I don't think I'll be making much of an overstatement once I mention that the Electric Prunes' debut does not own much in the way of original vision. (Take that, English language!). Well, you might have been deceived by the lead-in single - which, by the way, also happens to be the lead-in track on Nuggets (both the current box set and the groundbreaking Lenny Kaye concoction). The lead-in single, which wasn't even written by the band members, much like the absolute majority of the material on here, was pretty damn mind-blowing. For a detailed account of the song, see my Nuggets review; here I'll just add that, for all its transparency, it really sounded like nothing else at the time.

Once you get past that song, though, it's the usual picture of a one-hit band, good enough to take a short sprint but whose muscles eventually give way when it comes to follow it up with something more substantial. None of the songs on the album reach that peak. On the other hand, the Electric Prunes still have an advantage over a lot of their competitors. We have the epoch to thank, of course, but it took talent and bravery to follow the trends of that epoch, and one can't deny that the Prunes had both, in early 1967, at least. The record is brimming with all kinds of experiments - successful or failed, mild or bold, laudable or questionable, you name it; no two songs sound the same. At the very worst, you could claim that all these experiments are failed - and in a certain way, they are, because for every genre and style tackled here, I could name somebody who did it much better; but then again, it's hardly possible for anybody to equally despise all of the boys' results. And if you like at least a small bunch of these tunes, enough to not be able to declare the record a "monumental crash", you'll probably have to give them credit for at least trying to do all the rest.

If the song writing credits are of any indication, the band members themselves were primarily fans of the Rolling Stones-style: "dangerous"-sounding midterm blues-rock was their original thing. The best track in that genre, singer Jim Lowe's 'Little Olive', actually did not make it onto the original album; today, it is available as a bonus track on the restored CD edition. The album has that direction represented by the slightly more generic 'Luvin', produced in such a closely mimicking way that it sounds like an outtake from a Stones album of the Now! (early '65) period - same mysterious echoey guitars, same scary echoey harmonica.

They did, however, take interest in expanding their format, and the one "alien" track of their own writing that they did get the chance to place on the album was 'Train For Tomorrow'. In the liner notes, Richie Unterberger hints at the band's being used and exploited in the studio, meaning that, while they did have a batch of original compositions under their belt, only two were allowed on the record; maybe that is why 'Train For Tomorrow' is actually a medley of two songs in two different styles - first part is mild psycho-folk, possibly influenced by the Jefferson Airplane, second part is instrumental jazz, "inspired by Wes Montgomery" (to quote R.U.). Both parts sound amateurish but authentic, and they even manage to make the instrumental jazz section ring with true tension, unlike quite a few boring noodlefests by far more professional performers I could name.

Outside songwriter Annette Tucker is responsible for a whopping' eight compositions on here (six in collaboration with Nancie Mantz, two with Jill Jones). Considering that this includes both of the band's hit singles (the second one is 'Get Me To The World On Time', also captured on Nuggets and deservedly so), she truly should be considered the main hero of the album, although credit still goes to the band members for thinking up all the variegated arrangements. Granted, some of these songs can't be saved by any amount of psychedelic overlays, which is presumably why they don't even try on such fluff as 'Onie', a sugar-sweet teenybopper ballad that tries to work along the same atmospheric/melodic lines as the Velvet Underground's 'Sunday Morning', but doesn't have neither the chimes nor the interesting lyrics nor the sincere-sounding Lou Reed vocal delivery; in fact, I have a suspicion rhythm guitarist Weasel, who takes lead vocals on here, isn't even trying, because no sane person could feel any sympathy towards such garbage. But you just had to have something for the pre-pubescent ones, you know. In the same way, 'The King Is In The Counting House' is probably targeted at an even younger audience. (There was this really nasty tendency to "artsify" nursery rhymes in the mid-Sixties, mostly indicative of bands that had a hard time writing some real art-pop of their own).

On the other hand, 'Sold To The Highest Bidder' with its pseudo-ukuleles is good clean fun, and the resulting sound, mixing a bit of sadness with a bit of ecstasy, is quite unique even for '67; a slightly similar effect, although with radically different means (synthesizers - what a surprise!), would only be achieved by Roy Wood seven years later with 'Everyday I Wonder'. 'Try Me On For Size' shows that Tucker wasn't opposed to writing ballsy Stonesy rockers either, although the similarity is somewhat weakened by the band entrusting most of the melody to electric pianos (then again, once the marimbas start rolling in, comparisons with 'Under My Thumb' become inevitable). And the music-hall divertissement of 'The Toonerville Trolley' is a suitably nice conclusion to the album.

You know, when you actually read the liner notes and hear all those band members complaining about how The Machine was sadistically stifling their creative forces, as if they were one collective Orson Welles or something, you'd think the end result should have been predictable - two good single A-sides and ten pieces of worthless crap. But in thinking so, you'd definitely underestimate the power of corporate song writing. Tucker and Mantz presumably wrote 'I Had Too Much To Dream' just because it was their job. They got good money for it, and they wrote it by carefully capturing the "vibes" of the epoch, whether they themselves were feeling these vibes in their souls or not (and I have good reason to doubt they did). And yet the result was convincing enough for the song to make it to Nuggets, together with the real "authentic" garage-rock of the epoch, the one written by scruffy teens out of (spiritual) inspiration and (sexual) maturation!

Which brings us, yet again, to the point that "commercial" and "non-commercial" song writing were exceedingly hard to separate in the mid-Sixties; with values such as "experimentalism" and "spontaneity" getting as high on the market as they'd never ever get again, somehow the goals of those who wrote for money and of those who wrote for art became, if not completely the same, at the very least so close to each other it took a real pro to tell them apart. On I Had Too Much To Dream, it's mostly lightweight fluff like 'Onie' or 'The King...' that hints at "oppression" - but let's not forget that even creatively free bands would often stoop to this kind of material, not being forced by anybody, in order to attract larger audiences.  

The one truly deplorable effect it had on the Prunes, of course, is that the Prunes eventually came to be regarded in the same ballpark as the Monkees - i.e. a band where outside songwriters are everything and band members are interchangeable nothings, which, of course, resulted in the embarrassment of the "band’s "third" album in less than a year. But then again, it has never been proven that something great and timeless could come out of the original Prunes had they been given completely free rein. Where is Jim Lowe today, I wonder?