music hall song, etc. Rather than allowing us to do something cool with a baroque sound, he would go to Nancie and Annette and say, ‘I need a ’20s type song.’ I think he saw variety as good for its own sake, regardless of the material.”
Annette: “I think it started out real good and then creativity gets in the way where sometimes you don’t agree with ideas people have. I think they wanted to express themselves. I don’t think some of the songs that we wrote that [Dave] chose they thought [were] them. Now that I know them more, I totally understand.”
Preston: “I think that Richie [Podolor] was more of our producer than Dave Hassinger. When Dave first started off, he seemed to be really involved with what we were doing. But as time went on, he became less interested. I think Dave’s real motive was not producing the group, as much as it was getting a deal as a producer for a record company. We were just the ticket to get in. I’ve heard rumours that he felt that [recording the Prunes’ first album] was a demo for him. He was trying to display his ability to do different music, come up with different sounds. I think all along Dave had
Dick Hargraves (sitting), Ken Williams, Mike Weakley, Mark Tulin, James Lowe (sitting)
ulterior motives. After he got his contract with Warner/Reprise, he seemed to lose interest in us as a band.”
James: “Dave never liked our songs; he never liked anything we did. If it came from somebody else he liked it immediately, no matter what it was, as long as it wasn’t one of our songs.”
Mark: “We developed the practice of telling him somebody else wrote them. If somebody else wrote them, he liked them.”
Mike: “Dave was not a really friendly character; I can’t even remember him laughing. He was not a musician, so he didn’t understand musicians. He did know how to engineer, no doubt about it. He had certain abilities in certain areas. If it hadn’t been for Dave, there wouldn’t have been The Electric Prunes.”
Mark: “Dave knew sounds [and] helped a lot in that respect, thinking of studio effects. He wasn’t good at musical stuff; he had a lot to do with the tremolo aspect of the band. He had a lot to do with formulating the professional behaviour in the studio.”
Annette: “I think every time a producer is
doing something, they have a fixed idea of what they want. As a writer, I would take my ideas to a publisher and if The Rolling Stones have the #1 hit then [they’d say] bring me a song like ‘19th Nervous Breakdown’. I think all producers do that; they want what’s happening at the time. I never asserted myself, nor did Nancie or [our songwriting collaborator] Jill Jones, who was also involved. We had a handle on them and we did really well for them. We were their little anchor that could pull them back. They just wanted to do their thing and still do to this day. I think [Dave] frustrated the Prunes, who really had their own identity that they wanted to show. He really kind of dominated them on the first album. It got better because they got to do their own thing later on.”
MORETO COME…
In PART TWO of The Gospel, the Prunes find their creative voice on Underground, reunite with Quint, stand in the shadow of producer David Axelrod on the Mass In F Minor, meet The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix on tour in Europe, return, burn out and are born again via Nuggets. Stay tuned for the excitement in the next issue of Shindig!
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