James Lowe, who fronted the psych-garage-pop group the Electric Prunes in the late 1960s, best known for their top 10 hit “I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night),” died May 22 at age 82 his family reported.
Following the breakup of the Electric Prunes, Lowe became an engineer and producer working with such artists as Sparks and Todd Rundgren, before leaving music behind in the early ’70s and eventually finding a second career in the world of industrial filmmaking. After a quarter-century of not doing music, he reunited the Prunes in the late ’90s and continued to perform through the end of his life.
The family did not give a cause of death, saying that Lowe “passed away on May 22, 2025, from natural causes — suddenly, yet peacefully — surrounded by family and music.”
The musician had happily acceded to a wave of nostalgia for his band that only seemed to heighten in recent years, from performing to an adoring crowd in Los Angeles at a “Nuggets” tribute show in 2023 (“I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night” was the kickoff song to that classic garage-rock compilation) to recently giving retrospective interviews for a series 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 children Lisa, Cameron, and Skylar said in a statement. “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 biggest fans was David Katznelson, an A&R executive for Warner Bros. Records in the ’90s who was responsible for putting out a compilation that revived interest in the Electric Prunes and helped spur the reunion that few — least of all Lowe himself — thought would ever happen.
“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 point that the manufacturers of the Fox wah-wah pedal actually used the Prunes to push their product in advertising in the late ’60s. “And Jim was a natural engineer, which is why he went on to do other great records — when we talk about experimenting in the ’60s, he was one of those guys who was really 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 quit in 1968, the band briefly continued without him; then their manager formed an all-new lineup without any of the original members that proved short-lived.)
The oldest of nine children, Lowe grew up in southern California, making occasional surfing trips to Hawaii and coming of age musically under the sway of surf guitarist Dick Dale, whom he often would see perform at Newport Beach’s Rendezvous Ballroom. In 1965, he and several Taft High students formed the Sanctions and were discovered by record producer and engineer David Hassinger, whose claims to fame included engineering the Rolling Stone’s mid-’60s records. Hassinger became their manager 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 were known as Jim and the Lords, a tag they were eager to shed before releasing their first single.
The origin of their ultimate name involved a joke similar to the one that prompted another 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 first single, “Ain’t It Hard,” failed to stir much action, but “I Had Too Much to Dream” rose to No. 11 on the Hot 100, despite doubts that it was suitable for AM airplay. A third single, “Get Me to the World on Time,” peaked at No. 27 before the Prunes’ brief run as radio favorites came to an end. Their self-titled debut only made it as far as No. 113 on the Billboard chart, little belying just how enduring their biggest hit would remain in the world of well-remembered oldies over the years.
The song was not written by the group but rather the female writing team 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 said. “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 down to Hassinger having been involved with the Rolling Stones and unusual 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 said, “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 final album with the original lineup, “Underground,” came out in 1967. It was included on an NME list of the “100 greatest albums you’ve never heard.” The leadoff song, 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 said. “I thought it was a great idea for an international joke, or at least for an American joke.”
On the second album, they had more of their own original material, but not because it was encouraged 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 quit the group in 1968, with Hassinger attempting to keep the group alive with ideas that included odd diversions into religious rock and lineups that decreasingly resembled the original. Meanwhile, Lowe, less interested in performing, took to engineering — including a call to work with Todd Rundgren’s original group, the Nazz, on their second album (which extended to a third).
“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 standards are notoriously higher than that, and so he clearly had faith in Lowe when he had him engineer one of his early production efforts, the debut album by Sparks, known at the time as Halfnelson. When it came time to do Sparks’ second album (now under their final name), “A Woofer in Tweeter’s Clothing,” Rundgren was already booked but asked Lowe to take over for them as producer. The way Lowe remembered it, he was so enamored of what he was doing with Sparks that he decided to quit the business if the album didn’t take off. It didn’t, and so he did.
Lowe pivoted into directing children’s shows and TV commercials. Around the time that he and his wife Pamela were welcomed a third child, he began building what his family described as his mountaintop dream home in the hills of Santa Ynez. They also built a second home in Cabarete, a bay in the Dominican Republic.
In the ’90s, Katznelson was looking to put together an Electric Prunes compilation for Warner Bros,, where he was in A&R. Ultimately the label passed, thinking there wasn’t enough interest — but gave him the green light to license the material to himself at a small independent label he ran, Birdman Records. Together, they came up with some unreleased tracks and new mixes, among other treats for fans of the original 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 adding the jamming endings to some of the songs that had been kind of edited before they were put on the main records… Then Jim put the band back together with pretty much almost all the original players, and they played a lot of dates. It was actually pretty incredible. We also did the first real release of the ‘Live in Stockholm’ record that had been recorded when the band was first touring the world when they were having initial success with ‘Too Much to Dream Last Night.’ And the Prunes started making new records — and I’d kept in touch with Jim ever since.
“When that new record came out in 2000, they did a couple live shows around that, and that’s when they started packing them in. They would do these tours with bands like the Seeds and even toured with some semblance of Love. That lasted for probably over a decade. That’s when he realized that people still loved him. But you know, even when did a reissue of the ‘Live in Stockholm’ album, years after we’d done the first one, even then he was like, ‘Why would you do that? Who’s gonna want 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 also proudly welcomed his son Cameron, who followed in the path of music, on stage for many appearance. More recently, “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 1970s, when the Kaye-curated “Nuggets” compilation came out in 1972, and led off with “Too Much to Dream,” serving as the very exemplar of the garage-psych ethos that Kaye was trying to illustrate with the impactful two-LP set. As major as it became for rock hounds, Lowe was so far out of the music scene at the time that he didn’t even know the song led the compilation till his son pointed it out seven years later.
The family’s statement called 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 wife, Pamela; his children Lisa, Cameron, and Skylar; and his grandchildren Hana, Blue, Isla and Goldie, who affectionately called him “Dude.”
