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James Lowe, who fronted the psych-garage-pop group the Electric Prunes within the late Sixties, greatest recognized for his or her prime 10 hit “I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night),” died May 22 at age 82 his household reported.
Following the breakup of the Electric Prunes, Lowe turned an engineer and producer working with such artists as Sparks and Todd Rundgren, earlier than leaving music behind within the early ’70s and ultimately discovering a second profession on the planet of business filmmaking. After a quarter-century of not doing music, he reunited the Prunes within the late ’90s and continued to carry out via the top of his life.
The household didn’t give a reason for dying, saying that Lowe “passed away on May 22, 2025, from natural causes — suddenly, yet peacefully — surrounded by family and music.”
The musician had fortunately acceded to a wave of nostalgia for his band that solely appeared to intensify lately, from performing to an adoring crowd in Los Angeles at a “Nuggets” tribute present in 2023 (“I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night” was the kickoff track to that basic garage-rock compilation) to not too long ago giving retrospective interviews for a sequence of rock podcasts.
“James left this world peacefully — his heart giving one final electric beat, surrounded by the loving embrace of his family and enveloped by the sounds of his favorite music,” his kids Lisa, Cameron, and Skylar stated in a press release. “He was a creative force, a rock star without pretense, and someone who lived and loved fully. But the most important ingredient to James’ life was his 62-year marriage to Pamela, his guiding star and enduring muse for all things. … James was a visionary, a dreamer, a doer who never stopped creating, exploring, lifting others up — or believing in what’s possible.”
One of Lowe’s largest followers was David Katznelson, an A&R govt for Warner Bros. Records within the ’90s who was answerable for placing out a compilation that revived curiosity within the Electric Prunes and helped spur the reunion that few — least of all Lowe himself — thought would ever occur.
“As soon as I heard the Electric Prunes, I knew it sounded like nothing I’d ever heard of,” says Katznelson. “You know, they were using backwards guitars, and leading the way in using fuzz guitar and the wah-wah pedal” — to the purpose that the producers of the Fox wah-wah pedal really used the Prunes to push their product in promoting within the late ’60s. “And Jim was a pure engineer, which is why he went on to do different nice data — once we speak about experimenting within the ’60s, he was a type of guys who was actually doing it, which is why ‘I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night’ had such an iconic sound…
“If you like the psychedelic movement,” continued, Katznelson, “the Electric Prunes, with their name and their sound, really define the psychedelic movement in ways that only a couple of other bands really did, exemplifying that for the the two main records that they did.” (After Lowe stop in 1968, the band briefly continued with out him; then their supervisor fashioned an all-new lineup with none of the unique members that proved short-lived.)
The oldest of 9 kids, Lowe grew up in southern California, making occasional browsing journeys to Hawaii and coming of age musically below the sway of surf guitarist Dick Dale, whom he typically would see carry out at Newport Beach’s Rendezvous Ballroom. In 1965, he and several other Taft High college students fashioned the Sanctions and had been found by report producer and engineer David Hassinger, whose claims to fame included engineering the Rolling Stone’s mid-’60s data. Hassinger turned their supervisor and helped get them signed to Warner Bros. Records’ Reprise imprint. Upon getting signed, Lowe and his bandmates Ken Williams, James “Weasel” Spagnola, Mark Tulin and Preston Ritter had been referred to as Jim and the Lords, a tag they had been desirous to shed earlier than releasing their first single.
The origin of their final title concerned a joke much like the one which prompted one other group of the time, Moby Grape. “Somebody said, ‘What’s purple and goes buzz buzz?’ And the answer was an electric prune,” Lowe recalled. “Our bass player told us that stupid joke and I said, ‘That’s gotta be the name.’ Of course they all didn’t respond to it, but Dave Hassinger took that name to Warner Bros. He hated it too, but he came back to me and said, ‘Guess what? Warner Bros. loved the name…. I know it’s a goofy one, but you remembered it.”
