As 'Tomorrow Never Knows' is the
last track on Revolver, and the clearest signpost of things
to come, it's often assumed that it was the last track
recorded. In fact, it was the first track laid down for
Revolver. Certainly the weirdest and most experimental track
to appear under the Beatles' name at the time, this was
John's attempt to capture something of the LSD experience in
words and sounds.
The words were borrowed, adapted
and embellished from Timothy Leary's 1964 book The
Psychedelic Experience, which was itself a poetic
reinterpretation of the ancient Tibetan Book Of The Dead.
John had been sent the book by Barry Miles, who ran Indica
Books in Southampton Row and was an influential figure on
the British underground scene in the Sixties. He had an
arrangement with the Beatles to send them significant books,
magazines and newspapers to keep them up-to-date.
Leary, known as the High Priest of
LSD, had spent seven months in the Himalayas studying
Tibetan Buddhism under Lama Govinda. The psychedelic
Experience was a direct result of this period of study. "I
would ask Lama Govinda questions," says Leary, "and then I
tried to translate what he said into something useful for
people. Book Of The Dead really means 'Book Of The Dying'
but it's your ego rather than your body which is dying. The
book is a classic. It's the bible of the Tibetan Buddhism.
The concept of Buddhism is of the void and of reaching the
void - that is what John captured in the song."
The working title of the track was
in fact 'The Void', taken from Leary's line "Beyond the
restless flowing electricity of Life is the ultimate reality
- the void." Its eventual title was a Ringoism which John
snatched at because it added some deceptive levity to what
to what otherwise might have sounded like a bleak journey
into nothingness. The actual sound of the piece, which
consists of 16 tape loops made by each of the Beatles fading
in and out, grew out of Paul's home experimentation on his
tape recorder. "He had this little Grundig," says George
Martin. "He found by moving the erase head and putting a
loop on he could actually saturate the tape with a single
noise. It would go round and round and eventually the tape
couldn't absorb any more and he'd bring it in and play
it."
For the vocal track, John wanted it
to sound like a chorus of Tibetan monks chanting on a
mountain top." He said he wanted to hear the words but he
didn't want to hear him," says George Martin. The result,
which sounds as if John is singing at the end of a long
tunnel, was achieved by feeding his voice through a Leslie
speaker.
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