The Beatles were “inspired by the musique concrète of German composer and early electronic music pioneer Karlheinz Stockhausen…” as SCOTT THILL has asserted. Francis Schaeffer noted that ideas of “Non-resolution” and “Fragmentation” came down German and French streams with the influence of Beethoven’s last Quartets and then the influence of Debussy and later Schoenberg’s non-resolution which is in total contrast with Bach’s resolution. Finally you have Stockhausen’s electronic music and concern with the element of change and his influence can be seen on the Beatles in several songs but the first one was TOMORROW NEVER KNOWS.
Karlheinz Stockhausen pictured below on the cover of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band:
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Tomorrow never knows – making of
Uploaded on Jan 5, 2008
John, Paul, George H. and George M. tell the story.
From Beatles Anthology DVD.
Tommorow Never Knows -The Beatles (Lost 1967 Music Video)
Uploaded on Jul 11, 2010
In 1967 Neil Aspinall was asked to put together a video for the beatles 3rd movie which was in early devolpment. The concept was going to be a collection of promotional videos all bunched together from the albums Rubber Soul, Revolver and Sgt Pepper. The Beatles dimissed the idea and decided to go with pauls idea of the Magical Mystery Tour. Only 4 videos are known to exist which where Eleneor Rigby&A Day In The Life (as seen in the anthology) along the lost videos for Within You And Without You ( which was supposed to be a montage of an office building) and Tommorow Never Knows. However I was able to find the Tommorow Never Knows Video through a lot of researching. The clip is simply put together from clips of John (14 hour technicolour dream), Paul (His 1966 trip with mal Evans), and George (arriving in india with pattie).
All rights belong to The Beatles and Apple Corp not me!
Enjoy comment and subscribe!
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Francis Schaeffer pictured below:
Francis Schaeffer correctly observed concerning the Beatles:
In this flow there was also the period of psychedelic rock, an attempt to find this experience without drugs, by the use of a certain type of music. This was the period of the Beatles’ Revolver (1966) and Strawberry Fields Forever (1967). In the same period and in the same direction was Blonde on Blond (1966) by Bob Dylan….No great illustration could be found of the way these concepts were carried to the masses than “pop” music and especially the work of the BEATLES. The Beatles moved through several stages, including the concept of the drug and psychedelic approach. The psychedelic began with their records REVOLVER, STRAWBERRY FIELDS FOREVER, AND PENNY LANE. This was developed with great expertness in their record SERGEANT PEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND in which psychedelic music, with open statements concerning drug-taking, was knowingly presented as a religious answer.
The Beatles were looking for lasting satisfaction in their lives and their journey took them down many of the same paths that other young people of the 1960’s were taking INCLUDING THE PATH OF PSYCHEDELIC MUSIC AND FRAGMENTATION. No wonder in the video THE AGE OF NON-REASON Schaeffer noted, ” Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band…for a time it became the rallying cry for young people throughout the world. It expressed the essence of their lives, thoughts and their feelings.”
How Should We then Live Episode 7 small (Age of Nonreason)
George Martin:
It was on Revolver that we have the track Tomorrow Never Knows
which was a great innovation
John Lennon:
That’s me in my Tibetan Book of the Dead period
and the expression Tomorrow NeverKnows was another of Ringo’s
I was self-conscious about the lyrics of Tomorrow Never Knows
so I took one of Ringo’s malapropisms like Hard Day’s Night
to take the edge off the heavy philosophical lyrics
Paul McCartney:
John had a song which was all on the chord of C
which we thought a perfectly good idea, like Indian music is all on one chord
I wondered how George Martin would take it-it was a radical departure
At least we’d had three chords and maybe a change for the middle eight
Suddenly this was just John strumming on C rather earnestly
George Harrison:
In those days there was no technology like there is now
There were two guitars, bass and drums, and that was it
If we did stuff in the studio with the aid of recording tricks
then we couldn’t just reproduce them on stage
Nowadays you could do Tomorrow Never Knows, have all the loops on a keyboard
You could have as many pianists, drummers and orchestras as you wanted
But in those days we were just a little dance hall band
and we never thought of augmenting ourselves
___________
Lennon had a close relationship with Stockhausen:
The Beatles – Tomorrow Never Knows (Lyrics)
The use of these ¼-inch audio tape loops resulted primarily from McCartney’s admiration for Stockhausen‘s Gesang der Jünglinge.
