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Rolling Stones songs: Sing This All Together (See What Happens)
The Rolling Stones were hardly known for playing it safe in 1967, but Sing This All Together (See What Happens) takes their psychedelic detour somewhere particularly strange. Built from drifting voices, Mellotron textures, percussion, flute, guitar and enough studio experimentation to make a sensible producer nervous, the track feels less like a conventional song than a controlled musical hallucination. It even began life as a sprawling fourteen-minute journey before somebody apparently decided listeners had suffered enough and trimmed it down. With Brian Jones deep in experimental territory and the Stones chasing sounds rather than rules,Sing This All Together (See What Happens) remains one of their strangest studio adventures.
Pictures of us in the circling sun/ Pictures of the show that we’re all on…
Original title: All Together Written by: Jagger/Richard Recorded: Olympic Sound and De Lane Lea Studios, London, Oct.2-23 1967
Mick Jagger: vocals Keith Richards: rhythm guitar, lead guitar Brian Jones: Mellotron, flute, vibraphone, Jew’s harp Bill Wyman: bass Charlie Watts: drums
Guest musicians: Nicky Hopkins (piano), John Lennon and Paul McCartney (backing vocals), “Everyone and its dog” (percussion)/ Unidentified session musicians (brass, vibraphone)
More about Sing This All Together (See What Happens) by The Rolling Stones
*By Marcelo Sonaglioni
A psychedelic continuation
The closing track on side one of Their Satanic Majesties Request feels less like a separate composition than a door left open by the album’s beginning. It circles back to the opening refrain, bringing “Why don’t we sing this song all together?” and “Open our minds, let the pictures come” into a longer, stranger meditation. The new images—“pictures of us in the circling sun” and “pictures of the show that we’re all one”—push the idea into more abstract territory. Mick Jagger may have drawn inspiration from The Secret of the Golden Flower, while another possible connection is Carl Jung’s study of the Taoist treatise on inner alchemy. Either way, the song turns an invitation to sing into a psychedelic proposition, suggesting that the destination is not a chorus but a state of perception, where music, images and identity blur together.
An improvised trip
The recording grew from an extended improvisation that originally ran beyond fourteen minutes before being reduced to 8:34. Mick Jagger later admitted, “I probably started to take too many drugs,” a remark that suits the album’s loose, hallucinatory atmosphere. Instead of a tightly arranged song, the track develops through sounds appearing, colliding and disappearing.
Brian opens with the Mellotron, using a flute setting also heard on theBeatles’ Strawberry Fields Forever. A distant conversation seems to mention flower power before Keith arrives with spare, abstract guitar chords. Percussion then rolls in, linking the piece to Sing This All Together without simply repeating it.
Sounds in motion
The arrangement becomes a collage of voices, screams, laughter and Tibetan Om chanting. Brian moves through horn and flute colors on the Mellotron, while the real flute and mandolin add further layers. Nicky Hopkins contributes piano, a Jew’s harp and vibraphone, alongside the continuing percussion. Charlie’s bass drum provides a steady thread through the wandering performance.
The music refuses to settle. Instruments surface and retreat while voices and textures overlap, making the studio itself feel like part of the improvisation inside the studio space. Rather than building toward a conventional climax, the track keeps changing shape, with the musicians responding to the sounds around them.
The refrain returns
The familiar refrain comes back after the songs hits the seven minutes, giving the sprawling improvisation a recognizable center. Mick’s voice is buried in reverb before emerging with a drier tone. Keith supplies electric rhythm guitar, while Brian moves to vibraphone and then the Mellotron. The return reconnects the track with the album’s opening idea without neatly explaining the strange journey in between. The words function almost like a signpost: the listener remembers where the trip began, even though the music has wandered far beyond its starting point.
The final descent
Before reaching the eight minutes of the song the Stones enter a final abstract sequence built around white noise from a frenzied oscilloscope and the deep, reverberating sound of a gong. There is no tidy pop-song resolution; the recording simply dissolves after pushing conventional structure aside.
And then not to forget faint spoken question by Mick can be heard near the beginning: “Where’s the joint?” It may help explain the track’s relaxed, hazy atmosphere, although the recording leaves room for interpretation. By the final gong, the strange circuit is complete: an invitation to sing together has become an eight-minute trip into sound, repetition and abstraction.
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