"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".
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 Merseys' 1966 hit "Sorrow" "With your long blonde hair and your eyes of blue" 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." 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. 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. Author George Case describes the same victory scene as "a psychotropic cartoon dreamscape" and an example of the Beatles' more overt allusions to the hallucinogenic experience. Speaking in 1999, Starr said of "It's All Too Much": "that's the [track] that really sets the mood of the movie ... that's where the music and the movie really gel."
In this sequence, an extra verse is heard that is not heard on any modern mix. The verse goes as follows;
"Nice to have the time to take this opportunity.
Time for me look at you, and you to look at me."
The verse is only heard in the movie and not involved in any official release.
The film represented the final episode in the Beatles' psychedelic period, although the band had already returned to making more roots-based music at the start of 1968. Referring to the drug-inspired imagery that led Rank to pull Yellow Submarine from its UK cinema run, Glynn writes: "Indeed, the imagery accompanying [Harrison's] 'Only a Northern Song' and 'It's All Too Much' only 'makes sense' when read as attempting an audio-visual recreation of the hallucinogenic state ..."
Release and reception
An EP containing "It's All Too Much" and the three other new soundtrack songs had been scheduled for September 1968, but a full album was created instead. With the addition of the previously issued "Yellow Submarine" and "All You Need Is Love" to fill-out side one of the LP, George Martin's orchestral pieces from the film made up the second side. Viewed as a secondary release beside the band's recently issued double LP, The Beatles, the Yellow Submarine album appeared in January 1969, six months after the film's London premiere. In January 1996, "It's All Too Much" (backed by "Only a Northern Song") was issued on a jukebox-only single, pressed on blue vinyl. That release was part of a series of Beatles jukebox singles issued by Capitol Records' CEMA Special Markets division.
Hillage included "It's All Too Much" in his concert performances; live versions from the late 1970s appear on his albums Live Herald (1979), BBC Radio 1 Live (1992) Reviewing BBC Radio 1 Live for AllMusic, Chris Nickson writes that Hillage's reading "not only heightens the Eastern-flavored psychedelia, but lets [the guitarist] unleash some of his most scorching axe work yet, tearing into the song like a starving man given a five-course meal".
Other artists
Journey also issued a recording of the song in 1976, on their album Look into the Future. Besides the late 1970s renditions, according to Miles, the Beatles' "It's All Too Much" "won fresh acclaim from a later wave of acid-rock adventurers" during the early 1990s. The House of Love released a cover of the song as the B-side to "Feel", the first single from their 1992 album Babe Rainbow. The previous year, Loves Young Nightmare recorded it (as "All Too Much") for Revolution No. 9: A Tribute to The Beatles in Aid of Cambodia, a multi-artist compilation supplied with Revolver magazine; the album was reissued in the United States in 1997, following the popularity there of Britpop bands such as Oasis. The Church included the track on their 1999 covers album A Box of Birds.
"It's All Too Much" has been performed live by the Grateful Dead, by the latter's associated acts Ratdog and Phil Lesh and Friends, and by Yonder Mountain String Band. Other artists who have recorded the song include All About Eve, Paul Gilbert, the Violet Burning, Yukihiro Takahashi, and Rich Robinson. A version by former MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer appeared on the 2003 Harrison tribute album Songs from the Material World. My Darling Clementine recorded "It's All Too Much" for Yellow Submarine Resurfaces, a multi-artist CD accompanying the July 2012 issue of Mojo.
Experimental musician Greg Davis and jazz singer-songwriter Chris Weisman recorded the track for their 2010 album Northern Songs, a project that The Village Voice described as blending "Beatlefolk" with "gongs, field recordings, and generally orchestrated nirvana". The Flaming Lips performed "It's All Too Much" at the George Fest tribute concert in September 2014, with special guest Gingger Shankar playing violin. Consequence of Sounds reviewer described it as "the most sonically pleasing song of the night".
Personnel
According to Ian MacDonald and Kenneth Womack:
The Beatles
- George Harrison – lead vocal, Hammond organ, lead guitar, backing vocal, handclaps