What are the sounds heard on The Beatles’ ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’?
When The Beatles played their final show in San Francisco’s Candlestick Park in August 1966, they were still playing Chuck Berry and Little Richard numbers they had cut their teeth with in the band’s infancy. Weathered by the punishing touring schedule and screaming fans, they turned their backs on gigging and sought to embrace their growing interest in the studio as more than just a recording tool but a creative instrument in its own right.
From asking George Martin four months earlier to make his vocals “sound like one hundred chanting Tibetan monks” to playing the Fab Four mannequins, they’d become only added to the deep fatigue felt by John Lennon and the band at large. Having wrapped the sessions for ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ in April, Lennon had already dreamed up the sonic possibilities granted to him without concern for live reproduction, sitting on a slice of innovative psychedelia that was a billion light years away from ABC’s The Beatles cartoon sitcom still flogging Beatlemania.
Revolver‘s closing cut was inspired by Timothy Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based On The Tibetan Book Of The Dead and his and Paul McCartney’s fascination with Karlheinz Stockhausen’s pioneering musique-concrète and electro-acoustic work. Wishing to translate the mind-expanding experience of an LSD trip, Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick, knowing nothing of the counterculture yet consummate professionals, set to the task of deploying all manner of novel recording techniques to realise Lennon’s psychedelic masterstroke.
Martin was no stranger to the avant-garde. Having a hand in the strange editing and sound effects that smattered The Goon Show comedy records, Martin would later collaborate with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’s Maddalena Fagandini under the Ray Cathode moniker. He would go on to craft primitive electronic pieces such as 1962’s ‘Time Beat’ and ‘Waltz in Orbit’, released just weeks before he first met The Beatles. When he first heard Lennon’s sketch of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, rarely shifting from one chord of C, EMI’s shirt-and-tie bigwig accepted the droning with little protest nor wild embrace.
Adding a droning tambura soaking up the Indian influences of the age, Ringo’s inventive drum fills, and its signature backwards guitar solo, Lennon’s ode to LSD ego-death was taking shape. His warped vocals, heard after the solo, were recorded through a Leslie speaker typically used for the Hammond organ to achieve its eerie effect; plus, there was copious use of groundbreaking double-tracking.
It’s the loops that form the piece’s most gripping moments and have long been a source of mystery as to what’s conjured. Inspired by Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge, each Beatle recorded 30-odd six-second loops to be smattered on the lysergic track, Martin selecting 16 of them. Played on several BTR3 tape machines located around the EMI Studios, with each Beatle manning the mixing console’s faders, the samples that ended up colouring ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ were ultimately the result of happenstance from its complex and unpredictable recording technique.
The details of the prominent loops can never be definitively verified, but it’s widely accepted that the seagull sounds seven seconds in are McCartney laughing with variable speed trickery. The cosmic train hurtles toward the brain at 19 seconds an orchestral chord, followed by two Mellotron flashes on strings and flute setting, respectively. The chewed-up tape that blasts 56 seconds in is a saturated and sped-up sitar, likely played by George Harrison and demonstrating a rising scalic phrase, and the closing surreal ragtime is courtesy of Mrs Mills’ famous tack Steinway piano.
Finished on April 22nd, 1966, The Beatles had surpassed themselves with the experimental reach evident in ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, with no band in the burgeoning psychedelia coming close. It set the tone for the future sound collages to come on later Beatles LPs. One of the absolute finest works in the Lennon-McCartney songbook, Revolver’s acid-soaked finale has lost none of its transportive energy nearly 60 years later.
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