Description
Mass in F Minor is the third album by the American rock band The Electric Prunes, released on Reprise Records in 1968, a division of Warner Bros. Records. The album was produced by Dave Hassinger, featuring a musical setting of the mass sung in Latin and Greek and arranged in the psychedelic style of the band. The songs were written and arranged by David Axelrod, a classically trained musician. (A fourth studio album entitled Release of an Oath was released later in 1968, composed and arranged by David Axelrod, based on a mix of Christian and Jewish liturgies. Though the album is credited to The Electric Prunes, the band members played little part in its recording.)
“Kyrie Eleison/Mardi Gras (When the Saints)” was featured on the soundtrack to the classic 1969 counterculture movie Easy Rider, starring Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda. (The soundtrack was released by ABC-Dunhill Records in August 1969. It peaked at No. 6 on the Billboard album chart in September of that year, and was certified gold in January the following year.)
Michael Omartian and The Electric Prunes member Mark Tulin later co-wrote two tracks featured on the self-titled debut album by the American pop/rock duo Pratt/McClain, “Did You Ever Wander” and “Don’t Let The Pieces Fall”.
Following the limited commercial success of the Electric Prunes’ previous album, Underground, the band’s manager Lenny Poncher and their producer Dave Hassinger, whose company owned the rights to the band name, agreed with Reprise Records that their third album would be written and arranged by David Axelrod, a classically trained musician. The album was planned to combine religious and classical elements with psychedelic rock, in a religious-based rock-opera concept album. Axelrod was given carte blanche by Hassinger to do what he wanted with the Electric Prunes.
When the existing band – singer James Lowe, guitarists Ken Williams and Mike Gannon, bassist Mark Tulin, and drummer Michael “Quint” Weakley – came to record the album, it became apparent that the complex arrangements largely outstripped the band’s ability to perform them to the standards expected by Axelrod, or within the time set aside for recording. Although Lowe, Tulin (the only band member who could read music) and Weakley appeared on all the tracks, and Williams and Gannon also appeared on the first three tracks («Kyrie Eleison», «Gloria» and «Credo»), the album was finished by studio musicians working with engineer Richie Podolor on guitar, and a Canadian group, the Collectors. The choral-style vocals were by Lowe, double-tracked. Hassinger was credited with producing the album.
So much in the old cathedral seemed, to the young man, intent on making him feel smaller. Ahead of him, remote figures in shining robes moved on worn paths through their stations, chanting in foreign ritual. He just couldn’t get with it.
Around him in the half-empty rows were mostly isolated old women, bent, tucked down over strings of black beads. Bent, with no one bending back to them.
To one side, a robed choir, echoing Medieval plainsong, which he couldn’t remember even his grandfather singing. No one to talk to, or touch. Little to listen to. A museum for other souls, not his.
He returned to the out-of-doors. The city outside beat to a new rhythm. It – the Hondas, the jets, the guitars, the laughs, the headlines, the commercials, the cries, the kids, his ugly-lovely cacophony – it caught him up. It walloped.
Those outside the cathedral – new colors, new cuts, new looks – moving in lifely anticipation. Eyes cast up, watching their hopes.
Then, from some $4.98 radio he heard the beat of the latest anthem. That music beat out his own tempo. An unplainsong caught his heart and gut. It beat in him. It bent to him. He bent back.
Christian worship has been graven on granite and vested in shining robes and danced in jungles and shared in lake shores and sung in foxholes and tacked on cathedral doors and played to jazz and performed on Broadway and droned in cathedrals.
Christian worship has forms as many as the creative energies of Man. The Mass in F Minor is one of these.
– Stan Cornyn
[A note printed on the back of the LP sleeve, written by Carl Stanley Cornyn, a Warner Bros. Records label executive and a former Grammy Award Winner for Best Album Notes]
> Apple Music (https://music.apple.com/us/album/mass-in-f-minor-ep/656177829)
LP tracklist:
Side One
A1. “Kyrie Eleison” – 3:18
A2. “Gloria” – 5:42
A3. “Credo” – 4:58
Side Two
B1. “Sanctus” – 2:52
B2. “Benedictus” – 4:48
B3. “Agnus Dei” – 4:25
Note: Has been re-issued on CD.
The 1st part of the Electric Prunes Mass in F Minor; “Kyrie Eleison” and “Gloria”. This color promo film was broadcast on French TV on April 12, 1968.
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