Saturday, Mar 5, 2022
Episode 145: “Tomorrow Never Knows” by the Beatles
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This week’s episode looks at “Tomorrow Never Knows”, the making of Revolver by the Beatles, and the influence of Timothy Leary on the burgeoning psychedelic movement. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.
Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode available, on "Keep on Running" by the Spencer Davis Group.
Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/
Errata
A few things -- I say "Fairfield" at one point when I mean "Fairchild". While Timothy Leary was imprisoned in 1970 he wasn't actually placed in the cell next to Charles Manson until 1973. Sources differ on when Geoff Emerick started at EMI, and he *may* not have worked on "Sun Arise", though I've seen enough reliable sources saying he did that I think it's likely. And I've been told that Maureen Cleave denied having an affair with Lennon -- though note that I said it was "strongly rumoured" rather than something definite.
Resources
As usual, a mix of all the songs excerpted in this episode is available at Mixcloud.com.
I have read literally dozens of books on the Beatles, and used bits of information from many of them. All my Beatles episodes refer to: The Complete Beatles Chronicle by Mark Lewisohn, All The Songs: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Release by Jean-Michel Guesdon, And The Band Begins To Play: The Definitive Guide To The Songs of The Beatles by Steve Lambley, The Beatles By Ear by Kevin Moore, Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald, and The Beatles Anthology.
For this episode, I also referred to Last Interview by David Sheff, a longform interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono from shortly before Lennon's death; Many Years From Now by Barry Miles, an authorised biography of Paul McCartney; and Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles by Geoff Emerick and Howard Massey.
For information on Timothy Leary I used a variety of sources including The Most Dangerous Man in America by Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis; Timothy Leary: Outside Looking In by Robert Forte; The Starseed Signals by Robert Anton Wilson; and especially The Harvard Psychedelic Club by Don Lattin.
I also referred to both The Tibetan Book of the Dead and to The Psychedelic Experience.
Leary's much-abridged audiobook version of The Psychedelic Experience can be purchased from Folkways Records.
Sadly the first mono mix of "Tomorrow Never Knows" has been out of print since it was first issued. The only way to get the second mono mix is on this ludicrously-expensive out-of-print box set, but the stereo mix is easily available on Revolver.
Patreon
This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?
Transcript
Before I start this episode, I'd like to note that it deals with a number of subjects some listeners might find upsetting, most notably psychedelic drug use, mental illness, and suicide. I think I've dealt with those subjects fairly respectfully, but you still may want to check the transcript if you have worries about these subjects.
Also, we're now entering a period of music history with the start of the psychedelic era where many of the songs we're looking at are influenced by non-mainstream religious traditions, mysticism, and also increasingly by political ideas which may seem strange with nearly sixty years' hindsight. I'd just like to emphasise that when I talk about these ideas, I'm trying as best I can to present the thinking of the people I'm talking about, in an accurate and unbiased way, rather than talking about my own beliefs. We're going to head into some strange places in some of these episodes, and my intention is neither to mock the people I'm talking about nor to endorse their ideas, but to present those ideas to you the listener so you ca
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Andrew Hickey
00:00
A history of Rock Music and 500 songs by 100.
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00:08
Episode 145
Tomorrow Never Knows
by The Beatles
.Share
00:17
Before I start this episode, I'd like to note that it deals with a number of subjects some listeners might find upsetting, most notably psychedelic drug use, mental illness, and suicide.
Share
00:30
I think I've dealt with those subjects fairly respectfully, but you still may want to check the transcript if you have worries about these subjects.
Share
00:37
Also, we're now entering a period of music history, with the start of the psychedelic era, where many of the songs we're looking at are influenced by non-mainstream religious traditions, mysticism and also increasingly by political ideas which may seem strange with nearly 60s years hindsight.
Share
00:54
I'd just like to emphasis that when I talk about these ideas, I'm trying as best I can to present the thinking of the people I'm talking about in an accurate and unbiased way, rather than talking about my own beliefs.
Share
01:07
We're going to head into some strange places in some of these episodes and my intention is neither to mock the people I'm talking about nor to endorse their ideas, but to present those ideas to you, the listener so you can understand the music, the history and the mindset of the people involved.
Share
01:24
Is that clear? Then let's turn on, tune in and drop out back to 1955.
Share
Timothy Leary
01:30
You are now about to begin the great adventure. The journey out of your mind.
Share
01:46
You will travel far beyond familiar reality into the level of transcendent awareness.
Share
01:59
You will leave behind you, your ego, your beloved personality, which will be returned to you at the end of this voyage.
Share
Andrew Hickey
02:12
There is a phenomenon in many mystical traditions which goes by many names, including The Dark Night Of The Soul and The Abyss. It's an experience that happens to mystics of many types, in which they go through unimaginable pain near the beginning of their journey towards greater spiritual knowledge.
Share
02:31
That pain usually involves a mixture of internal and external events - some terrible tragedy happens to them, giving them a new awareness of the world's pain, at the same time, they're going through an intellectual crisis about their understanding of the world and it can last several years.
Share
02:48
It's very similar to the more common experience of the midlife crisis, except that rather than buying a sports car and leaving their spouse, mystics going through this are more likely to find a new religion.
Share
02:59
At least, those who survive the crushing despair intact. Those who come out of the experience the other end often find themselves on a totally new path, almost like they were a different person.
