Song of the Day 5/18: The Electric Prunes, “Get Me to the World on Time”

Most of Donald Trump’s brain might be mush, but he’ll always retain a few things, like his fear of sharks and his childish habit of insulting people in terms that would sound weak coming from a sixth-grader. So when Bruce Springsteen called out the whiny bitch who likes to pretend he’s a strongman, the strongman came back at him by calling him a “dried-out prune.”

That comment makes me suspect he might have mistaken a photo of RFK Jr. for one of Springsteen, and it also makes me hope a reporter will ask him for details of his own skin-care regime – nothing makes a strongman sound stronger than talking about his soft skin. Or maybe his scrambled brain was thinking back to the ’60s, when popular music introduced the world to the Electric Prunes.

The band started as a surf-rock combo in mid-’60s Southern California called the Sanctions. The guy who signed them to a contract suggested a name change, and they kicked around various possibilities. “Electric Prunes” started as a joke, but lead singer and bandleader James Lowe concluded, “It’s the one thing everyone will remember. It’s not attractive, and there’s nothing sexy about it, but people won’t forget it.”

Eight songs on their first album, including their only two hits, were composed by songwriter Annette Tucker, but three more LPs without chart success led to personnel changes and weird musical directions – a combination of Gregorian chant and psychedelic rock, “Mass in F Minor,” with all the vocals in Greek and Latin, seems like an obvious misstep in retrospect – and the group disbanded in 1969. Around the turn of the century Lowe later put together another lineup using the name, and they’re still performing.

This single kept the Electric Prunes from being a one-hit wonder when it reached No. 27 in 1967, following up the No. 11 hit “I Had Too Much to Dream.”