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The 1967 Beatles inspired by George Harrison’s mind-altering LSD trip: “Written in a childlike manner”

Mon 20 April 2026 20:03, UK

George Harrison had found his feet by 1969 and had begun to shine through the shadow the songwriting partnership of Lennon-McCartney had cast over The Beatles. After meeting with Bob Dylan and The Band in 1968, Harrison was empowered to start writing in earnest, and he drew from personal experiences for his inspiration.

It was a skill he had already begun to hone in 1967, although one of those personal experiences was perhaps less relatable than some of Harrison’s other songs. While he was always more interested in exploring spirituality in his songwriting than John Lennon or Paul McCartney, one Beatles track drew directly from a particularly intense LSD trip and the experience of coming back down to reality.

Harrison was starting to find his rhythm as a songwriter when The Beatles sat down to assemble the songs for Yellow Submarine, released in 1969. The album featured a number of light, carefree tracks; the title song alone feels like a nursery rhyme. But one particular number, written back in 1967 in a “childlike manner”, came from very different intentions.

In his autobiography I, Me, Mine, written in 1980, Harrison pointed to the Fab Four song ‘It’s All Too Much’ as being directly inspired by tripping on acid: “‘It’s All Too Much’ was written in a childlike manner from realisations that appeared during and after some LSD experiences and which were later confirmed in meditation,” he said.

Speaking with Billboard in 1999, Harrison went in deeper on the track and expanded on his vision: “I just wanted to write a rock ‘n roll song about the whole psychedelic thing of the time – ‘Sail me on a silver sun/ Where I know that I am free/ Show me that I’m everywhere/ And get me home for tea.’ (laughs) Because you’d trip out, you see, on all this stuff, and then whoops! you’d just be back having your evening cup of tea!”

It was a unique feeling which is accurately captured in the song. Some Beatles aficionados have dismissed the song as aimless, but it’s hard not to see it as the pinnacle of the acid-rock scene in Britain. Harrison first took acid along with John Lennon and their wives and has described the experience as “gaining hundreds of years of experience within twelve hours.”

What helped ‘It’s All Too Much’ stand apart from many other Beatles tracks was its sheer density. The song stretches out over a droning organ line and layers of distorted guitars, creating a swirling wall of sound that mirrors the disorienting nature of a psychedelic experience. Rather than relying on traditional verse-and-chorus structure, Harrison allows the track to evolve, letting the instruments wash over each other in a way that feels closer to the improvisational spirit of the late-1960s acid rock scene.

Later reflecting on the work, Harrison shared his recollection of the recording process, stating: “‘Your long blond hair/ And your eyes of blue’- that was all just this big ending we had, going out. And as it was in those days, we had the horn players just play a bit of trumpet voluntarily, and so that’s how that ‘Prince Of Denmark’ bit was played (in the fade-out). And Paul and John just came up with and sang that lyric of ‘your eyes of blue.'”

Those ideas predate John Lennon’s use in ‘All You Need Is Love’, the song he wrote for the Our World television broadcast. It has therefore seen the songs paired up as sisters of the same family; The Beatles presenting their collective experience of drugs and their mind-expanding findings.

In many ways, the track also hinted at the direction Harrison would take in the final years of The Beatles. By the time the band recorded Abbey Road, he would deliver some of the strongest songs of his career with ‘Something’ and ‘Here Comes the Sun’, proving he had stepped out from the Lennon-McCartney shadow entirely. ‘It’s All Too Much’ may have emerged from a chaotic psychedelic moment, but it showed Harrison growing increasingly confident in translating personal revelations into ambitious musical statements.