With a name like The Electric Prunes, whose founder and front man James Lowe has just died, they could only have been a late-Sixties band from California.

And their best known song, I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night), could only really have come out in 1967’s Summer of Love.

I first heard it a decade later when its shimmering fuzzed-up psychedelic twang became the opening track on Nuggets, the landmark anthology of ’60s garage rock compiled by Patti Smith Group guitarist Lenny Kaye.

That spooky-sounding single and its follow-up, Get Me To The World On Time, both just failed to dent the Top 40, but launched an all-too-brief career that mirrored the shifting tides of music in the second half of the Sixties.

I only really know them for those early songs, exhibiting an urgent garage rock sound fuelled by fuzz, reverb and backward guitar – and Lowe’s impassioned vocals recorded in an eerie chamber of reverb.

Within a year they had wandered fully into the strawberry fields of psychedelia, recording a lavishly orchestrated version of the Latin Mass called Mass In F Minor for visionary producer David Axelrod; you may remember the track Kyrie Eleison from the film Easy Rider.

But by 1968 the original band had split up.

The group first took shape in 1964 when James Lowe, a young man from Southern California who had played guitar in a bluegrass duo, decided to form a surf rock band.

He recruited three high school students – guitarist Ken Williams, bassist Mark Tulin and drummer Steve Acuff – and called them The Sanctions.

Aiming to become a studio band, they moved swiftly from cover versions to Lowe’s own songs and when Acuff left to pursue his hobby of surfing, to be replaced by new drummer Mike Weakley, they became Jim And The Lords.

In late 1965, a chance encounter led to a meeting with Rolling Stones engineer Dave Hassinger, who brought them into Leon Russell’s home studio to work on their music.

Using his studio expertise, he dialled up the guitar effects, got them a del with Reprise Records, and recorded their cover version of The Gypsy Trips‘ folk-rock tune Ain’t It Hard, backed with Lowe’s own composition Little Olive.

It wasn’t a hit, and Weakley left, replaced by Preston Ritter on drums and a new guitarist, James ‘Weasel’ Spagnola, but the label asked for a second single.

I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night) was written for them by a pair of Hassinger’s songwriter friends called Annette Tucker and Nancie Mantz, and proved perfectly suited to their otherworldly guitar oscillations.

It peaked at No.11 on the US singles charts in February 1967, and they hit No.27 with its follow-up, Get Me To The World On Time, filled with more distorted sound effects – again written by Tucker, this time with Jill Jones.

Their fourth single Dr Do-Good, winningly described by one critic as “sounding more like a horror movie theme run amok than a radio-ready hit,” understandably failed to match the previous two.

In 1968, following a solitary disastrous live performance of Mass In F Minor (for which Axelrod had to bring in a team of studio musicians to complete his complicated compositions), with the band backed by an ensemble of classical musicians, the last two remaining original members, Lowe and Weakley (who had returned), left the band.

Various different lineups struggled on, one of them featuring guitarist Kenny Loggins, while another recorded an ambitious new Axelrod project, Release Of An Oath, the producer’s inspiration moving on from Catholic liturgy to the Hebrew prayer the Nol Kidre.

After his departure, Lowe worked in music production with Todd Rundgren on the first two albums by his band, The Nazz, and also the first two albums by Sparks (under their previous name Halfnelson).