The Electric Prunes
Listen/Download – The Electric Prunes – Luvin’
Greetings all.
I don’t know about you guys, but I’m more than ready for the weekend.
I had the opportunity last week to pop out for some local digging (something that is extremely rare, both in the opportunity to do so and the availability of records) and while it wasn’t exactly the motherlode, I did manage to find some cool stuff on the cheap, which is always a groovy thing.
I’d hit this spot because one of my big 45 hauls of last year turned out to be via a representative of this emporium (which hadn’t really carried vinyl in the past) so I figured I’d fall by to see what he might be packing in the stacks.
The answer to that question was, not much, and my guess was that the rest of the stash I was picking through was locked in a basement or storage locker somewhere. I would have asked to see it, but the morning I dropped by the place was staffed by a couple of world class knuckleheads – clearly NOT the proprietors – so I figured I’d make a return trip sometime in the future.
That said, I did manage to grab some cool 12” extended mixes (rock dance stuff) and a handful of nice 45s, including an obscure pop psyche number that I’ll feature here soon.
I did grab a couple of tasty, mainstream mid-60s garage 45s, the kind of obvious stuff I should have had copies of but didn’t (or didn’t have clean copies of) so I grabbed them, including a Standells disc and ‘I Had Too Much To Dream’ by the Electric Prunes.
Now, I won’t belabor that particular tune, on account of everyone that stops by here on the reg already knows it by heart, and while I dig it the most, I can’t think of much to say about it.
One of the reasons I wanted a copy – besides the ‘filler’ aspect – was that it carried upon its B-side a tune I’d never heard before, that being the very song you see (hear) before you today.
Interestingly enough, ‘Luvin’ is one of the few tunes on the first Electric Prunes album to have been written by someone in the band, seven of the album’s tunes having been written by the team of Annette Tucker and Nancie Mantz.
‘Luvin’ (written by Jim Lowe and Mark Tulin) which achieves a very nice level of psychedelic blues punk, cranking up a modified John Lee Hooker boogie wrapped in some uber-reverbed slide guitar that peeks over the fence into the land of Chocolate Watchbands and such. There are some interesting changes, and the whole shebang, like much of the best Prunes stuff sounds great on headphones, caroming nicely off of the wrinkles in ones brain.
There’s also a crazy, nearly avant garde, chicken scratch guitar “solo” ricocheting around the reverb tank in the last third of the song. It sounds like the work of someone who was, shall we say, intoxicated, locked in a dark studio, picking away at his gitbox because the noises made him happy.
It makes you thankful that enough people were either doing drugs, or trying to sell those people records that shenanigans like this were allowed to be committed to wax.
I hope you groove upon it, and I will see you all next week.
Peace
Larry