James Lowe, Rock Outsider With the Electric Prunes, Dies at 82

New York Times

12-06-2025

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.
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