Share
03:11
In 1955, when Dr
Timothy Leary's
dark night of the soul started, he was a respected academic psychologist, a serious scientist, who had already made several substantial contributions to his field and was considered a rising star.Share
03:26
By 1970, he would be a confirmed mystic sentenced to 20 years in prison in a cell next to Charles Manson and claiming to different people that he was the reincarnation of
Gurdjieff
, Aleister Crowley
and Jesus Christ.Share
03:41
In the 50s,
Leary
and his wife had an open relationship in which they were both allowed to sleep with other people but weren't allowed to form emotional attachments to them.Share
03:51
Unfortunately
Leary
had formed an emotional attachment to another woman and had started spending so much time with her that his wife was convinced he was going to leave her. On top of that, Leary
was an alcoholic and was prone to get into drunken rows with his wife.Share
04:06
He woke up on the morning of his 35th birthday, hung over after one of those rows to find that she had died by suicide while he slept, leaving a note saying that she knew he was going to leave her and that her life would be meaningless without him. This was only months after
Leary
had realized that the field he was working in, to which he had devoted his academic career was seriously broken.Share
04:29
Along with a colleague
Frank Barron
, he published a paper on the results of clinical psychotherapy, "Changes in psychoneurotic patients with and without psychotherapy" which analyzed the mental health of a group of people who have been through psychotherapy and found that a third of them improved, a third stayed the same and a third got worse.Share
04:49
The problem was that there was a control group of people with the same conditions who were put on a waiting list and told to wait the length of time that the therapy patients were being treated. A third of them improved, a third stayed the same and the third got worse.
Share
05:04
In other words, psychotherapy as it was currently practiced had no measurable effect at all on patients health.
Share
05:12
This devastated
Leary
as you might imagine. But more through inertia than anything else, he continued working in the field and in 1957 he published what was regarded as a masterwork - his book Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality: a functional theory and methodology for personality evaluation.Share
05:32
Leary's
book was a challenge to the then dominant idea in psychology behaviorism, which claimed that it made no sense to talk about anyone's internal thoughts or feelings - all that mattered was what could be measured, stimulating responses and that in a very real sense, the unmeasurable thoughts people had didn't exist at all. Behaviorism looked at every human being as a mechanical black box, like a series of levers.Share
05:57
Leary
by contrast, analyzed human interactions as games in which people took unusual roles, but were able, if they realized this to change the role or even the game itself.Share
06:09
It was very similar to the work that
Eric Berne
was doing at the same time and which would later be popularized in Berne's
book Games People Play.
Berne's
work was so popular that it led to the late 60s hit record Games People Play
by Joe South
.Share
Joe South
06:25
[
Joe South
- Games People Play
]Share
Andrew Hickey
06:50
But In 1957, between
Leary
and Berne
, Leary
was considered the more important thinker of among his peers, though some thought of him as more of a showman and fooled by his own ideas about how he was going to change psychology than a scientist and some thought that he was unfairly taking credit for the work of lesser known but better researchers.Share
07:18
But by 1958, the effects of the traumas
Leary
had gone through a couple of years earlier were at their worst. He was starting to become seriously ill - from the descriptions probably from something stress-related and psychosomatic - and he took his kids off to Europe
, where he was going to write the great American novel. but he rapidly ran through his money and hadn't got very far with the novel.Share
07:40
He was broke and ill and depressed and desperate. But then in 1959, his old colleague
Frank Barron
, who was on holiday in the area, showed up and the two had a conversation that changed Leary's
life forever in multiple ways.Share
07:55
The first of the conversational topics would have the more profound effect though, that wouldn't be apparent at first. Barron talked to
Leary
about his previous holiday when he'd visited Mexico
and taken psilocybin mushrooms.Share
08:08
These he been used by
Mexicans
for centuries, but the first publication about them in English had only been in 1955 - the same year when Leary
had had other things on his mind - and they were hardly known at all outside Mexico
. Barron talked about the experience as being the most profound, revelatory experience of his life. Leary
thought his friend sounded like a madman, but he humored him for the moment.Share
08:32
But Barron also mentioned that another colleague was on holiday in the same area.
David McClelland
, head of the Harvard Center For Personality Research
had mentioned to Barron that he had just read diagnosis of personality and thought is a work of genius. McClelland
hired Leary
to work for him at Harvard
and that was where Leary
met Ram Dass
.Share
Timothy Leary
08:52
You must be ready to accept the possibility that there is an infinite range of awareness is for which we now have no words.
Share
09:06
That awareness can expand beyond the range of your ego yourself. You're familiar identity beyond everything you have learned beyond your notions of space and time, beyond the differences which usually separate people from each other and from the world around them.
Share
Andrew Hickey
09:29
Ram
Dass
was not the name that Dass
was going by at the time. He was going by his birth name and only changed his name a few years later after the events were talking about. But as always on this podcast, we don't use people's deadnames though his is particularly easy to find as it's still the name on the cover of his most famous book, which will be talking about shortly.Share
09:50
Dass
was another psychologist at the Center For Personality Research and he would be Leary's
closest collaborator for the next several years. The two men would become so close that at several points Leary
would go traveling and leave his children in Dass' care for extended periods of time.Share
10:07
The two were determined to revolutionize academic psychology. The start of that revolution didn't come until summer 1960, while
Leary
was on holiday in Cuernavaca
in Mexico
, a linguist and anthropologist he knew, Lothar Knauth, mentioned that one of the old women in the area collected those magic mushrooms that Barron had been talking about.Share
10:28
Leary
decided that that might be a fun thing to do on his holiday and took a few psilocybin mushrooms. The effect was extraordinary. Leary
called this, which had been intended only as a bit of fun, "the deepest religious experience of my life".Share
Timothy Leary
10:44
You must remember that throughout human history, millions have made this voyage.
Share
10:51
A few whom we call mystics. Saints or Buddhas have made this experience endure and had communicated to their fellow men.
Share
11:06
You must remember too that the experience is safe at the very worst. You will end up the same person who entered this experience.
Share
Andrew Hickey
11:18
He returned to
Harvard
after his summer holiday and started what became the Harvard
Psilocybin Project.
