Everyone who starts a band starts it with great expectations of rock & roll glory. They and their musical compatriots gang together to take over the world one song at a time. They do not start a band with the expectation that the group will be hijacked within a couple of years and replaced by another band in order to record a complex Catholic concept album in Latin. Show business is weird, y’all.

Welcome to The Electric Prunes!

They started out as your typical teenage surf/garage cover band in Los Angeles in 1965. The group’s homemade demo passed into the possession of someone who knew someone, and it ended up in the knob-twiddling hands of Dave Hassinger, an engineer of fine repute who had spent the last couple of years working with The Rolling Stones whenever they came to L.A. to record. Hassinger wanted to try producing a record himself and thought this band, currently known as Jim and The Lords, might be his ticket. But first, he asked them to change their name.

Everyone kicked around suggestions, but when the lead singer suggested The Electric Prunes, the others recoiled in horror. He agreed with their reaction, but insisted nobody would ever forget the image behind such a name. And so it came to pass.

Even though the guys had started composing their own songs by this time, Hassinger brought in the pro writing team of Annette Tucker and Nancie Mantz to pen the majority of the group’s first album, including the sound explosion known as “I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night),” an attempt by the writers at emulating The Rolling Stones. The distorted guitar effect at the beginning resulted from a studio accident, but randomness and trippiness were becoming fashionable so The Prunes asked Hassinger to edit the sound onto the track.

Released as a single in November of 1966, “I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night)” peaked just outside of the US Top 10, blasting out of AM radios, and perfectly bridging the garage rock of the previous years with the psychedelia to come. Surely, The Electric Prunes would soon conquer the world! Right?

Not so fast. The band’s second album, mostly self-written this time around, produced no hits, and a couple of the guys left during the recording sessions. The band’s manager — along with Hassinger — for some reason decided that the best course of action to achieve success was to record a concept album marrying Gregorian chants and psychedelic rock. The band agreed and into the studio they went. Unfortunately, the guy hired to write this magnum opus, David Axelrod, made everything too complex for The Electric Prunes to play, and Hassinger brought in another band, The Collectors, to finish the songs, along with session musicians.

The album that resulted, Mass In F Minor, didn’t perform spectacularly, but did well enough that Hassinger and Axelrod decided to record a sequel, bringing in yet another band to assume the mantle of The Electric Prunes (Hassinger owned the name), for by this time, all of the original members had departed. The spark was gone, and so too, the fruits of success.

So get ready to face the light … with The Electric Prunes.