#james lowe

[mymelodic-chapel]

Sparks- A Woofer in Tweeter's Clothing (Glam Rock, Art Pop, Art Rock) Released: February 1973 [Bearsville Records] Producer(s): Thaddeus James Lowe

[junkdrawerbrain]

James Lowe, Singer for the Electric Prunes, of ‘I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)’ Fame, Dies at 82

James Lowe, who fronted the Electric Prunes, best known for their '60s psych-rock hit 'I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night,' has died at age

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.

[...] [“I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)”] 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 [producer David Hassinger] 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.'”

[merryslilhobbit]

Rugby boys 💚

From BBC Sport

[nedison]

Sparkstember Day 2:

Their cover of Do-Re-Mi had me imagining an album-length reimagined Sound Of Music by the Maels-- complete with The Electric Prunes galloping up the hill behind them in honor of producer Thaddeus James Lowe!

[boxwright]

The Electric Prunes - James Lowe

[spilladabalia]

The Electric Prunes - I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night

[thismustbetheblog]

SCOvIRE in a nutshell

[rainingmusic]

The Electric Prunes - I had too much to dream last night