Leary
and various other experimenters took controlled doses of psilocybin and wrote down their experiences and they were believed this would end up revolutionizing psychology, giving them insights unattainable by other methods.Share
11:37
The experiment has included lecturers, grad students and people like authors
Allen Ginsberg
and William Burroughs
, jazz trumpeter Maynard Ferguson
and Alan Watts
who popularized Zen Buddhism
in the West.Share
11:50
Dass
didn't join the project until early 1961 - he had actually been on the holiday with Leary
but had arrived a few days after the mushroom experiment and nobody had been able to get hold of the old woman who knew where to find the mushrooms, so he just had to deal with Leary
telling him about how great it was rather than try it himself.Share
12:09
He then spent a semester as a visiting scholar at
Berkeley
. So he didn't get to try his first trip until February 1961.Share
12:16
Dass
on his first trip first had a revelation about the nature of his own true soul, then decided at 3 a. m. that he needed to go and see his parents who lived nearby and tell them the good news. But there were several feet of snow and so he decided he must save his parents from the snow and shovel the path to their house at 3 a. m.Share
12:37
Then he saw them looking out the window at him, he waved and started dancing around the shovel. He later said "Until that moment I was always trying to be the good boy, looking at myself through other people's eyes, what did the mothers, fathers, teachers, colleagues want me to be. That night for the first time I felt good inside. It was okay to be me".
Share
12:59
The
Harvard
Psilocybin Project
soon became the Harvard
Psychedelic Project. The term psychedelic meaning soul revealing, was coined by the British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond
, who have been experimenting with hallucinogens for years and had guided Aldous Huxley
on the Mescaline
trip described in The Doors Of Perception
.Share
13:18
Osmond
and Huxley
had agreed that the term "psychotomimetic" in use at the time, which meant "mimicking psychosis" wasn't right, it was too negative. They started writing letters to each other suggesting alternative terms. Huxley
came up with "phanerothyme", the Greek for "soul revealing" and wrote a little couplet to Osmond:
"To make this trivial world sublime/Take half a gramme of phanerothyme". Osmond
countered with the latin equivalent: "To fathom hell or soar angelic/Just take a pinch of psychedelic".Share
13:51
Osmond
also inspired Leary's
most important experimental work of the early 60's. Osmond
had got to know Bill W.
, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous
and had introduced W.
to LSD.
W.
had become sober after experiencing a profound spiritual awakening and division of white light while being treated for his alcoholism using the so called "Belladonna Cure", a mixture of various hallucinogenic and toxic substances that was meant to cure alcoholism.Share
14:19
When
W.
tried LSD
, he found it replicated his previous spiritual experience and became very evangelistic about its use by alcoholics, thinking it could give them the same kind of awakening he'd had.Share
14:31
Leary
became convinced that if LSD could work on alcoholics, it could also be used to help reshape the personalities of habitual criminals and lead them away from reoffending.Share
14:42
His idea for how to treat people was based in part on the ideas of transactional analysis. There is always a hierarchical relationship between a therapist and their patient and that's hierarchical relationship itself in
Leary's
opinion, forced people into particular game roles and made it impossible for them to relate as equals and thus impossible for the therapist to truly help the patient.Share
15:05
So his idea was that there needed to be a shared bonding experience between patient and doctor. So, in his prison experiments, he and the other people involved, including
Ralph Metzner
, one of his grad students, would take psilocybin with the patients.Share
15:21
In short term follow ups the patients who went through this treatment process were less depressed, felt better and we're only half as likely to reoffend as normal prisoners. But critics pointed out that the prisoners have been getting a lot of individual attention and support and there was no control group getting that support without the psychedelics.
Share
Timothy Leary
15:39
All of the dangers which you have feared are unnecessary productions of your own mind whether you experience heaven or hell, remember that is your mind which creates them. Avoid grasping the one or fleeing the other.
Share
Andrew Hickey
16:07
As the experiment progressed though, things were becoming tense within
Harvard
, there was concern that some of the students who were being given psilocybin were psychologically vulnerable and were being put at real risk. There was also worry about the way that Leary
and Dass
were emphasizing experience over analysis, which was felt to be against the whole of academia.Share
16:27
Increasingly, it looked like there was a clique forming as well with those who had taken part in their experiments on the inside and looking down on those outside and it looked too many people like this was turning into an actual cult.
Share
16:39
This was simply not what the
Harvard
Psychology Department was meant to be doing and one Harvard
student was out to shut them down for good and his name was Andrew Weil. Weil
is now best known as one of the leading lights in alternative health and has made appearances on Oprah
and Larry King Live
, but for many years, his research interest was in mind-altering-chemicals. His undergraduate thesis was on the use of nutmeg to induce different states of consciousness.Share
17:05
At this point,
Weil
was an undergraduate and he and his friend Ronnie Winston had both tried to get involved in the Harvard
Psilocybin Project but
had been turned down.Share
17:15
While they were enthusiastic about it, they were also undergraduates and
Leary
and Dass
agreed with the university that they wouldn't be using undergraduates in their project and that only graduate students, faculty and outsiders would be involved. So Weil
and Winston had started their own series of experiments using Mescaline
, after they've been unable to get any psilocybin.Share
17:37
They contacted
Aldous Huxley
, the author of The Doors Of Perception
and an influence on Leary
industries experiments and asked him where they could get Mescaline
and he pointed them in the right direction.Share
17:48
But then Winston and
Dass
have become friends and Dass
had given Winston some psilocybin - not as part of his experiments, so Dass
didn't think he was crossing a line, but just socially. Weil
saw this is a betrayal by Winston who stopped hanging around with him once he became close to Dass
and also as a rejection of him by Dass
and Leary
.Share
18:08
If they give Winston psilocybin, why wouldn't they give it to him?
