"It's All Too Much" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles from their 1969 album Yellow Submarine. Written by George Harrison in 1967, it conveys the ideological themes of that year's Summer of Love. The Beatles recorded the track in May 1967, a month after completing their album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was one of four new songs they then supplied for the 1968 animated film Yellow Submarine, to meet their contractual obligations to United Artists.
Harrison wrote "It's All Too Much" as a celebration of his experiences with the hallucinogenic drug LSD, before a visit to Haight-Ashbury in August 1967 resulted in him distancing himself from usage of the drug. He later drew parallels between drug-induced "realisations" and his experiences with Transcendental Meditation. The song features a Hammond organ, which gives the track a drone-like quality typical of Indian music, electric guitar feedback, and an overdubbed brass section. Largely self-produced by the band, the recording displays an informal approach that contrasts with the discipline of the Beatles' previous work, particularly Sgt. Pepper. The song's sequence in the Yellow Submarine film has been recognised for its adventurousness in conveying a hallucinogenic experience.
Although several Beatles biographers dismiss the track as aimless, "It's All Too Much" has received praise from many other commentators. Peter Doggett considers it "one of the pinnacles of British acid-rock", while Rob Sheffield of Rolling Stone rates it among "the top five all-time psychedelic freakouts in rock history". Former Gong guitarist Steve Hillage adopted the song during his early years as a solo artist in the late 1970s. Journey, the House of Love, the Grateful Dead and the Church are among the other artists who have recorded or performed the track.
Background and inspiration
"It's All Too Much" reflects George Harrison's experimentation with the hallucinogenic drug lysergic acid diethylamide, commonly known as LSD or "acid". Author Robert Rodriguez describes the track as "gloriously celebratory", with a lyric that conveys "his acid revelations in a childlike way". Rather than the song being purely drug-related, Harrison states in his 1980 autobiography, I, Me, Mine, that the "realisations" brought about by his LSD experiences were also applicable to meditation.
Together with his Beatles bandmate John Lennon and their wives, Harrison first took acid in March 1965. He likened the heightened awareness induced by the drug to "a light-bulb [going] on in my head" and "gaining hundreds of years of experience within twelve hours". In addition, he credited LSD as being the catalyst for his interest in Indian classical music, particularly the work of Ravi Shankar, and Eastern spirituality. By the time Harrison wrote "It's All Too Much", in 1967, the Indian sitar had temporarily replaced the guitar as his main musical instrument, as he received tuition from Shankar and one of the latter's protégés, Shambhu Das. As with his other songs from this period, however, such as "Within You Without You" and "Blue Jay Way", Harrison composed the melody on a keyboard instrument. In the case of "It's All Too Much", his use of Hammond organ allowed him to replicate the drone-like sound of the harmonium commonly heard in Indian vocal pieces.
Coinciding with the counterculture's preoccupation with enlightenment, 1967 marked the period when LSD use had become widespread among rock musicians and their audience. In a 1999 interview with Billboard magazine, Harrison said his aim had been "to write a rock'n'roll song about the whole psychedelic thing of the time".
Composition and musical structure
The song is in the key of G major and the time signature throughout is . The melody is restricted within a G pedal point, with a simple melodic emphasis on scale notes 2 (A) and 7 (F). As a defining characteristic of Indian classical music, such minimal harmonic movement features in many of Harrison's other Indian-style compositions, including "Within You Without You" and "Blue Jay Way".
Aside from the song's intro and extended ending (or coda), the composition is structured into three patterns of verse and chorus, with the second and third patterns separated by an instrumental section. The song originally contained a fourth verse–chorus combination, but this would be omitted from the officially released recording. Among musicologists discussing "It's All Too Much", Walter Everett describes it as a two-chord composition, whereas Alan Pollack contends that the song's sole chord is G major, although he concedes that transcribers may well list fleeting changes to C major over the choruses. In Pollack's opinion, these sections appear to employ IV (C major) and ii (A minor) chords yet, rather than formal changes, "it all boils down to neighbor tone motion in the inner voices superimposed on to the pedal tone of G in the bass".
AllMusic contributor Tom Maginnis writes that the lyrics "reflect the idealist optimism of the soon-to-be-labeled 'summer of love' and the kind of chemically enhanced mind-expanding euphoria that pervaded the new 'hippie' youth culture". Author Ian Inglis views Harrison's mention of "the love that's shining all around here" and "Floating down the stream of time" as especially reflective of the philosophy behind the Summer of Love, while theologian Dale Allison identifies the singer's "emerging religious worldview" in the first of those phrases. Citing Harrison's comments that his awareness of God accompanied his first LSD experiences, music journalist Rob Chapman describes "It's All Too Much" as the composer's "most unrepentant acid song", yet also an example of his music "oscillating between the earthly and the elevated" and "as much an exercise in levity as levitation".
