' joey ................... does jb read the bible ? '
Why , ....... Yes , ........................... Some Guy !!!!! :
http://www.beatlesbible.com/songs/tomorrow-never-knows/" Tomorrow Never Knows, the monumental closing track on Revolver, was also the first to be recorded for the album.
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 had been given The Psychedelic Experience by Barry Miles, co-owner of the Indica gallery. According to the notorious biographer Albert Goldman, Lennon recorded himself reading the book's paraphrase of the Tibetan Book of the Dead into a tape recorder, ahead of his third acid trip in January 1966. He played back the passage as the drug took hold, and was so enthralled by the result that he resolved to capture the LSD experience in song.
In the studio
The recording was remarkable for a number of reasons. Firstly there was Ringo's thunderous drum pattern. The tom toms skins on his kit were slackened, and the recording was heavily compressed and echoed to give perhaps the most remarkable drum sound on any Beatles song.
The drums are the main constant in Tomorrow Never Knows, a perfect counterpoint to the musical anarchy that envelopes the rest of the song. According to engineer Geoff Emerick:
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."
Geoff Emerick
The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, Mark Lewisohn
Then there were the tape loops. Paul McCartney had discovered that by removing the erase head on his Grundig reel-to-reel tape machine, he could saturate a recording with sound.
There were five loops used on Tomorrow Never Knows: a seagull noise, actually a distorted recording of McCartney laughing; an orchestra playing a B flat chord; notes played on a Mellotron's flute setting; a second Mellotron on its violin setting; and a distorted sitar which is most clearly heard in the instrumental break following the lines "It is being, it is being".
It has been claimed that The Beatles also used part of McCartney's guitar solo for Taxman, reversed and slowed down a tone, in the instrumental break. However, the two parts are different and were likely recorded on different dates.
The final remarkable innovation in Tomorrow Never Knows was John Lennon's voice. For the first half of the song it was manually double tracked by John Lennon.
For the second half, meanwhile, the Abbey Road engineers ran Lennon's voice through a revolving Leslie speaker, more commonly found inside Hammond organs. It can be heard from the line 'Love is all and love is everyone'.
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 recoding 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.
George Martin
Anthology
Geoff Emerick later explained the response in the studio:
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!
The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, Mark Lewisohn
Despite the groundbreaking results, Lennon later claimed to be dissatisfied with the recording.
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
John Lennon "
http://www.beatlesbible.com/songs/tomorrow-never-knows/
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