Weil
was a writer for the Harvard Crimson,
Harvard's
newspaper and he wrote a series of exposes on Leary
and Dass for the Crimson
. He went to his former friend Winston's father and told him "Your son is getting drugs from a faculty member. If your son will admit to that charge will cut out your son's name. We won't use it in the article".Share
18:31
Winston did admit to the charge under pressure from his father and was brought to tell the Dean, saying to the Dean "Yes, sir, I did and it was the most educational experience I've had at
Harvard".
Weil
wrote about this for the Crimson
and the story was picked up by the national media.Share
18:47
Weil
eventually wrote about Leary
and ask for Look magazine where he wrote "there were stories of students and others using hallucinogens for seductions, both heterosexual and homosexual". And this seems actually to have been a big part of Weil's
motivation.Share
19:02
While
Dass
and Winston always said that their relationship was purely platonic, Dass
was bisexual and Weil
seems to have assumed his friend had been led astray by an evil seducer.Share
19:12
This was at a time when homophobia and biphobia were even more prevalent in society than they are now and part of the reason
Leary
and Dass
fell out in the late 60's is that Leary
started to see Dass's
sexuality as evil and perverted and something they should be trying to use LSD
to cure.Share
19:30
The experiment became a national scandal and one of the reasons that
LSD
was criminalized a few years later. Dass was sacked for giving drugs to undergraduates; Leary
had gone off to Mexico
to get away from the stress, leaving his kids with Dass, he would be sacked for going off without permission and leaving his classes untaught.Share
19:49
As
Leary
and Dass
were out of Harvard
, they had to look for other sources of funding. Luckily Dass
turned William Mellon Hitchcock, the heir to the Mellon Oil fortune onto acid and he and his brother Tommy and sister Peggy gave him the run of a 64 room mansion named Millbrook
.Share
20:06
When they started there, there were still trying to be academics, but over the five years they were at
Millbrook
, it became steadily less about research and more of a hippie commune with regular visitors and long term residents including Allen Ginsberg
, William Burroughs
and the jazz musician Maynard Ferguson
, who would later get a small amount of fame with jazz rock records, like his version of Macarthur Park
.Share
21:01
It was at
Millbrook
that Leary
, Dass and Metzner
would write the book that became The Psychedelic Experience
. This book was inspired by the Bardo Thödol
, a book allegedly written by Padmasambhava, the man who introduced Buddhism
to Tibet
in the 8th century, though no copies of it are known to have existed before the 14th century when it was supposedly discovered by Karma Lingpa
.Share
21:26
Its title translates as Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State, but it was translated into English under the name the
Tibetan Book Of The Dead
, as Walter Evans-Wentz
, who compiled and edited the first English translation was, like many Westerners who studied Buddhism in the early part of the 20th century, doing so because he was an occultist and a member of the Theosophical Society,
which believes the secret occult masters of the world live in Tibet, but which also considered The Egyptian Book Of The Dead - a book which bears little relationship to the Bardo Thödol and which was written thousands of years earlier on a different continent - to be a major religious document.Share
22:05
So it was through that len that Evans-Wentz was viewing the
Bardo Thödol
and he renamed the book, to emphasis what he perceived as its similarities. Part of the Bardo Thödol
is a description of what happens to someone between death and rebirth - the process by which the dead person becomes aware of true reality and then either transcends it or is dragged back into it by their lesser impulses - and a series of meditations that can be used to help with that transcendence.Share
22:31
In the version published as the
Tibetan Book Of The Dead
, this is accompanied by commentary from Evans-Wentz
who while he was interested in Buddhism
, didn't actually know that much about Tibetan Buddhism
and was looking at the texts were theosophical lens and mostly interpreting it using hindu concepts.Share
22:48
Later editions of
Evans-Wentz's
version added further commentary by Carl Jung
, which looked at Evans-Wentz's
version of the book through Jung
own lens' seeing it as a book about psychological state, not about anything more supernatural (although Jung's
version of psychology was always a supernaturalist one of course). His westernized psychologist version of the book's message became part of the third edition.Share
23:14
Metzner
later said "at the suggestion of Aldous Huxley
and Gerald Heard
we began using the Bardo Thödol
(Tibetan Book Of The Dead)
as a guide to psychedelic sessions. The Tibetan Buddhists
talked about the three phases of experience on the" intermediate planes "(bardos) between death and rebirth. We translated this to refer to the death and the rebirth of the ego of ordinary personality, stripped of the elaborate Tibetan symbolism and transposed into Western concepts, the text provided a remarkable parallel to our findings".Share
23:46
Leary
, Dass
and Metzner
rewrote the book into a form that could be used to guide the reader through a psychedelic trip through the death of their ego and its rebirth. Later Leary
would record an abridged audiobook version and it's this that we've been hearing excerpts of during this podcast so far.Share
Timothy Leary
24:07
Turn off your mind, relax. Float downstream.
Share
Andrew Hickey
24:17
When we left
The Beatles
, they were at the absolute height of their fame, though, in retrospect, the cracks had already begun to show. Their Second Film
had been released and the soundtrack had contained some of their best work, but the title track, Help
had been a worrying insight into John Lennon's
current mental state.Share
24:36
Immediately after making the film and album, of course, they went back out touring first european tour, then an American one, which probably counts as the first true stadium tour.
Share
24:48
There had been other stadium shows before
The Beatles
1965 Tour
, we talked way back in the first episode of the series about how Sister Rosetta Tharpe had a wedding that was a stadium gig. But of course, there were stadiums and stadiums and The Beatles
1965 Tour
had complained the kind of venues that no other musician and certainly no other rock band had ever played.Share
25:12
Most famously of course, there was the opening concert of the tour at
Shea Stadium
where they played to an audience of 55,000 people, the largest audience of rock band that ever played for and one which would remain a record for many years. Most of those people of course, couldn't actually hear much of anything - the band weren't playing through a public address system designed for music, just playing through the loudspeakers that were designed for commentating on baseball games.Share
25:38
But even if they had been playing through the kind of modern sound systems used today, it's unlikely that the audience would have heard much due to the overwhelming noise coming from the crowd.
