The Electric Prunes
Studio album by The Electric Prunes
Released 2007 [originally released in 1967]
Recorded 1967
Genre Psychedelic Rock
Length 29:15
Label Rhino/Reprise
Producer David Hassinger
The Electric Prunes is the 1967 debut album by The Electric Prunes. The first track, "I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)", was a hit and became the band's signature tune. It became the lead track on the compilation Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968. The album also contains another notable psychedelic rock composition, "Get Me to the World on Time". The album was listed in the book "1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die".
Professional Ratings:
allmusic 4/5 stars
Review by Mark Deming of allmusic:
As the throbbing buzz of Ken Williams' tremolo-laden fuzztone guitar creeps from one side of the stereo spectrum to the other, the Electric Prunes kick off their debut album with their first (and biggest) hit single, and if Electric Prunes: I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night) never hits the high point of its title track again, the next 11 songs confirm that these guys were in the first echelon of American garage bands of the '60s. In the grand tradition of most garage rock albums, the best tracks on this disc are the singles, which along with the title track include "Get Me to the World on Time" and the surprisingly effective B-sides "Luvin'" and "Are You Loving Me More (But Enjoying It Less)," but the other tunes are more than just filler. On nearly every song, Williams and fellow guitarists Weasel Spagnola and Jim Lowe spin a web of gloriously strange sounds, making the most of a battery of stomp boxes, and bassist Mark Tulin and drummer Preston Ritter provide a solid, percolating backdrop for their faux-psychedelic soundscapes. Producer David Hassinger would in time become a bad guy in the Electric Prunes' story, but on these sessions he gives them a great studio sound, specious but full of details, and at its best this album does as well by its three-guitar team as Moby Grape's epochal debut. And if songs like the weepy soft rock number "Onie," the phony Brit-folk of "The King Is in the Counting House" and the goofball nostalgia of "Toonerville Trolly" suggest Hassinger didn't always know what sort of material to fit with the band (who were only allowed to record two of their own songs), the Prunes rise to the occasion no matter what's thrown at them (and Jim Lowe's vocal suggests he knew just how ridiculous "Toonerville Trolly" would sound). While the Sonics and the Litter made more consistent albums, few if any bands from the '60s garage came up with a sound as distinctive as the Electric Prunes, and they got it on tape with striking success on I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night).
Review by George Starostin on Only Solitaire:
I don't think I'll be making much of an overstatement once I mention that the Electric Prunes' debut does not own much in the way of original vision. (Take that, English language!). Well, you might have been deceived by the lead-in single - which, by the way, also happens to be the lead-in track on Nuggets (both the current boxset and the groundbreaking Lenny Kaye concoction). The lead-in single, which wasn't even written by the band members, much like the absolute majority of the material on here, was pretty damn mindblowing. For a detailed account of the song, see my Nuggets review; here I'll just add that, for all its transparency, it really sounded like nothing else at the time.
Once you get past that song, though, it's the usual picture of a one-hit band, good enough to take a short sprint but whose muscles eventually give way when it comes to follow it up with something more substantial. None of the songs on the album reach that peak. On the other hand, the Electric Prunes still have an advantage over a lot of their competitors. We have the epoch to thank, of course, but it took talent and bravery to follow the trends of that epoch, and one can't deny that the Prunes had both, in early 1967, at least. The record is brimming with all kinds of experiments - successful or failed, mild or bold, laudable or questionable, you name it; no two songs sound the same. At the very worst, you could claim that all these experiments are failed - and in a certain way, they are, because for every genre and style tackled here, I could name somebody who did it much better; but then again, it's hardly possible for anybody to equally despise all of the boys' results. And if you like at least a small bunch of these tunes, enough to not be able to declare the record a "monumental crash", you'll probably have to give them credit for at least trying to do all the rest.
If the songwriting credits are of any indication, the band members themselves were primarily fans of the Rolling Stones-style: "dangerous"-sounding midtempo blues-rock was their original thang. The best track in that genre, singer Jim Lowe's 'Little Olive', actually did not make it onto the original album; today, it is available as a bonus track on the restored CD edition. The album has that direction represented by the slightly more generic 'Luvin', produced in such a closely mimicking way that it sounds like an outtake from a Stones album of the Now! (early '65) period - same mysterious echoey guitars, same scary echoey harmonica.
They did, however, take interest in expanding their format, and the one "alien" track of their own writing that they did get the chance to place on the album was 'Train For Tomorrow'. In the liner notes, Richie Unterberger hints at the band's being used and exploited in the studio, meaning that, while they did have a batch of original compositions under their belt, only two were allowed on the record; maybe that is why 'Train For Tomorrow' is actually a medley of two songs in two different styles - first part is mild psycho-folk, possibly influenced by the Jefferson Airplane, second part is instrumental jazz, "inspired by Wes Montgomery" (to quote R.U.). Both parts sound amateurish but authentic, and they even manage to make the instrumental jazz section ring with true tension, unlike quite a few boring noodlefests by far more professional performers I could name.
