Today We Know It Well: Tomorrow Never Knows

Some Thoughts About the Beatles' Most Innovative Track

Beginning on April 6, 1966 at 8 p.m. London time, the Beatles entered EMI’s Studio 3 to lay down the basic rhythm tracks for what was initially called “Mach 1” (as a working title). It took the four musicians just three takes to record the foundation track consisting of guitars, bass, drums, organ, piano and tambourine. They had finished by 1 in the morning, when the recording session concluded. Assemblage and processing of all the parts into a cohesive whole was finalized April 22, 1966.

THE ROLE OF THE DREADED LYSERGIC

John Lennon had become enthralled with LSD which, at that time, was a not-yet-illegal drug that was all the rage among London’s chic and “beautiful people.” He was also reading Timothy Leary’s “The Psychedelic Experience,” a book that was a kind of guide for those wishing to “trip.” Lennon later recounted that Leary had “nicked” the information in his book from “The Tibetan Book of the Dead.” Lennon, in turn, ripped off Leary’s stuff for his lyrics for “Mach 1”: Leary: “Whenever in doubt, relax and float downstream…”; Lennon: “Turn off your mind. Relax and float downstream. It is not dying…Lay down all thought, surrender to the void.” Another title used briefly for the track was “The Void” — known in Buddhism as sunyata (translated most often as emptiness, vacuity, and sometimes voidness; a concept found in diverse religions, which has multiple meanings depending on its doctrinal context.) But Lennon, fearing that he’d be considered pretentious, opted to use Ringo’s mangled catchphrase, “Tomorrow never knows,” to offset the seriousness of the track. (You can find a clip of Ringo and the boys from around this time, being interviewed. At one point, Ringo responds, ‘Tomorrow never knows,” as if he’s saying something profound.)

AMERICANS’ SOUND ENVY

In his Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the 60s, British writer Ian McDonald points out that in 1966, EMI’s studios were primitive, compared to American studios. But, as he says, the creativity engendered by the relative limitations of EMI’s technology mothered “the most dazzling aural invention to emerge from any studio in Britain or America during the late 60s.”

American pop star Tommy James recalled entire recording studios being taken apart and put back together again, all in an attempt to get a drum sound like that on “Tomorrow Never Knows” (TNK). Ringo’s mesmeric part was played mainly on two slack-tuned tom-toms. His drums’ sound was dampened, compressed and drenched in echo by George Martin, along with his engineers Geoff Emerick (who was only 20 at the time) and Ken Scott. The mike was placed much closer to Ringo’s bass drum than was customary.

TAPE LOOPS AND CONCRETE MUSIC

The next day, April 7, 1966, the Beatles started overdubbing so-called “tape loops” they had created individually at home. All four had Brenell tape recorders, and they had agreed to go home and use their creativity to record sounds that would eventually be manipulated, reversed, and otherwise altered to become part of the new track.

While Lennon is often characterized as the most far out of the Fabs, it was McCartney who was a follower of avant garde art and music. He was stimulated by composers such as John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, who would create bizarre experiences and label them musical compositions. One of Cage’s most famous “compositions” involved attentive listeners sitting in the performance space for a specified period of time, listening to silence. Another source of fascination for McCartney was musique concrete, the assemblage of various natural sounds on tape in order to produce a montage. The natural sounds serve as raw material, and were often altered through electronic effects or tape manipulation.

A tape loop was a short length of tape Scotch-taped to itself, making a literal “loop.” The effect of this was to create an endlessly repeating recording; if you could get the length of tape to continually pass through the playback head on a tape machine, you could have a perpetual series of sounds repeating over and over. Another technique used was saturation of the tape by disabling the machine’s erase head and simply recording various sounds, one upon another, for a cacophony of sound. In interviews, George Martin told of having several staff people keeping each tape loop taut by holding pencils or other items, around which the loop could travel on its way to and from the playback head of the tape machine.