Share
25:48
Similarly, there were no live video feeds of the show or any of the other things that nowadays make it at least possible for the audience to have some idea what is going on on stage. The difference between this and anything that anyone had experienced before was so great that the group became overwhelmed.
Share
26:05
There's video footage of the show - a heavily edited version with quite a few overdubs and rerecordings of some tracks was broadcast on tv and it's also been shown in cinemas more recently as part of promotion for an underwhelming documentary about
The Beatles
tours - and you can see Lennon
in particular becoming actually hysterical during the performance of I'm Down
where he's playing the organ with his elbows. Sadly the audio nature of this podcast doesn't allow me to show Lennon's
facial expression but you can hear something of the exuberance in the performance.Share
26:37
This is from what is labelled as a copy of the raw audio of the show. The version broadcast on tv had a fair bit of additional sweetening work done on it
Share
John Lennon
26:46
[
The Beatles
- I'm Down
]Share
Andrew Hickey
27:17
After their American tour they had almost six weeks off work to make new material before going back into the studio to record their second album of the year and one which would be a major turning point for the group. The first day of the recording sessions for this new album,
Rubber Soul,
started with two songs of Lennon
.Share
27:36
The first of these was
Run For Your Life
, a song Lennon
never later had much good to say about and which is widely regarded as the worst song on the album. That song was written off a line from Elvis Presley's
version of Baby Let's Play House
ad while Lennon
never stated this, it's likely that it was brought to mind by The Beatles
having met with Elvis
during their US Tour.Share
27:57
But the second song was more interesting. Starting with
Help
Lennon
had been trained to write more interesting lyrics. This had been inspired by two conversations with British journalists: Kenneth Allsop
had told Lennon
that while he liked Lennon's
poetry, the lyrics to his songs were banal in comparison and he found them unlistenable as a result, while Maureen Cleave
, a journalist who was a close friend with Lennon
had told him that she hadn't noticed a single word in any of his limits with more than two syllables, so he made more of an effort with Help
putting in words like independence and insecure.Share
28:31
As he said in one of his last interviews: "I was insecure then and things like that happened more than once I never considered it before. So after that I put a few words with three syllables in, but she didn't think much of them when I played it for her anyway".
Share
28:44
Cleave
may have been an inspiration for Norwegian Wood
(This bird has flown). There were very strong rumors that Lennon
had an affair with Cleave
in the mid-60's and if that's true, it would definitely fit into a pattern.Share
28:57
Lennon
had many, many affairs during his first marriage, both brief one night stands and deeper emotional attachments. And those emotional attachments were generally with women who were slightly older, intellectual, somewhat exotic looking by the standards of 1960s Britain and in the arts.Share
29:16
Lennon
later claimed to have had an affair with Eleanor Bron,
The Beatles
costar in Help,
though she always denied this and it's fairly widely established that he did have an affair with Alma Cogan
A singer who had mocked during her peak of popularity in the 50s, but who would later become one of his closest friends.Share
Alma Cogan
29:48
[Alma Cogan - Why Do Fools Fall in Love]
Share
Andrew Hickey
29:50
And
Norwegian Wood
, the second song recorded for Rubber Soul
, started out as a confession to one of these affairs. A way of Lennon
admitting it to his wife without really admitting it.Share
30:15
The figure in the song is a slightly aloof, distant woman and the title refers to the taste among Bohemian British people at the time for minimalist decor made of Scandinavian pine, something that would have been a very obvious class signifier at the time.
Share
30:58
Lennon
and McCartney
had different stories about who and what in the song and London's own story seems to have changed at various times.Share
31:07
What seems to have happened is that
Lennon
wrote the first couple of verses while on holiday with George
Martin
and finished it off later with McCartney's
help.Share
31:15
McCartney
seems to have come up with the middle eight melody - which is in Dorian mode rather than the Mixolydian mode of the verses - and to have come up with the twist ending where the woman refuses to sleep with the protagonist and laughs at him, he goes to sleep in the bath rather than her bed, wakes up alone and sets fire to the house in revenge.Share
31:34
This in some ways makes
Norwegian Wood
the thematic centerpiece of the album that was to result, combining several of the themes its two songwriters came back to throughout the album and the single recorded alongside it. Like Lennon's
Run For Your Life, it has a misogynistic edge to it and deals with taking revenge against a woman, but like his song Girl
, it deals with a distant, unattainable woman who the singer see as above him, but who has a slightly cruel edge - the kind of girl who puts you down when friends are there, you feel a fool, is very similar to the woman who tells you to sit down but has no chairs in her minimalist flat.Share
32:10
A big teaser who takes you half the way there is likely to laugh at you. We should fall off to sleep in the bath while she goes off to bed alone. Meanwhile,
McCartney's
two most popular contributions to the album, Michelle and Drive My Car also feature unattainable women, but essentially comedy songs.Share
32:28
Michelle is a pastiche French song which
McCartney
used to play as a teenager while pretending to be foreign to impress girls, dug up and finished for the album, while Drive My Car is a comedy song with a twist in the punch line, just like Norwegian Wood
though Norwegian Woods twist is darker, but Norwegian Wood
is even more famous for its music than its lyric.Share
32:49
The basis of the song is
Lennon
imitating Dylan's
style, something that Dylan
saw and countered with Fourth Time Around
