The Electric Prunes came together in the San Fernando Valley in 1965, but for some time it was reported that The Prunes were a Seattle band.

What was the musical environment like at the time while growing up in the Valley? Lots of garage music happening?

That was the mood of what was going on at the time. The Beatles had come over here and made such a big splash and I think that if you drove down any street in the San Fernando Valley you'd hear music coming out of at least one garage on the block. Every young kid was out trying to bang some music together and have some fun. The Beatles showed us we could do it. 

What was the music that first caught your ear and made you say, "Hey, I want to do this."

My earliest recollection of really being completely entranced with music was Les Paul and Mary Ford, Gene Vincent and Jerry Lee Lewis. I loved some of that tape-delayed echo effect. To me it sounded spatial, it sounded like some other place. It didn't sound like the music was being made on earth. It sounded like it was being made somewhere else. When I was a teenager I moved down to the Balboa Peninsula (Newport Beach, CA) and Dick Dale used to play at the Rendezvous Ballroom every weekend and I'd go down and see him every weekend and that completely solidified it for me. I liked surf music. I surfed and that's when I think I got really interested in music. Dick was very accessible at that time, he had a little shop on the peninsula where he sold Fender amplifiers I think it was. You could go in and talk to him and he'd show you how to play licks. Of course he played backwards from everybody else so you couldn't learn anything from it! You'd just sit in amazement! He was the first guy I ever saw cascade amplifiers together, he'd plug one into another into another into another. His sound was just amazing. He was an amazing player and still is.

Tell us a little about the coming together of The Electric Prunes and getting things started in the beginning stages of the band.

The core band initially was Mark Tulin, Ken Williams and I. We went through various other people that sort of came and went. When you don't have much going on or no place to play it's really kind of hard to get people to stick with you. Eventually Quint (Michael Weakley) came along. We were never really a club band. We played in a few places and because we were all underage we played in places where we had to sneak in and play and then sneak out before the alcoholic beverage people came in! We decided very early on that what we wanted to do was try to make some records. I was interested in recording. A friend of mine's dad was a famous French horn player and he used to have a studio in his house and I'd get to go over there and clean out the studio and watch him record and I thought that was the best, that recording was where it was. I wasn't that interested in live music. So, we set out actually on a daily practice routine. We look back at it now and say, "How did we ever get everyone to do that?!". We practiced everyday. When the opportunity came we sort of had things together. I think that would be my advice to young bands that ask me, "What do you do?" Just practice all you can.

That's the ticket, particularly with a group. If you can get together and be together all the time, I mean that's what a group's about. It's not about individual ace players, it's about everybody getting together with the same mind and formulating something through that. You only do that by hanging out and playing a lot.

One of the most recognizable songs from the era is the Psych anthem, "I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night). Anything in particular stand out about the recording of that song?

Well, probably one of the key elements that everyone asks about is the intro to "Too Much To Dream". There's a bit of a story behind it. When we initially started working with Dave Hassinger, because he was working at RCA as an engineer and of course couldn't bring us in there because it would have been a conflict of interest with his job, we started doing some little rehearsal sessions up at Leon Russell's house. He had this little studio in his house. The control room was in the kitchen and the studio was in the bedroom. There was a hallway between them so it wasn't a traditional thing where you could see the engineering staff. What we'd do at that time is record on four-track and when we got to the end of the tape they'd just flip the tape over and re-record it going the other way. We didn't think about saving anything, it was just a matter of us getting studio-wise with Dave, which ended up being a very good idea. During one of these sessions, as the tape ran out, Ken Williams was fooling around with his fuzz-tone making this weird sound on his guitar. They flipped the tape over and instead of pressing the record button they just left it on playback. Well, they're in the other room and can't see us and all of a sudden over the speakers where we are comes what you hear as the opening of "Too Much To Dream". An unbelievable guitar turned up to about eleven as Spinal Tap would say. It sounded like a plane was coming through the window or something, we couldn't figure out what it was because it was backwards. So, I went in there and asked them, "What the hell was that?" They didn't know that we had been listening because they didn't have the control room monitors up so they didn't hear it. So, we ended up going back and taking that piece and listening to it over and over again. I had them cut it off and put it on a little reel for use in some song. When we came to "Too Much To Dream", that proved to be the perfect opening. We needed something arresting to get your attention. That little four-track tape is what we used over at American studios for the opening of it.

Over thirty years later with the release of "Artifact" the band hasn't lost that garage sound. The guitar and the vocals still have that attitude and edge and I think that if someone described in 1966 what The Electric Prunes would sound like in 2002, "Artifact" sums it up nicely and it seems like a natural sort of progression. How would you describe the sound of "Artifact" and what an experience that was. 

Well, probably unlike a lot of other bands, we didn't join up with other groups after we broke up, which is kind of traditional for groups. The musical aesthetic is exactly the same. We're admitting that it's really the only way we can play. Every time we get together it sounds exactly the same. We didn't know what it was going to sound like thirty years later and it was an experience just to see what came out after all that time. The CD I would really say is a chronicle of what went on. It wasn't an attempt to actually sit down and change someone's perspective or show our perspective or anything. We all got together and just saw what came out. Made some songs some weeks and some songs other weeks. They say you can't go home again but I think you can go anywhere you want to go if you can imagine yourself there..

You experienced some incredible success initially but the band broke up after the second album, "Underground" although "Mass in F Minor" did follow in 1968.  How and why did the breakup happen? Was it a matter of artistic freedom or lack thereof under David Hassinger?

