and packaging of their music. Their debut album had been recorded in just four days, and although it was not a major hit, it cracked the US Top 50 album chart and sold steadily, eventually going gold in 1971. For their second album, The Grateful Dead took a far more experimental approach, embarking on a marathon series of recording sessions lasting seven months, from September 1967 to March 1968. They started the album with David Hassinger, who had produced their first album, but he quit the project in frustration in December 1967 while they were recording in New York City (although he is co-credited with the band on the album). The group and their concert sound engineer Dan Healy then took over production of the album themselves, taking the unusual step of intermixing studio material with multitrack recordings of their concerts. Anthem of the Sun proved to be the least successful of The Grateful Dead's 1960s albums—it sold poorly, the extended sessions put the band more than $100,000 in debt to the label, and Warner Bros. executive Joe Smith later described it as "the most unreasonable project with which we have ever involved ourselves." The Grateful Dead's relationship with Warner Bros. Records was stretched even further by the making of their third album Aoxomoxoa (1969), which also took around seven months to record and cost $180,000, almost twice as much as its predecessor. It sold poorly and took almost thirty years to be accredited with gold-record status. There were further difficulties in 1971 when the band presented Warner Bros. with a planned live double-album that they wanted to call Skull Fuck, but Ostin handled the matter diplomatically. Rather than refusing point-blank to release it, he reminded The Grateful Dead that they were heavily in debt to Warner's and would not see any royalties until this had been repaid; he also pointed out that the provocative title would inevitably hurt sales because major retailers like Sears would refuse to stock it. Realizing that this would reduce their income, the band voluntarily changed the title to Grateful Dead, known generally as Skull and Roses. Some of Warner Bros.' biggest commercial successes during this period were with "Sunshine Pop" acts. Harpers Bizarre scored a No. 13 Billboard hit in April 1967 with their version of Simon & Garfunkel's "The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)", and a month later The Association scored a