In the late ‘60s, The Electric Prunes were riding pretty high. Their 1966 single “I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night)” sold well and is still considered a classic, and their 1967 self-titled debut LP was a hit, establishing them in the public consciousness as well as in the garage-psych scene. Their tremoloed, fuzzed-out guitar attack made them as much a badge for the style as their weird name did, so it was probably a totally natural call to select them to record this amazing radio ad for the newly introduced Vox Wah-Wah pedal.
 

 
Cracks me up every time. That was made available on the second Pebbles
compilation in 1979, and later again as a hidden track on the Too Much To Dream double CD set.

I so wish the companies making guitar effects today would do such ads. I appreciate that YouTube videos are much more demonstratively effective and less expensive to make and distribute, but I’d love to hear some jobber announcer awkwardly—but breathlessly!—extolling the virtues of some of the truly weird shit that’s out there now in effects-land. Imagine an ad like that for the Rainbow Machine. The Superego. The Possessed!

The Prunes would break up under the ministrations of manager Lenny Poncher and composer David Axelrod, who, foreshadowing some of the nobody-needed-you-to-be-this-ambitious moves of ‘70s prog (lookin’ at you, ELP), tried to get the band to record an actual Catholic Mass (previously). The album, Mass in F Minor, did come out, and is regarded as a minor weirdo classic of sorts, but the band began shedding members during the recording—most accounts have it that they ALL bailed—and much of that album and all that would follow it were recorded by studio musicians under the Prunes’ name. Here’s the real deal, in a seldom seen TV appearance, performing the songs “You Never Had it Better” and yes, “I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night),” looking high as fuck. (Or maybe they just had too much to advertise the night before?)