Dissecting “Tomorrow Never Knows” by The Beatles
By Ian Vargo on 10/8/2014 · Production / Recording
One of the most ambitious and influential of all Beatles recordings is “Tomorrow Never Knows” from the 1966 Album Revolver. Primarily written by John Lennon, there are numerous examples of creative recording and mixing techniques from the production of this song.
To help reinforce this Indian-influenced song, which relies almost entirely on a steady C-chord, George Harrison added a droning Tambura, which is often confused with a sitar.
Ringo’s repetitive but unique drum performance which was arguably similar to “Ticket to Ride” from 1965, was close miked and heavily compressed, and provided an excellent backdrop for the organized chaos of tape loops and vocal experimentation.
Lennon wanted the vocal for this LSD-influenced song to sound like a hundred chanting Tibetan monks, and although The Beatles at this point could do essentially whatever they wanted at the famed Abbey Road Studios, this was not possible.
Ultimately, Engineer Geoff Emerick creatively ran Lennon’s vocal through a Leslie Speakerand re-recorded it. Lennon showed a general disdain for doubling his own vocal, so Ken Townsend developed automatic double tracking or ADT, a process in which the signal from the sync head of one tape machine was delayed through a second tape machine. The tape speed and therefore the pitch was modulated slightly, allowing the engineers to simulate a doubled vocal or other performance. Waves now has a plugin version of this effect.
McCartney, who had been influenced by Karlheinz Stockhausen and other Musique concrete composers, brought in a selection of quarter-inch tape loops he had recorded at home. The infamous “seagull sound” is actually a sped up recording of someone (perhaps McCartney) laughing. The other Beatles provided home recorded tape loops which were ultimately played through various tape machines in Abbey Road, each supervised by technicians, with the band and Producer George Martin manning the faders as the loops were recorded on top of the existing arrangement. This was quite a departure in terms of production technique not only for the Beatles, but for any popular music group at the time.
Although later the hyper-critical Lennon expressed disappointment that the song lacked due to not having the chanting monks he originally envisioned, that didn’t stop this recording from being revolutionary and the perfect centerpiece for what is perhaps the bands’ most experimental album.
It has been covered by dozens of artists, and its influence can be heard in artists ranging from hip-hop to electronic.
In 2012, the popular AMC series Mad Men, in an unprecedented event, was able to obtain the recording and publishing rights for the song, allowing it to be used in an episode of the show for the hefty fee of $250,000.
Sgt. Pepper’s footnote: Karlheinz Stockhausen passes
[Posted by Dave Haber on Tuesday, 12/18/07 7:34 am] [Full Blog] [Tweet] [Facebook]It was announced last week that Karlheinz Stockhausen , one of the most important and controversial postwar composers, passed away on Friday, December 7 at his home in western Germany. He was 79.So taken were the Beatles by Stockhausen’s music that he was included among the Beatle’s other heroes and idols on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967.
See this page on our sister-site, The Internet Beatles Album, for more about the Sgt. Pepper’s cover.
» Click here to read all the blog posts
Tomorrow Never Knows
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For The Beatles album, see Tomorrow Never Knows (Beatles album). For the Peter Baldrachi album, see Tomorrow Never Knows (Peter Baldrachi album). For the Mr. Children song, see Tomorrow Never Knows (Mr. Children song).
“Tomorrow Never Knows”
Song by the Beatles from the albumRevolver
Released
5 August 1966
Recorded
6, 7 and 22 April 1966
EMI Studios, London
Genre
Psychedelic rock,[1]raga rock,[2]hard rock,[3]experimental rock[4]
Length
2:58
Label
Parlophone
Writer
Lennon–McCartney
Producer
George Martin
Revolver track listing
[show]14 tracks
Music sample
“Tomorrow Never Knows”
MENU
0:00
“Tomorrow Never Knows” is the final track of the Beatles‘ 1966 studio album Revolver but the first to be recorded. Credited as a Lennon–McCartney song, it was written primarily by John Lennon.[1]
The song has a vocal put through a Leslie speaker cabinet (which was normally used as a loudspeaker for a Hammond organ). Tape loops prepared by the Beatles were mixed in and out of the Indian-inspired modal backing underpinned by Ringo Starr‘s constant but non-standard drum pattern.
