James Lowe, the frontman of the 1960s rock band the Electric Prunes, whose “free-form garage-rock” approach, as he called it, yielded the swirling psychedelic hit “I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night),” died on May 22 in Santa Barbara, Calif. He was 82.
His daughter Lisa Lowe said he died in a hospital of cardiac arrest.
The Electric Prunes arrived on the rock scene with a jolt: a menacing electric buzz that sounded like an oncoming swarm of deadly hornets.
The sound, which opened “I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night),” was the result of a playback error on a tape of the guitarist Ken Williams noodling with a fuzz box and a guitar tremolo bar. It was so raw and powerful that Mr. Lowe argued to keep it. The track would come to be hailed as a cornerstone of garage psychedelia.
With its trippy title and astral sound, “Too Much to Dream” was widely interpreted as a drug song, but its lyrics actually detailed the woe of an abandoned lover. Then again, the Electric Prunes, who swung from paisley pop to proto-punk to, yes, religious hymns sung in Latin, were always difficult to pin down.
“We were always outsiders,” Mr. Lowe recalled in a 2007 interview with Mojo, the British rock magazine. “We weren’t hip enough to be crazy, drugged-out characters.” In addition, he said: “The music was too eclectic. It sounds like 10 different bands on those records.”
Despite its maximalist sensibility, the band, which emerged from the Woodland Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, scored two early hits.
“Too Much to Dream” shot to No. 11 on the Billboard Hot 100 in December 1966. “Get Me to the World on Time,” a psychedelia-tinged rocker with a heavy helping of Rolling Stones insolence, made it to No. 27 the next year. But neither their 1967 debut album — which had heavy contributions from the songwriting team of Nancy Mantz and Annette Tucker — nor their follow-up, “Underground,” released the same year, sold well.
In response, the Electric Prunes took a major detour with their third album, “Mass in F Minor” (1968) — which was, in fact, pretty much that.
The composer and producer David Axelrod, who was brought in to write, arrange and conduct, “presented us with the idea of a Catholic Mass done in rock veneer,” Mr. Lowe said in a 2018 interview with the British magazine Shindig! “I had taken Latin and knew the Mass from my youth as an altar boy. I was sure my mom would like this one.”
The members of the band, however, did not. They struggled to tackle the complex arrangements, leading the album’s producer, Dave Hassinger, to replace them with other musicians on several tracks. “We were a garage band, for God’s sake!” Mr. Lowe told Shindig!
The daring, if odd, album, which included Gregorian chants and lyrics in Latin and Greek as well as scalding acid-rock guitar, rose no higher than No. 135 on the Billboard album chart. But it entered the hippie-era cultural canon when one track, “Kyrie Eleison,” was used in the New Orleans brothel scene of the landmark 1969 film “Easy Rider.”
In his book “The Great Psychedelic Discography” (1997), the music historian Martin C. Strong deemed the project “a complete disaster.” Conversely, the rock writer Richie Unterberger once wrote, “For all its apples-and-oranges conception, the record is a nifty psychedelic curio.”
Thaddeus James Lowe was born on March 5, 1943, in San Luis Obispo, Calif., the eldest of nine children of Thaddeus Lowe, a hairdresser, and Elizabeth (Hawkins) Lowe, a nurse’s aide.
The Electric Prunes were going by the name Jim and the Lords when an acetate of their music caught Mr. Hassinger’s attention. Before recording the band, however, he told them they needed a more memorable name.
During a brainstorming session, Mark Tulin, the band’s bassist, told a joke: What’s purple and goes buzz buzz? An electric prune. Mr. Hassinger hated the name, but their label, Reprise, loved it, so they went down in history as one of several psychedelic bands with grocery-aisle names, among them Moby Grape and the Strawberry Alarm Clock — although Mr. Lowe insisted to Shindig! that before them, “there were no other ‘fruitists.’”
During the Electric Prunes’ brief heyday, they toured Europe, hung out with Jimi Hendrix and performed on “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” albeit in regrettable matching prune-colored sweaters. With their reputation for inventive sounds, the Prunes were hired for an advertising campaign for the Vox wah-wah pedal.
But they failed to keep the momentum going and began to splinter soon after “Mass in F Minor.” Because they did not own the rights to their name, Mr. Hassinger continued to release Electric Prunes albums with different musicians.
Mr. Lowe turned his attention to working as a producer and engineer. He worked on albums by Todd Rundgren’s critically acclaimed band Nazz, and produced “A Woofer in Tweeter’s Clothing” (1972), an early album by the quirky Los Angeles band Sparks.
In addition to his daughter Lisa, Mr. Lowe is survived by his wife, Pamela (Sangster) Lowe; another daughter, Skylar McNiel; a son, Cameron; three sisters, Terese Hampton, Chris Pursley and Shannon Calandri; a brother, Matthew; four grandchildren; three step-grandchildren; and four step-great-grandchildren.
The Electric Prunes might have faded into oblivion if “I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)” had not been included as the opening track on “Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968,” a 1972 compilation of garage-rock gems unearthed by the guitarist Lenny Kaye. Ranked No. 196 on Rolling Stone’s 2008 list of the 500 greatest rock albums, “Nuggets” served as rocket fuel for generations of indie and punk bands to follow.
One person who was not bathing in the nostalgia was Mr. Lowe. “There was so much pain involved towards the end, with everybody savaging each other,” he told Mojo in 2007, “that I didn’t even admit I was in the band until 30 years later.”
After all those years, he still expressed mixed feelings about the band’s oddball name: “At the time, I wasn’t proud at all. But you know what? You wouldn’t be talking to me right now if we’d had a different name.”
Alex Williams is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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