Songfacts®:

• "I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)" is a psychedelic rock song by the American rock band The Electric Prunes. Reprise Records released it in November 1966 as their second single. The band members at the time were singer James Lowe, lead guitarist Ken Williams, rhythm guitarist James "Weasel" Spagnola, bassist Mark Tulin, and drummer Preston Ritter.
• In this dreamy and psychedelic ballad, James Lowe dreams of his ex, only to awaken and find she's gone. The lyrics convey a sense of disorientation and otherworldly sensations - common themes in many psychedelic songs of the time.
• Before releasing "I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)," The Electric Prunes had been writing and recording their own songs. Their debut single, "Ain't It Hard," flopped, so their producer, Dave Hassinger, recruited external songwriters Annette Tucker and Nancie Mantz.
  
  Annette Tucker had conceived the song's title and reached out to Nancie Mantz, who enthusiastically embraced the idea. Together, they penned the song in just half an hour. Initially, a demo with a middle-of-the-road pop arrangement was recorded by singer-songwriter Jerry Fuller for Hassinger. The demo didn't sound right to Tucker and Mantz, so Tucker presented the song to Hassinger and the band personally.
  
  "As a writer, you know that happens many times to our songs when the publisher hears it another way," she told Spectropop. "Nancie and I envisioned this as a rock song. We loved the things that the Rolling Stones were doing and, as I said, they were a big influence on us when we wrote that song."
• The band initially came together under the name "The Sanctions" while they were students at Taft High School in Los Angeles. In 1966, they changed it to The Electric Prunes. During this time, the cousin of Annette Tucker's husband introduced them to former Rolling Stones engineer, Dave Hassinger. Following a series of rehearsals at Leon Russell's home, the band recorded their first two singles, followed by their debut album.
  
  "When we were signed to producer Dave Hassinger, our relationship went well on that first self-titled album," Lowe told Uncut magazine. "We were chasing electronic sounds. 'I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)' was made in pieces and then pasted together. Even the intro was done separately, at Leon Russell's house."
• The Electric Prunes made sure the song sounded different, starting with the snippet of oscillating, reversed guitar that opened the track. That distinctive wiggly backwards guitar originated from the rehearsals at Leon Russell's house, where Ken Williams recorded with a 1958 Gibson Les Paul guitar with a Bigsby vibrato unit.
  
  "You couldn't see the studio from the control room," recalled Lowe. "We were recording on a four-track, and just flipping the tape over and re-recording when we got to the end. Dave cued up a tape and didn't hit 'record,' and the playback in the studio was way up: ear-shattering vibrating jet guitar. Ken had been shaking his Bigsby wiggle stick with some fuzztone and tremolo at the end of the tape. Forward it was cool. Backward it was amazing. I ran into the control room and said, 'What was that?' They didn't have the monitors on so they hadn't heard it. I made Dave cut if off and save it for later."
• The song reached #11 in America and also performed well in other countries. It has endured as a classic of the 1960s psychedelic rock era and is frequently included in compilations and retrospectives of that musical period.
• Following the band's extensive promotional campaign, a second single, "Get Me to the World On Time," penned by Annette Tucker with Jill Jones, was released and charted at #27 in the US. It was The Electric Prunes' last Hot 100 hit.
• The Electric Prunes broke up in 1970 but reunited in 1999. By 2011, James Lowe was the only remaining original member of the band. He passed away on May 22, 2025.