The song quotes a line from The McCoys' 1965 hit "Sorrow" "With your long blonde hair and your eyes of blue" a reference that has led some commentators to interpret "It's All Too Much" as a love song to Harrison's wife, Pattie Boyd, a blonde-haired former fashion model. At another point on the recording, the trumpets play part of Jeremiah Clarke's "Prince of Denmark's March". The Beatles' use of musical and lyrical quotations here pre-dates "All You Need Is Love", which was written by Lennon and recorded in June 1967 for the group's appearance on the Our World television broadcast. While noting the similar ideological theme behind the two compositions, Inglis writes of Harrison and Lennon "presenting alternative accounts of the same subject" in the manner of French Impressionists such as Monet, Renoir and Manet, each of whom painted their own interpretations of sites in Paris and Argenteuil.
Production Recording The Beatles began recording "It's All Too Much" on 25 May 1967 at De Lane Lea Studios, located on Kingsway in central London. With producer George Martin not in attendance that day, nor for the subsequent session, on the 26th, the band produced the recording themselves. The song had the working title of "Too Much", a phrase that journalist Robert Fontenot terms "beatnik vernacular for an experience that was exceptionally mindblowing". The group taped four takes of the basic track, the final version of which extended to over eight minutes, with Harrison playing Hammond organ, Lennon on lead guitar, Paul McCartney on bass, and Ringo Starr on drums. The following day, they added overdubs, comprising vocals, percussion and handclaps. In addition, according to authors Ian MacDonald and Kenneth Womack, Harrison also played lead guitar on the track.
MacDonald characterises the 25–26 May sessions as "chaotic" and typical of the group's drug-inspired efforts after completing their album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band late the previous month. On the Sunday following the sessions for "It's All Too Much", the four Beatles attended a party at their manager Brian Epstein's house in Sussex, where Lennon and Harrison introduced music-industry publicist Derek Taylor to LSD. The band returned to De Lane Lea on 2 June, with Martin now participating. That day, the trumpets and bass clarinet parts, played by four session musicians and conducted by Martin, were added to the track.
Maginnis describes the opening of the song as "a burst of howling guitar feedback and jubilant, church-like organ", adding: "The atmosphere hints at Harrison's fascination with Indian music and Hindu philosophy at the time, having a distinct, Eastern-flavored, droning undercurrent." Following the intro to "I Feel Fine" in 1964, "It's All Too Much" is a rare example of the Beatles' use of feedback on a recording and suggests the influence of Jimi Hendrix. Womack credits this guitar part to Harrison, who played his Epiphone Casino using "the instrument's Bigsby [tremolo] bar in searing, full vibrato force". Harrison later rued the prominence of the brass accompaniment, saying: "To this day I am still annoyed that I let them mess it up with those damn trumpets. Basically, the song's quite good but, you know, messed up with those trumpets."
In the months following the recording sessions, Harrison swore off LSD usage after visiting the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in August, with Boyd, Taylor and others. He said he found himself disillusioned at how, rather than an enlightened micro-society, Haight-Ashbury seemed to be a haven for dropouts and drug addicts. Harrison and Lennon subsequently became avid supporters of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's Transcendental Meditation technique, after the Beatles had attended a seminar by the Maharishi in Bangor, Wales, in late August. MacDonald writes that, through Harrison's embrace of meditation, "It's All Too Much" served as his "farewell to acid".
Mixing The Beatles carried out final mixing on "It's All Too Much", again at De Lane Lea, on 12 October 1967, while completing work on their Magical Mystery Tour EP. They considered the song for inclusion in their 1967 TV film Magical Mystery Tour. Instead, they selected it later that year for the soundtrack to the Yellow Submarine animated film, to meet their contractual obligations to supply United Artists with four new songs for the project. The version used in that 1968 film was a heavily edited version of the track, shortened to 2:22 through the inclusion of two of the original song's four verses and only the start of the long coda.
"It's All Too Much" was remixed for inclusion on the Yellow Submarine album on 16 October 1968. The vocals and handclaps were processed using automatic double tracking, so allowing these parts to be split across the stereo image. For this version, the song was edited down from the original eight minutes to a running time of 6:28, making it the longest officially released Beatles track written by Harrison.Gold, Gary Pig (February 2004). "The Beatles: Gary Pig Gold Presents A Fab Forty". fufkin.com. Available at Rock's Backpages (subscription required). The edit was achieved by cutting a 35-second portion from around the three-minute mark, thereby removing the third chorus and the fourth verse (the latter of which, featuring the line "Time for me to look at you and you to look at me", had appeared in the film), and by fading out before the final minute of the coda.
Appearance in Yellow Submarine