A primary single, “Ain’t It Hard,” didn’t stir a lot motion, however “I Had Too Much to Dream” rose to No. 11 on the Hot 100, regardless of doubts that it was appropriate for AM airplay. A 3rd single, “Get Me to the World on Time,” peaked at No. 27 earlier than the Prunes’ temporary run as radio favorites got here to an finish. Their self-titled debut solely made it so far as No. 113 on the Billboard chart, little belying simply how enduring their largest hit would stay on the planet of well-remembered oldies through the years.
The track was not written by the group however somewhat the feminine writing crew of Annette Tucker and Nancie Mantz. “Annette gave us a demo of it, and it was like kind of like a country-Western ballad or something,” Lowe stated. “Dave was real adamant about changing things. He said, ‘You gotta put your own arrangement to it. Do something weird, have some breaks, do some stuff,’ whatever’” — an encouragement that Lowe put right down to Hassinger having been concerned with the Rolling Stones and strange hits like “Paint It Black.” “We took it and took it as far as we could, fooling around with it, and it completely changed everything, for us and for the song… We looked at it as a construction. We did it in pieces. We didn’t all get in the studio and gather around and play ‘Too Much to Dream.’ We actually mapped it out, how we were gonna do it, with breaks here and breaks there… We never really got to hear the song the way we did it in full until we finished it.”
As for the memorable opening to the smash. Lowe stated, “From the beginning, nobody knew what that sound was at the beginning. Ken Williams had been playing around with his guitar and we recorded going forward on a four-track and then we’d flip the tape over and record going the other way to just to save money, because we didn’t have money to buy rolls of tape. And one of the engineers at Leon Russell’s house didn’t push the record button, and so we got left with the tail end of something backward… Once I heard that sound, which came in the studio accidentally… it overwhelmed us. And I went in the control room and I said, ‘Whatever that was, cut that off. We’re gonna use it for something!’ … And when we came to do ‘Too Much to Dream,’ I said, ‘Now we’ve got a place to use that sound.’”
The second and last album with the unique lineup, “Underground,” got here out in 1967. It was included on an NME record of the “100 greatest albums you’ve never heard.” The leadoff track, cowritten by Lowe, was “The Great Banana Hoax.” “If you remember back in 1967, I think it was, there was a rumor going around that if you fried banana peels and scraped that stuff off the inside of the banana peel, that you could get high from it,” he stated. “I thought it was a great idea for an international joke, or at least for an American joke.”
On the second album, they’d extra of their very own unique materials, however not as a result of it was inspired by their manager-producer, Lowesaid. “Dave go a deal with Warner Brothers to produce the Grateful Dead’s album, so he went to San Francisco, which that made it perfect for us to record the things we wanted. He never liked any of our songs, so we couldn’t put any of our material on there. So we would lie to him and use my wife’s maiden name and my parents’ maiden names and stuff to be able to put our songs on the record. So when he left town, that was perfect for us.”
Lowe stop the group in 1968, with Hassinger making an attempt to maintain the group alive with concepts that included odd diversions into non secular rock and lineups that decreasingly resembled the unique. Meanwhile, Lowe, much less concerned with performing, took to engineering — together with a name to work with Todd Rundgren’s unique group, the Nazz, on their second album (which prolonged to a 3rd).
“They were looking for a place to record and someone to record with. I guess Todd said their engineer had fallen asleep in their recordings they did back in Philly. So he just asked if I could stay awake — and I said, ‘Well, if the music’s good, I’ll stay awake.’ So that was the main criteria and we started recording together.”
Rundgren’s requirements are notoriously increased than that, and so he clearly had religion in Lowe when he had him engineer certainly one of his early manufacturing efforts, the debut album by Sparks, recognized on the time as Halfnelson. When it got here time to do Sparks’ second album (now below their last title), “A Woofer in Tweeter’s Clothing,” Rundgren was already booked however requested Lowe to take over for them as producer. The means Lowe remembered it, he was so enamored of what he was doing with Sparks that he determined to stop the enterprise if the album didn’t take off. It didn’t, and so he did.