Outside songwriter Annette Tucker is responsible for a whoppin' eight compositions on here (six in collaboration with Nancie Mantz, two with Jill Jones). Considering that this includes both of the band's hit singles (the second one is 'Get Me To The World On Time', also captured on Nuggets and deservedly so), she truly should be considered the main hero of the album, although credit still goes to the band members for thinking up all the variegated arrangements. Granted, some of these songs can't be saved by any amount of psychedelic overlays, which is presumably why they don't even try on such fluff as 'Onie', a sugar-sweet teenybopper ballad that tries to work along the same atmospheric/melodic lines as the Velvet Underground's 'Sunday Morning', but doesn't have neither the chimes nor the interesting lyrics nor the sincere-sounding Lou Reed vocal delivery; in fact, I have a suspicion rhythm guitarist Weasel, who takes lead vocals on here, isn't even trying, because no sane person could feel any sympathy towards such garbage. But you just had to have something for the pre-pubescent ones, you know. In the same way, 'The King Is In The Counting House' is probably targeted at an even younger audience. (There was this really nasty tendency to "artsify" nursery rhymes in the mid-Sixties, mostly indicative of bands that had a hard time writing some real art-pop of their own).
On the other hand, 'Sold To The Highest Bidder' with its pseudo-ukuleles is good clean fun, and the resulting sound, mixing a bit of sadness with a bit of ecstasy, is quite unique even for '67; a slightly similar effect, although with radically different means (synthesizers - what a surprise!), would only be achieved by Roy Wood seven years later with 'Everyday I Wonder'. 'Try Me On For Size' shows that Tucker wasn't opposed to writing ballsy Stonesy rockers either, although the similarity is somewhat weakened by the band entrusting most of the melody to electric pianos (then again, once the marimbas start rolling in, comparisons with 'Under My Thumb' become inevitable). And the music-hall divertissement of 'The Toonerville Trolley' is a suitably nice conclusion to the album.
You know, when you actually read the liner notes and hear all those band members complaining about how The Machine was sadistically stifling their creative forces, as if they were one collective Orson Welles or something, you'd think the end result should have been predictable - two good single A-sides and ten pieces of worthless crap. But in thinking so, you'd definitely underestimate the power of corporate songwriting. Tucker and Mantz presumably wrote 'I Had Too Much To Dream' just because it was their job. They got good money for it, and they wrote it by carefully capturing the "vibes" of the epoch, whether they themselves were feeling these vibes in their souls or not (and I have good reason to doubt they did). And yet the result was convincing enough for the song to make it to Nuggets, together with the real "authentic" garage-rock of the epoch, the one written by scruffy teens out of (spiritual) inspiration and (sexual) maturation!
Which brings us, yet again, to the point that "commercial" and "non-commercial" songwriting were exceedingly hard to separate in the mid-Sixties; with values such as "experimentalism" and "spontaneity" getting as high on the market as they'd never ever get again, somehow the goals of those who wrote for money and of those who wrote for art became, if not completely the same, at the very least so close to each other it took a real pro to tell them apart. On I Had Too Much To Dream, it's mostly lightweight fluff like 'Onie' or 'The King...' that hints at "oppression" - but let's not forget that even creatively free bands would often stoop to this kind of material, not being forced by anybody, in order to attract larger audiences.
The one truly deplorable effect it had on the Prunes, of course, is that the Prunes eventually came to be regarded in the same ballpark as the Monkees - i.e. a band where outside songwriters are everything and band members are interchangeable nothings, which, of course, resulted in the embarrassment of the "band"'s "third" album in less than a year. But then again, it has never been proven that something great and timeless could come out of the original Prunes had they been given completely free rein. Where is Jim Lowe today, I wonder?
LP track listing
Side One
1. "I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)" (Nancie Mantz, Annette Tucker) Ð 2:55
2. "Bangles" (John Walsh) Ð 2:27
3. "Onie" (Nancie Mantz, Annette Tucker) Ð 2:43
4. "Are You Lovin' Me More (But Enjoying It Less)" (Nancie Mantz, Annette Tucker) Ð 2:21
5. "Train for Tomorrow" (James Lowe, Preston Ritter, James Spagnola, Mark Tulin, Ken Williams) Ð 3:00
6. "Sold to the Highest Bidder" (Nancie Mantz, Annette Tucker) Ð 2:16
Side Two
7. "Get Me to the World on Time" (Nancie Mantz, Annette Tucker) Ð 2:30
8. "About a Quarter to Nine" (Al Dubin, Harry Warren) Ð 2:07
9. "The King Is in the Counting House" (Nancie Mantz, Annette Tucker) Ð 2:00
10. "Luvin'" (James Lowe, Mark Tulin) Ð 2:03
11. "Try Me on for Size" (Jill Jones, Annette Tucker) Ð 2:19
12. "The Toonerville Trolley" (Nancie Mantz, Annette Tucker) Ð 2:34
Personnel:
* Ken Williams - guitar
* James Lowe -guitar, tambourine, harmonica, autoharp, vocals
* James "Weasel" Spagnola - guitar, vocal
* Preston Ritter - drums, percussion
* Mark Tulin - bass, piano, organ