The Electric Prunes
 The
story of The Electric Prunes is the classic tale of a group
plucked from obscurity.
A group of friends from Taft High School in Los Angeles were
practicing in a garage one day when a passing real estate agent
heard them and was inspired to introduce the group to her friend,
RCA studio engineer Dave Hassinger.
Hassinger believed the group had talent, but lacked song writing
ability and so brought in professional songwriters Annette Tucker
and Nancie Mantz.
This pair had originally penned I Had Too Much To Dream
(Last Night) as a slow piano ballad, but the group's
interpretation, inspired by the hippie
scene of the day, was a fuzz and reverb-soaked trip into the
fantastical.
Double-tracked vocals and echoes added to its soaring sound and
led to the track's release as a single and it reached Number 11 on
the US charts. This swiftly led to the recording of an album -
mostly of Mantz/Tucker material - with the Reprise label.
Their follow-up single, Get Me To The World On Time, was
a similarly lush psychedelic affair, but failed to recreate the
commercial success of their debut.
 The album - also called I
Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night) - did well on both sides of
the Atlantic, certainly equalling sales of contemporaries such as Jefferson
Airplane and so - at least at the beginning - the Prunes were
viewed as the frontrunners of the burgeoning West Coast
psychedelic scene.
The group started taking themselves very seriously and recorded
their album Mass in F Minor sung in Latin, in what were
supposed to be Gregorian chants. Despite their pious intentions,
it was an unholy noise!
Years later, the large number of copies of their debut album
that became cheaply available in second-hand markets and the like
led to them becoming a huge influence on garage punk bands in the
1970s, such as The MC5 and The
Stooges.
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