It Is Not Dying (Tomorrow Never Knows)

LinearLineman

Pianoteq, Electric Vintage, Continua, BeatHawk Total Bass, BASSalicious.

Revolver was the first Beatles album that grabbed me. Looking back it was life changing.

michael_m

Nice variations. Definitely captures that modal/ drone approach of the original, but with some nice harmony added. There were definitely some surprise notes in there for me, but as always you resolve them unexpectedly or suspend resolving them in interesting ways.

The first Beatles song I ever heard was Hey Jude (probably at the time it was released), but one day at my grandparents house my Aunt accidentally played the wrong side and I heard the intro to Revolution as she scrambled to take it off while my Grandparents looked on bemused. It was a life-changing moment for me as from that point on I always went for the unusual rather than the mainstream with music. The Beatles never failed me there, and even in some of their more run of the mill numbers I could still hear the odd rhythms and the dissonant notes. Revolver is by far my favorite Beatles album though.

Paulieworld

Great new and very original take on a classic. I was never really into the Beatles, but they did some good stuff. My faves are I Am The Walrus, Helter Skelter, and this one. I just listened to the original versions of each. We have really come a long way in recording technology. I can only imagine what they might have done with a iPad! This a really lovely.

Edit - I had to add A Day In The Life.

michael_m

@Paulieworld said:
I can only imagine what they might have done with a iPad!

Considering the number of apps around in the 60s it would probably have ended up as something they rolled joints on… 😂

MrStochastic

You managed to make interesting variations of something I wouldn't have expected as a source! One thing that fascinated me with this song was the drum part. I think I found later that it was a looped recording. I keep wanting to make something with that kind of relentless cymbal crash.

espiegel123

@MrStochastic said:
You managed to make interesting variations of something I wouldn't have expected as a source! One thing that fascinated me with this song was the drum part. I think I found later that it was a looped recording. I keep wanting to make something with that kind of relentless cymbal crash.

The drums on TNK aren’t looped. There was an early take/demo on which they experimented with a drum loop (and abandoned cuz it didn’t really sound good ). But the released version isn’t looped. Ringo had phenomenally consistent time. The drums and bass stay very tight which wouldn’t have been possible at that time with a tape loop. The bass clearly isn’t looped as Paul plays with the accent and timing to keep it propulsive in spite of the repetition. And the drums stay tight with him.

I haven’t listened to it but there is an isolated version of the drums.

McD

Borrowed from the iTunes display of “Revolver”… remind me to put it back after a week:

100 Best Albums: No. 21 One of the great, possibly true stories about 1966’s Revolver concerns an exchange between Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan at London’s Mayfair Hotel about what they were currently working on. (In Dylan’s case, it was Blonde on Blonde.) On hearing the tape loops and death poetry of “Tomorrow Never Knows,” Dylan allegedly said to McCartney, “Oh, I get it. You don’t want to be cute anymore.”

It’s not entirely true. Part of what makes Revolver appealing is that it’s as much “Yellow Submarine” and the domestic sweetness of “Here, There and Everywhere” as it is “She Said She Said” and “Tomorrow Never Knows.” But Dylan’s point was well-taken: For a band that put out “I Want to Hold Your Hand” less than three years earlier, the relative complexity of Revolver—in both sound and subject matter—not only challenged The Beatles’ image as the pop band the whole family could agree on (as opposed to, say, The Rolling Stones), but it also put pop on a course toward unfamiliar horizons.

Not only were The Beatles able to bridge their interest in the relatively uncommercial worlds of psychedelia, experimental, and Indian classical music with Motown (“Got to Get You Into My Life”) and what we now think of as classically Beatlesque pop (“Good Day Sunshine”), but they also gave us a template for the pop album as the kaleidoscopically varied studio construction we think of it as today. Cute, but more.

On the occasion of the album’s 2022 Super Deluxe reissue—which, in addition to a new mix in Spatial Audio by Giles Martin and Sam Okell, features some extraordinary rehearsals, outtakes, and demos—we’re taking a look back at what shaped Revolver and what Revolver shaped in turn.

Before: The R&B Backbeat
Revolver is the last Beatles album where you can really hear the influence of American soul and R&B. “Taxman” is obvious, as is “Got to Get You Into My Life,” which John called “our Tamla-Motown bit.” But you can also hear it in “And Your Bird Can Sing” and “Love You To,” whose Indian influence is anchored by a beat heavy enough to drive a dance floor regardless of the continent it’s on. And where the beat of “Tomorrow Never Knows” is rightly cited as a precursor to techno and drum ’n’ bass, it’s also a take on the syncopations of James Brown drummer Clyde Stubblefield, who said he got his style, in part, from listening to washing machines and trains—the funk of daily life. Their growing conceptual interests didn’t get in the way of their roots as a bar-and-dance band, and their ability to bridge the two—or, more importantly, to dissolve the distinction between them—is part of what makes Revolver Revolver. Four people, one room.

Before: British Humor and the Surrealism of Daily Life
For however mystical Revolver can seem, squint and you hear an album mostly about ordinary life. “Eleanor Rigby,” “Doctor Robert,” the “Taxman,” the lovebirds of “Here, There and Everywhere,” and the eccentric of “I’m Only Sleeping”: these are the people in your neighborhood, and if they’re stranger than you remember, it might be because you never really looked. The Kinks were experts in this field. And John, in particular, was a fan of the Scottish singer Ivor Cutler, whose novelty songs masked a sense of surrealism that pointed toward more cosmic realms. The point isn’t just that Revolver was strange, but that it located its strangeness in places easily dismissed as familiar. So, while John borrowed the first line of “Tomorrow Never Knows” from a book connecting LSD with The Tibetan Book of the Dead, its title came from a more historically modest source: Ringo Starr.