I guess it would sound noble to say we didn't get our artistic freedom. I think it's pretty common knowledge among anybody who knows us that we didn't get to record the things that were ours.
A lot of the material was given to us by the producer and we sort of had to do it. We ended up doing the "Mass" concept album and by that time we were all fed up with it. The economics weren't there to make us feel comfortable. By the time we'd finished doing the "Mass" album it felt like we weren't even doing music we recognized anymore. We have nothing against that album but it just wasn't us, it was someone else's composition. So, it sort of seemed like everything that had been fun at the beginning had been taken out of it. I guess if you're a popular star and you're being remunerated with money or something then you can forego all that other stuff and just take the money and grin. But the money wasn't even there; endless touring, it's the same old story, I've heard it from every band, "My manager fucked me, blah, blah, blah!" Basically, we all gave up in spirit. When you lose your focus and you lose the vanishing point on the horizon, you're dead, you don't have anywhere to go and that's how we saw it. Just not worth it.

How did the reunion show come about?

We played at a thing called Voxfest last June out here in Riverside. It was real close and it was someone I had promised for years on the Internet that if we ever played we'd play at his place. We didn't set out to play live, that wasn't the idea. We didn't formulate everything to play live. I guess it really started when Mark and I were asked by David Katznelson at Warner Brothers if we'd like to remix our old stuff into a compilation album. To be honest with you, it had been almost thirty years and I had never listened to one of the records. I didn't know if I was even interested in doing it. I didn't admit to anyone that I was in the band so it's funny how a lot of our friends now have said, "You were in a band?!" It took them all by surprise! But Mark and I got together and took a week or so and went back to the original four tracks and remixed the pertinent tunes, twenty-three of them, and made up a compilation called "Lost Dreams" (2001Birdman Records). After we got together doing those things we said, "Gee, remember how it used to be fun to write songs?" So I have a little studio up here at my ranch in Santa Barbara and we got together and started making some music he and I together and gradually everybody started filtering in. Before you know it we had most of the original members back. Mark and I had read something on the Internet about how we didn't play our stuff on our records and we were products of producers and songwriters, so we felt like let's just make a record just as therapy, so that's what it ended up being.

You do read a lot of stuff like that but if anything dispels that rumour it's the 1997 release of the live "Stockholm '67" (Heartbeat Records). What do you remember about that European tour and the recordings that made up that live CD?

The thing most people don't realize is back then, during that period of the sixties, in order for a band to go over and play in Europe you had to trade with a band that came from Europe over here. You weren't allowed to just go get on a plane and go over there and start playing. Our manager happened to manage Donovan over here in the States and so they brought Donovan over and we went over with Brian Epstein and the NEMMS company. It was a great tour. We had a great time doing it. Stockholm was the last night we played and as a matter of fact we were sort of fed up by then and very, very tired and it isn't the best show! It was the night we all decided to just jam because some of the songs we were playing people were left just looking at us. You didn't get much applause and people kind of wondered what the hell it was, so we thought let's just play some Blues stuff! And of course that thing comes back to haunt you thirty years later, that's the one they recorded! 

Did you know ahead of time that they would be recording it and were you surprised that it survived?

They came to me before and asked me. It's a beautiful place by the way, that Stockholm Opera House. I remember they came before and asked me if they could record it and I went up to the booth up in the balcony to see what they were using and it looked like they were using good equipment and I said, "I don't think so. It's just not a good night." So, I was very surprised all this time later. Simon Edwards got a hold of me from Heartbeat Records in England and said "I know about this cut of yours from 67 and I would love to make a good album out of it because its been bootleg but I think that I can do something good with it." So I said, "Sure go ahead!". I was really surprised when I heard it. I still couldn't listen to it. Now I can but I couldn't at first!

Very different but very good cover of Love's "7 & 7 Is" Was this a song you'd played and wanted to cover for some time or was it more along the lines of, "Hey, let's give this a shot"

I produced and engineered records after I left the band and there are a few songs that I always liked and that happened to be one of them. "The Dream I Had Last Night" I worked on the original version with Randy Newman and so that's why I did that. "Analog Life" was a friend of mine's song that he played me. "7 & 7 Is" was always a song I liked by Love but they had done it so well and so fast and so good that the only thing left was to do it some different way. Actually, Peter Lewis of Moby Grape was sitting playing the 12-string with us that day and that's how that song came out; boom, we just went into it and he started playing the 12-string and all of a sudden it blossomed into something different than what we do. A different take on it. That's what I like for covers to be. Not to be copies of something but certainly a different interpretation of another guy's poem. 

Do you and Peter Lewis go back many years? Do you get together regularly?

Yes. Peter and I actually went to the same high school. I knew him because Loretta Young is his mother so he was a famous kid around school. I went to the sort of school where a lot of famous kids went so you always knew who they are. Of course, he didn't know who I was. But we both played music in school and so we knew all the same people. He had a little band called The Cornels and all his friends and my friends were in the band with him. Here it turns around that after all these years Peter lives seven or eight miles away from me and we end up rekindling a friendship. So we hang out together all the time. He's a great musician and a good vocalist.

Any final thoughts?

I think if I had to say anything in closing it's just that you realize when you do this that music is really up to personal interpretation. You don't get to decide how the audience is going to perceive your music. Some people like it and some people don't and that's what you face when you put out a CD. Does the world need another Electric Prunes record? No! Do I ? Yes! I need this therapy!

That brings up the eternal Napster / music file swapping debate, which isn't raging as it once was but many people felt it was the record companies who were more upset, not really because the artists may not have been getting paid but more so because it was affecting their bottom line.