Another great song from Revolver (1966)—the album’s last cut—and what I see as the quintessential psychedelic song, an attempt to musically reproduce the LSD experience. It’s enormously complicated and creative: a deliberate tour de force.
It comes in at #18 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 100 greatest Beatles songs. I can’t tell you how many times I listened to this song in various states of consciousness. Lacking other drugs, I’d sometimes steal one of my father’s cigarettes and inhale huge gusts of smoke, holding them in my lungs till I got dizzy, while turning on a lamp whose bulb I’d replaced with a red one. Ah, youth!
Rolling Stone describes its genesis and impact:
All of a sudden, the poetic advance and rustic modernism of Rubber Soul — issued only five months before these sessions, in December 1965 — was very old news. Compared to the rolling drone, tape-loop effects and out-of-body vocals that dominate Lennon’s trip here, even the rest of Revolver sounds like mutation in process: the Beatles pursuing their liberated impulses as players and writers, via acid, in pop-song form. There was no other place for this track on the album but the end. “Eleanor Rigby,” “I’m Only Sleeping,” “Love You To” and “She Said She Said” were all bold steps toward the unknown — “Tomorrow Never Knows” was the jump from the cliff.
. . . It took them only three tries to come up with a master take of the rhythm track, driven by Starr’s relentless drumming. (McCartney suggested the tumbling pattern Starr uses.) Most of the otherworldly overdubs were created and recorded on the night of April 6th and the afternoon of the 7th — a total of about 10 hours. There is nothing on “Tomorrow Never Knows” — the backwards guitar solo, the hovering buzz of Harrison on sitar, Lennon’s vocal drifting on what feels like the other side of consciousness — that was not dosed beyond plain recognition. The spacey, tabla-like quality of Starr’s drumming was just him playing on two slackly tuned tom-toms, compressed and doused in echo. Loops were created using a Mellotron imitating flute and string tones; the cackling seagull sounds were either an altered recording of McCartney laughing or a treated slice of guitar.
Lennon hoped to sound nothing like his usual self. “I want my voice to sound like the Dalai Lama chanting from a mountaintop, miles away,” he proclaimed in the studio. Engineer Geoff Emerick achieved that effect by running Lennon’s voice through the rotating speaker of a Leslie cabinet, which had been hooked up to the Hammond organ at Abbey Road. The result was heaven and earth combined: a luxuriant and rippling prayer, delivered in Lennon’s nasal Liverpool-hard-boy tone. “That is bloody marvelous!” Lennon exclaimed repeatedly after hearing his effect. McCartney’s reaction was equally joyful: “It’s the Dalai Lennon!”
Wikipedia gives a bit more about how Lennon conceived this song:
John Lennon wrote the song in January 1966, with lyrics adapted from the book The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead by Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and Ralph Metzner, which in turn was adapted from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. AlthoughPeter Brown believed that Lennon’s source for the lyric was the Tibetan Book of the Dead itself, which, he said, Lennon read whilst consuming LSD, George Harrison later stated that the idea for the lyrics came from Leary’s, Alpert’s and Metzner’s book and Paul McCartney confirmed this, stating that he and Lennon had visited the newly opened Indica bookshop — Lennon was looking for a copy of The Portable Nietzsche — and Lennon had found a copy of The Psychedelic Experience that contained the lines: “Whenever in doubt, turn off your mind, relax, float downstream”.
Lennon bought the book, went home, took LSD, and followed the instructions exactly as stated in the book. The book held that the “ego death” experienced under the influence of LSD and other psychedelic drugs is essentially similar to the dying process and requires similar guidance.
Thanks Jerry. I’ve always been ashamed to admit I’m not much of a Beatles fan for reasons I can’t explain or defend. But when they break out of basic pop song style I dig it. Great song.
Excellent choice!
Los Lobos does a terrific live version of this song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ei2i1NelYV0. Awesome guitar work by David Hidalgo, and a touching intro tribute to the Beatles’ depth from this great L.A. band.
(Apologies if my link pasting was done incorrectly – first time!)
Larry, hadn’t heard that one before. Love it.
A completely different take can be heard on the soundtrack from ‘Sucker Punch’ (not a great film). Link is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPsL6dECQ38
I.M.O. it’s the best cover of any beatles song.
Released almost exactly 3 years after ‘She Loves You’. This song changed everything about pop music. The old boundaries of what a pop song could be were abolished.
I wonder what song they would have written if Lennon had quickly found a copy of The Portable Nietzsche and taken LSD while reading it.
Might have been even better. The tightrope walker sequence from “Zarathustra” is pretty trippy.
I had to look it up… trippy indeed.
