During the Hippie era, Pop became a dirty word. The 3-minute single became the domain of teenybopper music, not serious "Art". Pretentiousness became rampant, reaching it’s peak with Progressive Rock, the appearance of The Ramones finally putting a much-appreciated end to.
But I never stopped loving Paul Revere & The Raiders, whose "Just Like Me" is a fantastic Pop song! Sure, the chord progression is nothing special, but the song has a great melody, and the all-important sing-along chorus "hook", as well a really cool double-tracked guitar solo by Drake Levin. Plus, Mark Lindsey was (is?) a great singer.
I auditioned for a Hippie band in the spring of ’71, and after passing the audition (a jam from 10 PM to 6 AM the next morning) moved into the band house. The bass player helped me carry in my LP collection from my VW van (of course 😉), and after looking through the titles said to me "You like weird music." He had seen my Beach Boys albums (they had long ago become uncool), my Paul Revere & The Raiders, my Ventures, my Animals and Manfred Mann albums, my copy of Emitt Rhodes s/t debut (a Pop classic), my girl group albums, my Soul and R & B, my Country & Western (Hippies did not allow you to like Merle Haggard, even though Jerry Garcia did), and my Andy Williams Greatest Hits album (which contains some songs by Henry Mancini, a favorite of mine). But my Jazz and Classical were fine, of course. I liked some albums by current bands, like those of Moby Grape, The Sons (though a Hippie band---in fact as about as Hippie as they come---they were great), Spirit, Fleetwood Mac, Procol Harum, The Kinks, a few others.
I played the band The Beach Boys’ Smiley Smile album, with which I was at that time obsessed (read the two chapters on the making of Smile in the Paul Williams book Outlaw Blues if you don’t already know about this incredible album-that-never-was), and they just didn’t get it. I eventually had to quit the band; too much jamming/extended guitar soloing, too little playing and singing of songs.