It is considered one of the greatest songs of its time, with Pitchfork Media placing it at number 19 on its list of “The 200 Greatest Songs of the 1960s”.[5]
Inspiration[edit]
See also: Counterculture of the 1960s
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 was in turn adapted from the Tibetan Book of the Dead.[6] Although Peter Brown believed that Lennon’s source for the lyrics was the Tibetan Book of the Dead itself, which, he said, Lennon had read whilst consuming LSD,[7]George Harrison later stated that the idea for the lyrics came from Leary, Alpert, and Metzner’s book;[8]Paul McCartney confirmed this, stating that when he and Lennon visited the newly openedIndica bookshop, Lennon had been looking for a copy of The Portable Nietzsche and found a copy of The Psychedelic Experience that contained the lines: “Whenever in doubt, turn off your mind, relax, float downstream”.[9]
Lennon bought the book, went home, took LSD, and followed the instructions exactly as stated in the book.[10][11] 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.[12][13] This is a state of being known by eastern mystics and masters as samādhi (a state of being totally aware of the present moment; a one-pointedness of mind.).
Title[edit]
The title never actually appears in the song’s lyrics. In an interview Lennon revealed that, like “A Hard Day’s Night“, it was taken from one of Ringo Starr‘s malapropisms.[14] The piece was originally titled “Mark I”.[9]“The Void” is cited as another working title but according to Mark Lewisohn (and Bob Spitz) this is untrue, although the books The Love You Make: An Insider’s Story of the Beatles and The Beatles A to Z both cite “The Void” as the original title.[7]
When the Beatles returned to London after their first visit to America in early 1964 they were interviewed by David Coleman of BBC Television. The interview included the following exchange:
Interviewer: “Now, Ringo, I hear you were manhandled at the Embassy Ball. Is this right?”
Ringo: “Not really. Someone just cut a bit of my hair, you see.”
Interviewer: “Let’s have a look. You seem to have got plenty left.”
Ringo: (turns head) “Can you see the difference? It’s longer, this side.”
Interviewer: “What happened exactly?”
Ringo: “I don’t know. I was just talking, having an interview (exaggerated voice). Just like I am NOW!”
(John and Paul begin lifting locks of his hair, pretending to cut it)
Ringo: “I was talking away and I looked ’round, and there was about 400 people just smiling. So, you know — what can you say?”
John: “What can you say?”
Ringo: “Tomorrow never knows.”
(John laughs)[15]
Musical structure[edit]
McCartney remembered that even though the song’s harmony was mainly restricted to the chord of C, Martin accepted it as it was and said it was “rather interesting”. The song’s harmonic structure is derived fromIndian music and is based upon a high volume C drone played by Harrison on a tamboura.[16] The “chord” over the drone is generally C major, but some changes to B flat major result from vocal modulations, as well as orchestral and guitar tape loops.[17][18] The song has been called the first pop song that attempted to dispense with chord changes altogether.[16] Here, the Beatles’ harmonic ingenuity is nonetheless displayed in the upper harmonies- “Turn off your mind”, for example, is suitably a run of unvarying E melody notes, before “relax” involves an E-G melody note shift and “float downstream” an E-C-G descent.[19] “It is not dying” involves a run of three G melody notes that rise on “dying” to a B♭, creating a ♭VII/I (B♭/C) ‘slash’ polychord.[19] This is a prominent device in Beatles songs such as “All My Loving“, “Help!“, “A Hard Day’s Night“, “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)“, “Hey Jude“, “Dear Prudence“, “Revolution” and “Get Back“.[20]
________________
George Harrison, US PresidentGerald Ford, and Ravi Shankar in the Oval Office in December 1974
Recording[edit]
A cross-section showing the inner workings of a Leslie speaker cabinet
Lennon first played the song to Brian Epstein, George Martin and the other Beatles at Epstein’s house at 24 Chapel Street, Belgravia.[21][22]
The 19-year-old Geoff Emerick was promoted to replace Norman Smith as engineer on the first session for the Revolver album. This started at 8 pm on 6 April 1966, in Studio Three at Abbey Road.[9] Lennon told producer Martin that he wanted to sound like a hundred chanting Tibetan monks, which left Martin the difficult task of trying to find the effect by using the basic equipment they had. The effect was achieved by using a Leslie speaker. When the concept was explained to Lennon, he inquired if the same effect could be achieved by hanging him upside down and spinning him around a microphone while he sang into it.[9][23] Emerick made a connector to break into the electronic circuitry of the cabinet and then re-recorded the vocal as it came out of the revolving speaker.[24][25]
