31: Tomorrow Never Knows

Posted on | July 26, 2009 | 5 Comments

The final track of Revolver — my second favorite Beatles album — Tomorrow Never Knows signals, for those who somehow didn’t get it throughout the rest of the album, that the Beatles were going in new directions. Not content with the rock and roll formula, anymore, they wanted to go off into new genres, and talk about big ideas.

There’s a section in the Beatles Anthology where Paul talks about Tomorrow Never Knows, and recalls the first time John played it for producer George Martin (closely paraphrased): “up until that point, we’d always had, you know, at least three chords. But this was very different, with [miming it out] John just sitting there strumming very earnestly on C.” I don’t know, it always amuses me. In any case, George Martin took it well. And if he hadn’t, I’m sure that John would’ve done it anyway.

Ringo kicks major ass on drums.  The song itself is strictly John.  Paul came up with the idea of the tape loops — he made them at home, and brought them in in a little plastic bag.  The Beatles recruited virtually everyone working in Abbey Road, who were all apparently very unimpressed, to hold the little tape loops in different machines using pencils, while George Martin and the Beatles mixed them into the song live.  George and Paul play backwards guitar.  Oh, and Geoff Emerick puts John’s voice through a Leslie speaker during the first verse, and Ken Townsend fucking invented automatic double-tracking (ADT) for the other two verses.  You know, no biggie.

Interesting factoid: John, never being good with expressing what he wanted out of his songs in musical terms, originally told George Martin that he wanted to sound like 100 Tibetan monks chanting on a hilltop.  No one, of course, really knew what that meant, though Emerick eventually came up with the Leslie speaker idea.

Before that, though, John had the brilliant thought that he wanted to be hung upside from the studio ceiling by a rope tied at his feet, and spun in circles around the microphone while he sang.  He was convinced that this would give him a different sound.  Reportedly, he kept asking the studio techs about when exactly they were going to rig this up for him, to which they kept giving him the answer “we’re looking into it, John.”  Apparently he even sent roadie and personal assistant Mal Evans out to buy a rope at one point, but Mal went to the pub instead, knowing it was an awful idea and that John would have forgotten all about it in a few hours.  He was right.

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