, a song which people have interpreted multiple ways. But one of those interpretations has always been that it's a fairly vicious parody of Norwegian Wood
.Share
Bob Dylan
33:03
[Bob Dylan - Fourth time Around]
Share
Andrew Hickey
33:38
Certainly
Lennon
thought that at first saying a few years later "I was very paranoid about that. I remember he played it to me when he was in London. He said" What do you think? "I said" I don't like it, I didn't like it ". I was very paranoid. I just didn't like what I felt I was feeling, I thought it was an out and out skit, you know, but it wasn't, it was great. I mean he wasn't playing any tricks on me, I was just going through the bit.".Share
34:03
But the aspect of
Norwegian Wood
that has had more comments over the years has been the Sitar
part played by George Harrison
.Share
34:17
This has often been called the first
Sitar
to be used on a rock record and that may be the case, but it's difficult to say for sure. Indian music
was very much in the air among British groups in September 1965, when The Beatles
recorded the track. That spring to records had almost simultaneously introduced Indian influenced music into the pop chart.Share
34:41
The first have been the
Yardbirds
, Heart Full of Soul
, released in June and recorded in April. In fact, the Yardbirds
had actually used a Sitar
on their first attempt of recording the song, which, if it had been released, would have been an earlier example than The Beatles
. But in the finished recording, they had replaced that with Jeff Beck
playing a guitar in a way that made it sound vaguely like a Sitar
rather than using a real one.Share
Keith Relf
35:49
[Yardbirds - Heart Full of Soul]
Share
Andrew Hickey
36:05
Meanwhile after the
Yardbirds
had recorded that but before they released it and apparently without any discussion between the two groups, The Kinks
had done something similar on the See My Friends
, which came out a few weeks after the Yardbirds
record.Share
Ray Davies
36:23
[
The Kinks
- See My Friends
]Share
Andrew Hickey
36:57
Incidentally that track is sometimes titled See My Friend rather than
See My Friends
. But that's apparently down to a misprint on initial pressings, rather than that being the intended title. As part of this general flowering of interest in Indian music, George Harrison
had become fascinated with the sound of the Sitar
while recording scenes in Help!
, which featured some Indian musicians.Share
37:19
He'd then, as we discussed in the episode on
Eight Miles High
but introduced by David Crosby
on The Beatles
Summer U. S. Tour to the music of Ravi Shankar
. Norwegian Wood
likely reminded Harrison
of Shankar's
work for a couple of reasons. The first is that the melody is very model. As I said before, the verses of a mix a Lydian mode while the midline are in Dorian. And as we saw in the Eight Miles High
episode, Indian music is very model.Share
37:46
The second is that for the most part, the verses all on one chord, a D chord as
Lennon
originally played it, though in the final take it's composed on the second fret so it sounds an A. The only time the chord changes at all is on the words once had in the phrase "She once had me", where for one beat each Lennon
plays a C9 in the G, sounding as a D9 and A.Share
38:07
Both these chords in the fingering
Lennon
is using field to a guitarist more like playing a D chord and lifting some fingers up or putting some down, rather than playing new chords.Share
38:17
And this is a fairly common way of thinking about stuff, particularly when talking about
Folk
and Folk
Rock Music
. You'll tend to get people talking about the needles and pins riff as being an A chord where you twiddle your finger about on the D string, rather than changing between A, Asus2 and Asus4. So while there are chord changes, their minimal and of a kind that can be thought of as not really chord changes.Share
38:42
And so that may well have reminded
Harrison
of the Drone
that's so fundamental to Indian classical music. Either way he brought in his sitar and they used it on the track. Both the version they cut on the first day of recording and the remake a week later, which became the album track.Share
John Lennon
39:07
[
The Beatles
- Norwegian Wood]Share
Andrew Hickey
39:31
At the same time as the group was recording
Rubber Soul
, they were also working on two tracks that would become their next single, released as a double A side because the group couldn't agree which of the two to promote. Both of these songs were actual Lennon
McCartney
collaborations, something that was increasingly rare at this point.Share
39:53
One,
We Can Work It Out,
was initiated by McCartney
. Unlike many of his songs of this period, was inspired by tensions in his relationship with his girlfriend, Jane Asher
. Two of his other songs for Rubber Soul
, where I'm Looking Through You
and You Won't See Me
. The other, Day Tripper
was initiated by Lennon
and had other inspirations.Share
John Lennon
40:24
[
The Beatles
- Day Tripper
]Share
Andrew Hickey
40:44
John Lennon
and George Harrison's
first acid trip had been in spring of 1965. Around the time they were recording Help!
. The fullest version of how they came to try it. I've read was in an interview, George Harrison
gave to Cream Magazine in 1987, which I'll quote a bit of.Share
41:01
"I had a dentist who invited me and
John
and our ex wives to dinner and he had this acid, he got off the guy who ran playboy by in London and the playboy guy had gotten it off, you know, the people who had it in America, what's his name, Tim Leary,
and this guy had never had it himself, didn't know anything about it, but he thought it was enough aphrodisiac and he had this girlfriend with huge breasts.Share
41:24
"He invited us down there with our blonde wives and I think he thought he was going to have a scene. And he put it in our coffee without telling us he didn't take any himself. We didn't know we had it."
Share
41:35
"And we made an arrangement earlier after we had dinner, we were going to go to this nightclub to see some friends of ours who were playing in a band. And I was saying, okay, let's go, we've got to go. And this guy kept saying, no, don't go finish your coffee. Then 20 minutes later or something. I'm saying, come on,
John
we'd better go now, we're going to miss the show and he says we shouldn't go because we've had LSD."