Lowe pivoted into directing kids’s reveals and TV commercials. Around the time that he and his spouse Pamela had been welcomed a 3rd baby, he started constructing what his household described as his mountaintop dream house within the hills of Santa Ynez. They additionally constructed a second house in Cabarete, a bay within the Dominican Republic.
In the ’90s, Katznelson was seeking to put collectively an Electric Prunes compilation for Warner Bros,, the place he was in A&R. Ultimately the label handed, pondering there wasn’t sufficient curiosity — however gave him the inexperienced mild to license the fabric to himself at a small unbiased label he ran, Birdman Records. Together, they got here up with some unreleased tracks and new mixes, amongst different treats for followers of the unique stuff. It ended up sparking a Prunes revival.
“We went into the studio to to listen to all that stuff,” says Katznelson, “and we ended up including the jamming endings to a number of the songs that had been form of edited earlier than they had been placed on the primary data… Then Jim put the band again along with just about virtually all the unique gamers, they usually performed plenty of dates. It was really fairly unimaginable. We additionally did the primary actual launch of the ‘Live in Stockholm’ report that had been recorded when the band was first touring the world after they had been having preliminary success with ‘Too Much to Dream Last Night.’ And the Prunes began making new data — and I’d stored in contact with Jim ever since.
“When that new report got here out in 2000, they did a pair reside reveals round that, and that’s after they began packing them in. They would do these excursions with bands just like the Seeds and even toured with some semblance of Love. That lasted for most likely over a decade. That’s when he realized that folks nonetheless liked him. But you recognize, even when did a reissue of the ‘Live in Stockholm’ album, years after we’d performed the primary one, even then he was like, ‘Why would you do that? Who’s gonna need that?’
“Jim was living in Santa Ynez at the time, and he was close with Peter from the Moby Grape, and the two of them came to a Halloween party that I had in Beverly Hills and ended up doing a single that was about the party that that came out.” He additionally proudly welcomed his son Cameron, who adopted within the path of music, on stage for a lot of look. More not too long ago, “Jim had not been playing for a while, but they did this show that Lenny Kaye put together for Wild Honey as a tribute to ‘Nuggets’ in Los Angeles and Jim stole the show, supposedly, coming on the stage with everybody to do ‘Too Much to Dream.’”
This marked a turnaround from the Nineteen Seventies, when the Kaye-curated “Nuggets” compilation got here out in 1972, and led off with “Too Much to Dream,” serving because the very exemplar of the garage-psych ethos that Kaye was attempting for instance with the impactful two-LP set. As main because it turned for rock hounds, Lowe was to this point out of the music scene on the time that he didn’t even know the track led the compilation until his son pointed it out seven years later.
The household’s assertion known as their father “an elder statesman of rock ‘n’ roll — not just a witness to music history, but one of its architects. And yet he remained humble, always making time for fans, answering questions, sharing stories, and encouraging younger artists to follow their strange, experimental muses.”
“The thing that I loved about Jim,” says Katznelson, “is that for him, as far as art was concerned, anything is always possible. And the idea is to try to figure out a way of getting as far out as you could, while maintaining true artistry, you know? And that’s kind of how he lived his life. And he was just a great guy. He was really a great encapsulation of what you would think of when you think of a ’60s artist and thinker — happy to go against the grain, happy to push things, happy to try things, happy to be exposed to new ideas, both in music and beyond, and really live life on its own path. In fact, there’s an Electric Prunes song called ‘I Got a Way Of My Own,’ and that really fits Jim to a tee.”
Lowe is survived by his spouse, Pamela; his kids Lisa, Cameron, and Skylar; and his grandchildren Hana, Blue, Isla and Goldie, who affectionately known as him “Dude.”