POOL THE LOOPS

Martin also recalled how he, Geoff Emerick, Ken Scott, and the four Beatles “played” the loops. Seated at the studio’s recording console — what the British call the “desk” — each person had the ability to raise and lower the console’s faders (volume controls) controlling the sound of the loop. So, as Martin recounted, TNK was a one-off, unrepeatable performance, combining the rising and lowering volume levels on a variety of tape-looped sounds, with each changing volume level for each loop controlled by a different person.

There is some disagreement on what the individual loops were and how they were created. Here’s the best breakdown from what I’ve heard and read:

Loop 1: the seagull effect (first heard at 7 seconds into the record). This, according to “Revolution in the Head” and George’s son, Giles Martin, was a recording of McCartney laughing. It was sped up, reversed and otherwise electronically manipulated.

Loop 2 (first heard at 19 seconds into the record): Paul made this one by taping an orchestra playing a B flat Major chord off a vinyl record he owned. This is interesting because it relates to George Harrison’s assertion that the song isn’t really just one chord, but that you can hear a second chord — B flat Major — if you listen carefully.

Loop 3 (audible for the first time 22 seconds in): EMI studios had a Mellotron, a very early attempt at a synthesizer. The Mellotron itself used internal tape loops of various orchestral instruments (horns, strings, etc.) for its available sound pallette. Loop 3 is the Mellotron on its “flute” setting (think of the intro to “Strawberry Fields Forever”).

Loop 4 (introduced at 38 seconds) is again from the Mellotron, this time oscillating in 6/8 time signature between the pitches C and B flat, again building the case for Harrison’s statement that there are two discernible chords: C Major and B flat Major.

Loop 5 (at 0:56): an ascending scalar phrase played on a sitar, recorded with a great deal of saturation and sped up. (As an example of the ambiguity about what each loop was originally, a video clip on YouTube plays each loop from the song, one at a time. It lists the loop heard from 0:43 to 0:56 as guitars sped up and played backwards. If accurate, this would constitute a sixth loop.)

RECYCLING PAUL’S SOLO

The instrumental portion of TNK included a vaguely familiar sound: Paul’s guitar solo from “Taxman” (Revolver’s very first track) reversed, altered in pitch and further embellished. To me, the original Taxman solo itself was heavily influenced by Jeff Beck’s solos on “Over Under Sideways Down” with the Yardbirds. (Do you agree? You can weigh in on my Guitar Players group on Facebook.)

MUSICAL ANALYSIS

TNK is very simple melodically. Lennon sings just four notes: C, E, G and B flat. These notes spell out a C7 chord. You could also say that the notes are from the C Mixolydian mode (this mode is simply the major scale with its seventh note flatted [dropped down one fret, or one half-step]). You could think of the song as being a C Mixolydian one, with the main chord being C and the note selection coming from that mode. Or you could see TMK as being in the key of F Major. Doing that, we would see that the C Major chord is the five chord in that key, and the hint of a B flat Major chord is the four chord. Arguing against the F Major opinion is the fact that an F Major chord is never heard.

LASTING IMPACT AND A LITTLE LEVITY

On YouTube, you can find a clip which is the TNK track, slowed down “800 percent.” Where the original was roughly 3 minutes, this version is 24. One person offered a comment below the clip: “This version should be called ‘Tomorrow Never Ends.’” Another commenter: “A great tune for the kids to dance to right after surgery.” I recall an interview with David Crosby where he recalled thinking, “What is THAT?” upon first hearing TMK. Record producer Rick Rubin said, “That song makes you rethink what music is. It’s that profound.”

ALL ABOUT THE LISTENER’S PERSPECTIVE

We can only hope to grasp how new TNK was to pop music back in the 60s. For years, we’ve been hearing artists and recordings that were influenced by it, and therefore have lost the ability to react in the pure way that listeners in ‘66 and beyond did. It’s a little like explaining to a young person how revolutionary Hendrix was on some tracks when the young person has been hearing imitators and influencees of Jimi his whole life. Jimi no longer sounds new and fresh because musicians have been incorporating his innovations for 50 years.

WILL IT LAST?

Do you think people will still be able or be interested in hearing TNK a hundred or two hundred years down the line? We’ll have to wait and see…

Tomorrow never knows.

Thanks for reading, and feel free to comment via my Guitar Players group on FB or on my YouTube channel.