Share
41:59
They did leave anyway and they hadn't experienced that later remembered as being both profound and terrifying. Nobody involved had any idea what the effects of
LSD
actually were and they didn't realize it was any different from cannabis or Amphetamines.Share
42:13
Harrison
later described feelings of universal love, but also utter terror believing himself to be in hell and that World War III was starting, as he said later "We'd heard of it, but we never knew what it was about and it was put in our coffee maliciously. So it really wasn't us turning each other on the world or anything. We were the victims of silly people.".Share
42:33
But both men decided it was an experience they needed to have again, and one they wanted to share with their friends. Their next acid trip was the one that we talked about in the episode and
Eight Miles High
with Roger McGuinn
, David Crosby
and Peter Fonda
. That time, Neil Aspinall
and Ringo
took part as well.Share
42:51
But at this point
Paul
was still on show about taking it. He would like to say that he was being told by everyone that it changed your worldview so radically, you'd never be the same again and he was understandably cautious about this. Certainly it had a profound effect on Lennon
and Harrison.
Share
43:07
Starr has never really talked in detail about his own experiences.
Harrison
would later talk about how prior to taking acid he had been an atheist, but his experiences on the drug gave him an unshakable conviction in the existence of God. Something he would spend the rest of his life exploring.Share
43:23
Lennon
didn't change his opinions that drastically, but he did become very evangelistic about the effects of LSD
and Day Trippers started out as a dig at what he later described as weekend hippies who took acid but didn't change the rest of their lives, which shows a certain level of ego in a manner who had at that point only taken acid twice himself.Share
43:43
Though, in collaboration with
McCartney
, it turned into another of the rather angry songs about unavailable women they were writing at this point. The line "she's a big teaser, she took me half the way there" apparently started as "she's a prick teaser".Share
John Lennon
44:23
[The Beatles -
Day Tripper
]Share
Andrew Hickey
44:29
In the middle of the recording of
Rubber Soul
the group took a break to receive their MBEs from the Queen
. Officially the group were awarded these because they have contributed so much to British exports. In actual fact they received them because the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson
had a government with a majority of only four MPs and was thinking about calling an election to boost his majority.Share
44:50
He represented a Liverpool Constituency and wanted to associate his government in the
Labor Party
with the most popular entertainers in the UK. Day Tripper
and We Can Work It Out
got their tv premiere on the show recorded for Granada Tv
, the music of Lennon
and McCartney
.Share
45:07
And fans of British tv trivia will be pleased to note that the harmonium
Lennon
plays while the group end We Can Work It Out
in that show is the same one that was played in Coronation Street
by Ena Sharples
, the character we heard last episode being Davy Jones
grandmother.Share
45:21
As well as
The Beatles
themselves, that show included other Brian Epstein
artists like Cilla Black
and Billy J. Kramer
singing songs that Lennon
and McCartney
had given to them, plus Peter Sellers
, the Beatles'
comedy idol performing A Hard Day's Night
in the style of Laurence Olivier
as Richard the Third
.Share
Peter Sellers
45:39
[The Beatles -
A Hard Day's Night
]Share
Andrew Hickey
46:06
Another performance on the show was by
Peter And Gordon
, performing a hit that Paul
had given to them one of his earliest songs.Share
Peter And Gordon
46:19
[
Peter And Gordon
- A World Without Love]Share
Andrew Hickey
46:44
Peter Asher
of Peter And Gordon
was the brother of Paul McCartney's
girlfriend, the actress Jane Asher
and while the other three Beatles
were living married lives in mansions in suburbia, McCartney
at this point was living with the Asher family in London and being introduced by them to a far more bohemian artistic hip crowd of people than he had ever before experienced.Share
47:07
They were introducing him to types of art and culture of which he had previously been ignorant. And while
McCartney
was the only Beatle so far who hadn't taken LSD,
this kind of mind expansion was far more appealing to him.Share
47:20
He was being introduced to art, film to electronic composers like
Stockhausen
and two ideas about philosophy and art that he had never considered. Peter Asher
was a friend of John
Dunbar
who at the time was Marianne Faithfull's
husband. The Faithfull
had left him and taken up with Mick Jagger;
and of Barry Miles,
a writer.Share
47:38
And in september 1965 the three men had formed a company, Miles Asher and Dunbar Limited or Mad For Short, which had opened up a bookshop in art gallery, the
Indica Gallery
, which was one of the first places in London to sell alternative or hippie books and paraphernalia and which also hosted art events by people like members of the fluxus art movement. McCartney
was a frequent customer, as you might imagine.Share
48:03
And he also encouraged the other
Beatles
to go along and the Indica Gallery
would play an immense role in the group's history, which will look at in a future episode. But the first impact it had on the group was when John
and Paul
went to the shop in late 1965, just after the recording and release of Rubber Soul
and the Day Tripper
, We Can Work It Out
single.Share
48:22
And
John
bought a copy of The Psychedelic Experience
by Leary,
Dass
and Metzner
. He read the book on a plane journey while going on holiday reportedly while taking his third acid trip and was inspired. When he returned, he wrote a song which became the first track to be recorded for the group's next album, Revolver
.Share
John Lennon
48:43
[The Beatles -
Tomorrow Never Knows
]Share
Andrew Hickey
49:16
The lyrics were inspired by the parts of
The Psychedelic Experience
which were in turn inspired by the Tibetan Book Of The Dead
. Now it's important to put it this way because most people who talk about this record have apparently never read the book which inspired it.Share
49:31
I have read many, many books on
The Beatles
which claimed that The Psychedelic Experience
simply is the Tibetan Book Of The Dead
slightly paraphrased. In fact, while the authors used the Tibetan Book Of The Dead
as a structure on which to base their book, much of the book is detailed descriptions of Leary,
Dass
and Metzner's
hypotheses about what is actually happening during a psychedelic trip and their notes on the book. In particular, they provide commentaries to the commentaries, giving their view of what Carl Jung
meant when he talked about it and of Evans-Wentz's
opinions and especially of a commentary by Ana Garica Govinda, a westerner who had taken up Tibetan Buddhism
seriously and become a monk and one of its most well known exponents in the west.Share
50:14
By the time it's been filtered through so many different viewpoints and perspectives, each rewriting and reinterpreting it to suit their own preconceived ideas. They could have started with a book on the habitat of the Canada goose and ended with much the same result.
