Tomorrow Never Knows

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Tomorrow Never Knows is a song off The Beatles' 1966 album Revolver. It was written by John Lennon and credited to Lennon/McCartney.

Contents

AKA and Working Titles

Writing

Tomorrow Never Knows was, like A Hard Day's Night, based on something that Beatles drummer Ringo Starr said which John liked. The lyrics, however, were based off the 1964 book The Psychedelic Experience, written by Harvard psychologists Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, contained an excerpt based off the ancient Tibetan Book Of The Dead. Lennon had been given The Psychedelic Experience by Barry Miles, co-owner of the Indica Gallery. According to biographer Albert Goldman, Lennon recorded himself reading the passage of the book that contained the Tibetan Book Of The Dead paraphrase before his third LSD trip in January 1966. He played the tape back as he was starting to feel the effects of the drug, and decided to write the song based on this passage upon hearing the tape.

Recording

Tomorrow Never Knows was the first song recorded for Revolver. Recording for Tomorrow Never Knows began on April 6, 1966, when three takes of the basic track were recorded under the working title Mark I. Take 1 was drastically different than the final version, with a slowed down tape loop of a distorted guitar and heavily echoed percussive sounds as the basis for the recording. Onto this, they added vocals, bass, and drums. This take appears on the 1996 compilation Anthology 2. Take 2 was incomplete, but Take 3 formed the basis for the final, released version. For Ringo to get the drum sound used on the recording, he had the toms slackened, and the recording was heavily compressed and echoed. Engineer Geoff Emerick recalls, "I moved the bass drum microphone much closer to the drum than had been done before. There's an early picture of The Beatles wearing a woollen jumper with four necks. I stuffed that inside the drum to deaden the sound. Then we put the sound through Fairchild 660 valve limiters and compressors. It became the sound of Revolver and Pepper really. Drums had never been heard like that before." On April 7, the distinctive tape loops for the song were overdubbed. By removing the erase head from a Grundig tape recorder, Paul McCartney found that he could saturate a recording with sound. Five different loops were used in Tomorrow Never Knows: a seagull noise; actually a distorted recording of Paul McCartney laughing, an orchestra playing a B-flat chord, notes played on a Mellotron's flute setting, and a distorted sitar; best heard in the instrumental break following the lines 'It is being, it is being.' George Martin recalled, "We did a live mix of all the loops. All over the studios we had people spooling them onto machines with pencils while Geoff did the balancing. There were many other hands controlling the panning. It is the one track, of all the songs The Beatles did, that could never be reproduced: it would be impossible to go back now and mix exactly the same thing: the 'happening' of the tape loops, inserted as we all swung off the levers on the faders willy-nilly, was a random event." Paul McCartney recalled, "We ran the loops and then we ran the track of Tomorrow Never Knows and we played the faders, and just before you could tell it was a loop, before it began to repeat a lot, I'd pull in one of the other faders, and so, using the other people, 'You pull that in there,' 'You pull that in,' we did a half random, half orchestrated playing of the things and recorded that to a track on the actual master tape, so that if we got a good one, that would be the solo. We played it through a few times and changed some of the tapes till we got what we thought was a real good one." Also used on the song was part of Paul McCartney's guitar solo from Taxman, reversed and slowed down a tone for the instrumental break. Another innovation on the track was John Lennon's vocals. The first half of the song utilized automatic double tracking, or ADT. ADT involves duplicating the sound of a track, in this case the song's vocals, and slightly changing the pitch, giving the effect of two voices. For the second half of the song, John's vocals were put through a Leslie speaker, commonly found inside Hammond organs. It can be heard from the line 'Love is all and love is everyone' onward. Producer George Martin recalls, "For Tomorrow Never Knows he said to me he wanted his voice to sound like the Dalai Lama chanting from a hilltop, and I said, 'It's a bit expensive, going to Tibet. Can we make do with it here?' I knew perfectly well that ordinary echo or reverb wouldn't work, because it would just put a very distant voice on. We needed to have something a bit weird and metallic... A Leslie speaker is a rotating speaker, a Hammond console, and the speed at which it rotates can be varied according to a knob on the control. By putting his voice through that and then recording it again, you got a kind of intermittent vibrato effect, which is what we hear on Tomorrow Never Knows. I don't think anyone had done that before. It was quite a revolutionary track for Revolver." Geoff Emerick recalled, "It meant actually breaking into the circuitry. I remember the surprise on our faces when the voice came out of the speaker. It was just one of sheer amazement. After that they wanted everything shoved through the Leslie: pianos, guitars, drums, vocals, you name it!" Tomorrow Never Knows was completed on April 22, when John overdubbed additional vocals through a Leslie speaker and George overdubbed a sitar part. Despite the final results of the song, John Lennon was still dissatisfied. Lennon recalled in The Beatles, a 1968 authoized biography of the band, "Often the backing I think of early on never comes off. With Tomorrow Never Knows I'd imagined in my head that in the background you would hear thousands of monks chanting. That was impractical of course and we did something different. I should have tried to get near my original idea, the monks singing. I realise now that was what it needed."

Recording and Mixing Sessions


LOVE Mix

A mix of Tomorrow Never Knows is included on the 2006 Beatles remix album. The drums, bass, and tape loops are mixed with sections of Within You Without You. Also, some sound effects from Tomorrow Never Knows are included in the transition to the next track on the album, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds.

Personnel

The Beatles

Guest Musicians

Production

Available Versions

Available On

Cover Versions

Source

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