When [the tightrope walker] had reached the exact middle of his course the small door [between the towers] opened once more and a fellow in motley clothes, looking like a jester, jumped out and followed the first one with quick steps.
“Forward, lamefoot!” he shouted in an awe-inspiring voice. “Forward, lazybones, smuggler, pale-face, or I shall tickle you with my heel! What are you doing here between towers? The tower is where you belong. You ought to be locked up; you block the way for one better than yourself.” And with every word he came closer and closer; but when he was but one step behind, the dreadful thing happened which made every mouth dumb and every eye rigid: he uttered a devilish cry and jumped over the [tightrope walker] who stood in his way.
This man, however, seeing his rival win, lost his head and the rope, tossed away his pole, and plunged into the depth even faster, a whirlpool of arms and legs. The market place became as the sea when a tempest pierces it: the people rushed apart and over one another, especially at the place where the body must hit the ground.
Zarathustra, however, did not move; and it was right next to him that the body fell, badly maimed and disfigured, but not yet dead. After a while the shattered man recovered consciousness and saw Zarathustra kneeling beside him. “What are you doing here?” he asked at last. ‘I have long known that the devil would trip me. Now he will drag me to hell. Would you prevent him?”
“By my honor, friend,” answered Zarathustra, “all that of which you speak does not exist: there is no devil and no hell. Your soul will be dead even before your body: fear nothing further.”
The man looked up suspiciously. “If you speak the truth,” he said, “I lose nothing when I lose my life. I am not much more than a beast that has been taught to dance by blows and a few meager morsels.”
“By no means,” said Zarathustra. “You have made danger your vocation; there is nothing contemptible in that. Now you perish of your vocation: for that I will bury you with my own hands.”
When Zarathustra had said this, the dying man answered no more; but he moved his hand as if he sought Zarathustra’s hand in thanks.
Now THAT’S dying.
This is the Beatles song I probably played the most and it was the first time I realized how different John Lennon was from Paul McCartney in writing styles.
I got Revolver on my 11th birthday and it is still my favourite record of all time.
That said, McCartney had a great deal of influence on the track, from the bizarre drum pattern he suggested to Ringo to the extensive use of tape loops (Paul discovered avant garde before John and was thus familiar with some of its methods, including the use of tape loops).
Of course everyone involved played huge roles in the realization of the song, George Martin and Geoff Emerick almost (but not quite) deserving credit for the song as much as the Beatles.
Great song!
The backward guitar is the solo from Taxman, played by Paul 🙂
Also, the tape loop thing, as far as I know, was Paul’s idea too.
I’m pretty sure you’re right about the tape loops being Pail’s idea. Lennon wanted to sound like he was singing from a mountaintop with a thousand Buddhist monks chanting in the background. It was a little…impractical. It reminds me of the story where he told told George Martin he wanted a particular song to “sound like an orange.”
I don’t think I ever really understood the lyrics until I heard Brian Eno sing them on 801 Live.
I went absolutely apeshit for Revolver when I got it for Xmas in 1978. In a previous thread I said I thought She Said She Said was the best track on the album. I now realise I was wrong and I apologise.
I find it odd that this Beatles song post received the fewest comments of any of the others. Maybe people aren’t familiar that familiar with the song. Maybe they think it’s too weird. Maybe they don’t like it and were never into psychedelics.
But this sort of thing is what made the Beatles the best ever. Sure, the fact that they could virtually toss off one of the best pop songs ever at the drop of a hat. That they were the best songwriters ever and had as a member perhaps the most talented, both in terms of songwriting and musicianship, rock/pop artist of all time (McCartney of course) of course meant that their place in history was sealed, but the fact that they could pull off the weird stuff, and not only pull it off, but invent their own made them not just rock & pop innovators, but sound and production innovators as well. Of course they had considerable help from George Martin and their various engineers, especially Geoff Emerick, but the the Beatles were the ones with the ideas. Their producer and engineers helped them turn those ideas into realities.
The Beatles invented a whole new genre with Tomorrow Never Knows. The west coast psychedelic bands weren’t doing anything like it. No one was. No one did for years. Tomorrow Never Knows was the first techno rave track. That’s the only other music that sounds remotely like it (aside from – to some degree – the truly bizarre Silver Apples). And with his second Fireman album, “Rushes,” Paul reverted to this style. I highly recommend his “Rushes” album for some sixties style instrumentals – complete with Mellotron, sitar, and McCartney’s live percussion – plus updated techno touches and processed spoken word vocals mixed with various vocal samples and found sounds. Truly a great album. His follow-up album, “Electric Arguments,” which was released in 2008, 10 years after “Rushes.” It features more standard rock and pop with just a couple experimental tracks. Two of McCartney’s best solo albums ever, recorded under the name “The Fireman.”