A 7-inch reel of 1⁄4-inch-wide (6.4 mm) audio recording tape, which was the type used by McCartney to create tape loops
As Lennon hated doing a second take to double his vocals, Ken Townsend, the studio’s technical manager, developed an alternative form of double-tracking called artificial double tracking (ADT) system, taking the signal from the sync head of one tape machine and delaying it slightly through a second tape machine.[26] The two tape machines used were not driven by mains electricity, but from a separate generator which put out a particular frequency, the same for both, thereby keeping them locked together.[26] By altering the speed and frequencies, he could create various effects, which the Beatles used throughout the recording of Revolver.[27] Lennon’s vocal is double-tracked on the first three verses of the song: the effect of the Leslie cabinet can be heard after the (backwards) guitar solo.[28][29]
The track included the highly compressed drums that the Beatles currently favoured, with reverse cymbals, reverse guitar, processed vocals, looped tape effects, a sitar and a tamburadrone.[23] The use of these ¼-inch audio tape loops resulted primarily from McCartney’s admiration for Stockhausen‘s Gesang der Jünglinge.[30] By disabling the erase head of a tape recorder and then spooling a continuous loop of tape through the machine while recording, the tape would constantly overdub itself, creating a saturation effect, a technique also used inmusique concrète. The tape could also be induced to go faster and slower. McCartney encouraged the other Beatles to use the same effects and create their own loops.[18] After experimentation on their own, the various Beatles supplied a total of “30 or so” tape loops to Martin, who selected 16 for use on the song.[31] Each loop was about six seconds long.[31]
The tape loops were played on BTR3 tape machines located in various studios of the Abbey Road building[32] and controlled by EMI technicians in Studio Two at Abbey Road on 7 April.[33][23] Each machine was monitored by one technician, who had to hold a pencil within each loop to maintain tension.[31] The four Beatles controlled the faders of the mixing console while Martin varied the stereo panning and Emerick watched the meters.[34][35] Eight of the tapes were used at one time, changed halfway through the song.[34] The tapes were made (like most of the other loops) by superimposition and acceleration.[36][37] According to Martin, the finished mix of the tape loops could not be repeated because of the complex and random way in which they were laid over the music.[38]
Five tape loops are audible in the finished version of the song. Isolating the loops reveals that they contained:
A “laughing” voice, played at double-speed (the “seagull” sound)
An orchestral chord of B flat major (from a Sibelius symphony) (0:19)
A fast electric guitar phrase in C major, reversed and played at double-speed (0:22)
Another guitar phrase with heavy tape echo, with a B flat chord provided either by guitar, organ or possibly a Mellotron Mk II (0:38)
A sitar-like descending scalar phrase played on an electric guitar, reversed and played at double-speed (0:56)
The Beatles further experimented with tape loops in “Carnival of Light“, an as-yet-unreleased piece recorded during the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band sessions, and in “Revolution 9“, released on The Beatles.[39]
The opening chord fades in gradually on the stereo version while the mono version features a more sudden fade-in. The mono and stereo versions also have the tape-loop track faded in at slightly different times and different volumes (in general, the loops are louder on the mono mix). On the stereo version a little feedback comes in after the guitar solo, exactly halfway through the song, but is edited out of the mono mix.
Lennon was later quoted as saying that “I should have tried to get my original idea, the monks singing. I realise now that’s what I wanted.”[40] Take one of the recording was released on the Anthology 2 album.[40]
Interpretation[edit]
Harrison questioned whether Lennon fully understood the meaning of the song’s lyrics:
You can hear (and I am sure most Beatles fans have) “Tomorrow Never Knows” a lot and not know really what it is about. Basically it is saying what meditation is all about. The goal of meditation is to go beyond (that is, transcend) waking, sleeping and dreaming. So the song starts out by saying, “Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream, it is not dying.”
