harpsichord, and the song is among the most heavily orchestrated on the album.

At the end a voice says, "We're all normal and we want our freedom." Lee said the line came from Peter Weiss's play Marat/Sade, which, according to Barney Hoskyns, he had seen six times. Pitchfork's Stephen M. Deusner asked whether rock had produced a stranger, more alarming cry for help, and noted that the calm in Lee's voice makes the lines more worrisome. Slant's Sal Cinquemani read in it a condemnation of centralized power, the ability of one president to start a war with a phone call.

Jim Bickhart's 1968 Rolling Stone review took a cooler view, finding excellent and mediocre portions in the song.