#james lowe

[...] [“I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)”] was not written by the group but rather the female writing team of Annette Tucker and Nancie Mantz. “Annette gave us a demo of it, and it was like kind of like a country-Western ballad or something,” Lowe said. “Dave [producer David Hassinger] was real adamant about changing things. He said, ‘You gotta put your own arrangement to it. Do something weird, have some breaks, do some stuff,’ whatever'” — an encouragement that Lowe put down to Hassinger having been involved with the Rolling Stones and unusual hits like “Paint It Black.” “We took it and took it as far as we could, fooling around with it, and it completely changed everything, for us and for the song… We looked at it as a construction. We did it in pieces. We didn’t all get in the studio and gather around and play ‘Too Much to Dream.’ We actually mapped it out, how we were gonna do it, with breaks here and breaks there… We never really got to hear the song the way we did it in full until we finished it.” As for the memorable opening to the smash. Lowe said, “From the beginning, nobody knew what that sound was at the beginning. Ken Williams had been playing around with his guitar and we recorded going forward on a four-track and then we’d flip the tape over and record going the other way to just to save money, because we didn’t have money to buy rolls of tape. And one of the engineers at Leon Russell’s house didn’t push the record button, and so we got left with the tail end of something backward… Once I heard that sound, which came in the studio accidentally… it overwhelmed us. And I went in the control room and I said, ‘Whatever that was, cut that off. We’re gonna use it for something!’ … And when we came to do ‘Too Much to Dream,’ I said, ‘Now we’ve got a place to use that sound.'”