These guys were musicians, adults. I’m still like 17 years old. [Dave] brings us this one song and says, ‘I really like the title of it. Do something with it.’”
Annette Tucker: “We wrote ‘Too Much To Dream’ as a country song, without ever thinking that it would be turned into this brilliant idea that the Prunes and Dave Hassinger had. I may have invited [Dave] to my house and played it for him in person. He heard something. I did attend the sessions and watched him put this whole thing together with them, and it was, I have to say, amazing.”
Mark: “Synchronicity: everything fell into place. ‘I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night)’ was our hopes in the studio coming to fruition: let’s try this, let’s do this. Because the way we did it was so strange anyway, it wasn’t like we were going to destroy it.”
James: “That weird sound at the beginning happened accidentally at Leon Russell’s house. [We were] recording stuff and then we would flip the tape over because we couldn’t afford more than one roll of four-track tape. The engineer didn’t push record at one point, and Ken had been fooling around with something at the end of the tape, of course when it got turned over he started recording after it and it turned out to be that sound you hear at the beginning of ‘I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night)’. So we cut that piece off to use for something else, we didn’t even know what the hell we
were going to use it for – it was an incredible sound, we could never recreate that.
“We decided to sort of do it in pieces. That’s how it was recorded, we’d come up
“He looks like a guywho’s been out on the street, going into trash cans. He said, ‘I’m the owner, my name’s Richie. Come on in.’”
to a point and decide, ‘OK, we’re going to do something right there’ but we wouldn’t know what it was exactly. And we wanted to work the drum breaks into it, we knew the drum breaks would be something that would propel it.”
Mark: “We hadn’t heard a record like that. It was a song that happened in the studio.”
James: “I always liked to be taken to another place in recordings. That’s why I liked Les Paul and Mary Ford, they had all this tape delay and echo. It sounded to me like it was happening in space. Gene Vincent, where the hell is he singing? It sounds like he’s in prison with all that slap-back echo. That sort of made me want to go to those places, it sounded
better than reality to me.”
Mark: “I think a big influence on us was Phil Spector. We were attempting to make that big sound. So the echo and the delay was a lot of Spector stuff, we just didn’t have the instrumentation. I saw it as being meditative, the term trip wasn’t around much yet, but it was that type of thing. The music is its own entity, as opposed to just existing to support the vocal. The vocals took a back seat to what we were doing instrumentally. We didn’t think it was going to be a hit. Warner Brothers called it ‘the weird one, the strange one.’ They didn’t know what to do with it.”
James: “It came out in October or November of ’66 and then took forever, just inched up the charts. The record wasn’t being played in LA. It was an oddball-sounding record. We were told by record executives, ‘It’s nice, but who’s going to play something like that… it’s too weird.’”
Mark: “We were signed to Dave’s production company, not to Warner Brothers. We never went there. In their wisdom, they put it out in November of ’66, hoping the holiday would kill it and fulfil their contract. But it survived; it broke in the Pacific Northwest.”
James: “I was working at that time as an x- ray technician. I still remember getting a call at 10 o’clock at night from [the Prunes’] manager saying, ‘You gotta quit that job, ’cause the record’s taking off. You
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