Before: Power of the Experiment
Given their cultural stature, it’s easy to forget that The Beatles didn’t really know what they were doing at the time. So, while Revolver’s experimental qualities—the tape loops of “Tomorrow Never Knows,” the dislocated horn sections of “Got to Get You Into My Life”—could seem pretentious or alienating, they’re better understood as an embrace of the same unknowns that led to “Yesterday” or “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown).” Namely, can this be done? Though the band’s interest in avant-garde composers like John Cage or Luciano Berio wasn’t always obvious in their sound, it spoke to a sense of experimentation and open-mindedness that spurred them on when they could’ve easily and comfortably stayed in the same place.

Before: Pop as Art
Part of The Beatles’ story is that of pop’s transformation into something like art. Not that Revolver was without precedent. Frank Sinatra’s serial-like string of albums in the ’50s (In the Wee Small Hours, Only the Lonely, No One Cares), Ray Charles’ Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, the sound sculptures of producers like Phil Spector and Joe Meek, the arrangements of The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds—all undoubtedly pop music. But they’re also examples of artists stretching pop to accommodate a sense of depth and conceptual ambition that hadn’t been there before. As George said around the time of Revolver’s release, selling a lot of records was nice. Now the point was to make them better.

After: Psychedelia for the Mainstream
The real psychedelic quality of Revolver wasn’t its sound but its subject. Time, memory, the inevitability of death: With the exception of Bob Dylan and The Byrds, no mid-’60s pop artists were wading as deeply into inner space as The Beatles. And because, in George’s words, they’d “had a few hits,” their ideas landed on audiences that probably wouldn’t have encountered them otherwise, or at least ones that might’ve been more hesitant to hear them out. The effect was to expand our sense of the terrain that pop music could cover and introduce a sense of headiness and ambiguity that gave way to everything from Jimi Hendrix and Prince to the inward-facing stance of alternative rock. Revolver tried to touch what can’t be touched.

After: The Studio as Instrument
Before Revolver, the studio was, by and large, a place where bands went to record music they’d already worked out. After Revolver, it became a kind of instrument of its own. It wasn’t just the unprecedented amount of time The Beatles spent making it (220 hours to Rubber Soul’s 80) or their experiments with new technology; it was the way they opened their process to the concept of music being less a set of notes than a sequence of sounds—an attitude that evolved into everything from dub to shoegaze to hip-hop. Paul remembers meeting with producer George Martin before they went into the studio to play him what they’d been writing. When they got to “Tomorrow Never Knows,” Martin was curious but puzzled: there were no chord changes, no verses, no chorus. In other words, it wasn’t a song. The blueprint was in the band’s collective head, but you couldn’t make sense of it until the work was done.

After: Pop as Playground
Revolver helped define the pop album as a loose, collagelike space where you could get any number of sounds and moods thrown at you. Paul’s sweetness, John’s cynicism, the experimental and the straightforward, Western R&B and Eastern classical—and each of them somehow as much a part of the band’s identity as the others. Not only was the shift an important step toward understanding artists as people who curate and arrange the world rather than creating it out of thin air, but it also gave us a template you can still hear in everything from Thriller to Purple Rain, M.I.A.’s Kala, and Frank Ocean’s Blonde. Revolver wasn’t just a marketing tool; it was an experience. And the band’s eclecticism wasn’t a lack of commitment—it was liberation.

LinearLineman

Thanks @michael_m @Paulieworld @MrStochastic . Glad you enjoyed it!

ExAsperis99

@LinearLineman This is fantastic and inventive and brings a real melancholy that I never really picked up on in the original. And it weirdly changes my impression of the original. Really impressive.

Here’s another take that finds another emotional vein in the same song.

LinearLineman

Thanks @ExAsperis99 Junior does a great job. We can sing this stuff but do we live it, too?

espiegel123

@LinearLineman : excellent rendition. I appreciate the spareness of the interpretation.

@ExAsperis99 : that is a great version of the song. That’s the best interpretation I’ve heard. So many other versions are just straightforward covers.

MrStochastic

@espiegel123 said:

@MrStochastic said:
You managed to make interesting variations of something I wouldn't have expected as a source! One thing that fascinated me with this song was the drum part. I think I found later that it was a looped recording. I keep wanting to make something with that kind of relentless cymbal crash.

The drums on TNK aren’t looped. There was an early take/demo on which they experimented with a drum loop (and abandoned cuz it didn’t really sound good ). But the released version isn’t looped. Ringo had phenomenally consistent time. The drums and bass stay very tight which wouldn’t have been possible at that time with a tape loop. The bass clearly isn’t looped as Paul plays with the accent and timing to keep it propulsive in spite of the repetition. And the drums stay tight with him.

I haven’t listened to it but there is an isolated version of the drums.

Wow; thanks! interesting new insight.

LinearLineman

Thanks @espiegel123 glad you listened.🙏

GeoTony

The Beatles sort of passed me by.. sadly I didn’t even recognise the title until I googled it and listened and thought ‘of course’… your piano interpretation is a thing of beauty 👌

LinearLineman

Thx @GeoTony maybe time to listen to them again. Have a great weekend, bro.

michael_m

@espiegel123 said:
@ExAsperis99 : that is a great version of the song. That’s the best interpretation I’ve heard. So many other versions are just straightforward covers.

While it’s not a cover, there can’t be any doubt that this is heavily influenced by it:

It’s not well known in the US, but it topped the singles charts in many countries around the world in the mid 90s.