Then it says, “Lay down all thoughts, surrender to the void—it is shining. That you may see the meaning of within—it is being.” From birth to death all we ever do is think: we have one thought, we have another thought, another thought, another thought. Even when you are asleep you are having dreams, so there is never a time from birth to death when the mind isn’t always active with thoughts. But you can turn off your mind, and go to the part which Maharishi described as: “Where was your last thought before you thought it?”
The whole point is that we are the song. The self is coming from a state of pure awareness, from the state of being. All the rest that comes about in the outward manifestation of the physical world (including all the fluctuations which end up as thoughts and actions) is just clutter. The true nature of each soul is pure consciousness. So the song is really about transcending and about the quality of the transcendent.
I am not too sure if John actually fully understood what he was saying. He knew he was onto something when he saw those words and turned them into a song. But to have experienced what the lyrics in that song are actually about? I don’t know if he fully understood it.[41]
Personnel[edit]
John Lennon – double-tracked vocal, Hammond organ and tape loops
Paul McCartney – bass, backwards guitar solo and tape loops
George Harrison – sitar, tamboura, and tape loops
Ringo Starr – drums, tambourine and tape loops
George Martin – piano, producer
Geoff Emerick – engineer
Personnel per Ian MacDonald[42]
The Love album remix[edit]
The Love project, which combined “Tomorrow Never Knows” and “Within You Without You”
In 2006, Martin and his son, Giles Martin, remixed 80 minutes of Beatles music for the Las Vegas stage performance Love, a joint venture between Cirque du Soleil and The Beatles’ Apple Corps Ltd.[43] On the Love album, the rhythm to “Tomorrow Never Knows” was mixed with the vocals and melody from “Within You Without You“, creating a different version of the two songs. The soundtrack album from the show was released in 2006.[44][45] The Love remix is one of the main songs in The Beatles: Rock Band music video game.[46]
In popular culture[edit]
This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (September 2013)
In music[edit]
DJ Spooky said of the track in 2011:
“Tomorrow Never Knows” is one of those songs that’s in the DNA of so much going on these days that it’s hard to know where to start. Its tape collage alone makes it one of the first tracks to use sampling really successfully. I also think that Brian Eno‘s idea of the studio-as-instrument comes from this kind of recording.[47]
Other references[edit]
The song is referenced in the lyrics to the 1995 Oasis song “Morning Glory“: “Tomorrow never knows what it doesn’t know too soon”.
The Chemical Brothers refer to “Tomorrow Never Knows” as their “manifesto”; their 1996 track “Setting Sun” is a direct tribute to it.
Chilean psychedelic band The Holydrug Couple references the drum beat on “Counting Sailboats” off their 2013 album Noctuary.
In television[edit]
The song was featured during the final scene of the 2012 Mad Men episode “Lady Lazarus.” Don Draper‘s wife Megan gives him a copy of Revolver, calling his attention to a specific track and suggesting, “Start with this one”.[53] Draper, an advertising executive, is struggling to understand youth culture, but after contemplating the song for a few puzzled moments, he shuts it off.[54] The song also played over the closing credits.[55]The rights to the song cost the producers about $250,000,[54] “about five times as much as the typical cost of licensing a song for TV.”[53]
Categories:
1966 songs
The Beatles songs
Counterculture of the 1960s
Psychedelic rock songs
Song recordings produced by George Martin
Songs written by Lennon–McCartney
Songs about drugs
Experimental rock songs
Songs published by Northern Songs
____________
Tomorrow Never Knows
While the title, like A Hard Day’s Night, was a Ringoism particularly liked by Lennon, the lyrics were largely taken from The Psychedelic Experience, a 1964 book written by Harvard psychologists Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert which contained an adaptation of the ancient Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Lennon discovered The Psychedelic Experience at the Indica bookshop, co-owned by Barry Miles. In late March 1966 Lennon and McCartney visited the bookshop.
John wanted a book by what sounded like ‘Nitz Ga’. It took Miles a few minutes to realise that he was looking for the German philosopher Nietzsche, long enough for John to become convinced that he was