Share
50:28
Much of this is the kind of mixture between religious syncretism and pseudoscience that will be very familiar to anyone who has encountered
New Age Culture
in any way, statements like "The vedic sages knew the Secret. The Allisonian initiates knew it, the tantrics knew it. In all their esoteric writings, they whisper the message."Share
50:46
"It is possible to cut beyond ego consciousness, to tune in on neurological processes which flash by at the speed of light and to become aware of the enormous treasury of ancient racial knowledge welded into the nucleus of every cell in your body."
Share
51:00
This kind of viewpoint is one that has been around in one form or another since the 19th century religious revivals in America that led to mormonism, christian science and the New Thought. It's found today in books and documentaries like The Secret and the writings of people like
Deepak Chopra
and the idea is always the same one.Share
51:20
People thousands of years ago had a lost wisdom that has only now been rediscovered through the miracle of modern science. This always involves a complete misrepresentation of both the lost wisdom and of the modern science.
Share
51:34
In particular,
Leary
Dass
and Metzner's
book freely mixes between phrases that sound vaguely scientific, like there are no longer things and persons, but only the direct flow of particles, fits to the elements of Tibetan Buddhism
and references to ego games and game existence which come from Leary's
particular ideas of psychology as game interactions.Share
51:54
All of this is intermingled and so the claims that some have made that
Lennon
based the lyrics on the Tibetan Book Of The Dead
itself are very wrong. Rather, the song which he initially called The Void is very much based on Timothy Leary
. The song itself was very influenced by Indian music. The melody line consists of only four notes, E, G, C and B flat over the space of an octave.Share
52:21
A j a j a C J J B flat, C G B flat C.
Share
52:34
This sparse use of notes is very similar to the pentatonic scales in a lot of
Folk
music, but that B flat makes it the mix a Lydian mode rather than the E minor pentatonic scale areas first make it feel like. The B flat also implies a harmony change.Share
52:50
Lennon
originally sang the whole song over one chord, a C which has the notes C E and G in it. But a B flat note implies instead of code of C7. This is another one of those occasions where you just put one finger down to change the chord while playing. And I suspect that's what Lennon
did.Share
53:21
Lennon's
song was inspired by Indian music, but what he wanted was to replicate The Psychedelic Experience
. And this is where McCartney
came in. McCartney
was, as I said earlier, listening to a lot of electronic composers as part of his general drive to broaden his mind and in particular, he had been listening to quite a bit of Karlheinz Stockhausen
.Share
53:43
Stockhausen
was a composer who had studied with Olivier Messiaen
in in the 1940s and had then become attached to the Groupe de Recherches de Musique Concrète along with Messiaen
, Pierre Boulez
, Edgard Varèse
and others, notably Pierre Schaeffer
and Pierre Henry
. These composers were interested in a specific style of music called Music Concrète
, a style that had been pioneered by Schaeffer
.Share
54:07
Music Concrète
is music that is created from, or at least using, pre recorded sounds that have been electronically altered rather than with live instruments. Often this would involve found sound, music made not by instruments at all, but by combining recorded sounds of objects, like with the first major work of Music Concrète
: Pierre Schaeffer's
Cinq Etudes de Bruits.Share
54:56
Early on,
Music Concrète
composers worked in much the same way that people used turntables to create dance music today. They would have multiple record players playing shellac discs and a mixing desk and they would drop the needle on the record players to various points, play the records backwards and so forth.Share
55:14
One technique that
Schaeffer
would come up with was to create records with a closed groove so that when the record finished the groove would go back to the start, the record would just keep playing the same thing over and over and over. Later, when magnetic tape had come into use, Schaeffer
had discovered you could get the same effect much more easily by making an actual loop of tape.Share
55:35
And it started making loops of tape whose beginnings were stuck to their ending, again creating something that could keep going over and over.
Stockhausen
had taken up the practice of using tape loops, most notably in a piece that McCartney
was a big admirer of, Gesand Der Junglinge.Share
56:23
McCartney
suggested using tape loops on Lennon's
new song and everyone was in agreement. And this is the point where George
Martin
really starts coming into his own as a producer for the group. Martin
has always been a good producer, but he's being a good producer up to this point mostly consisted of doing little bits of tidying up and being rather hands off.Share
56:44
He'd scored the strings on yesterday, played piano part and made suggestions like speeding up, Please Please Me or putting the hook of Car Buy Me Love at the beginning. Important contributions, contributions that turn good songs into great records, but nothing that
Tony Hatch
or Norrie Paramor
whoever couldn't have done.Share
57:03
Indeed, his biggest contribution had largely been not being a
Hatch
or Paramor
and not imposing his own songs on the group, letting their own artistic voices flourish.Share
57:13
But at this point,
Martin's
unique skill set came into play. Martin
had specialized in comedy records before his work with The Beatles
and he had worked with Peter Sellers
and Spike Milligan
of The Goons, making records that required a far wider range of sounds than the normal pop record.Share
Peter Sellers
57:37
[
Peter Sellers
and The Goons - Unchained Melody]Share
Andrew Hickey
58:05
The Goons Radio show had used a lot of sound effects created by the
BBC
Radiophonic Workshop
, a department of the BBC
that specialized in creating Music Concrète and Martin had also had some interactions with the radiophonic workshop. In particular he had worked with Maddalena Fagandini
of the workshop on an experimental single combining loop, sounds and live instruments under the pseudonym Ray Cathode.Share
59:00
He had also worked on a record that is, if anything even more relevant
Tomorrow Never Knows
. Unfortunately, that record is by someone who has been convicted of very serious sex offences. In this case, Rolf Harris
, the man in question, was so well known in Britain before his arrest, so beloved and so much a part of many people's childhoods that it may actually be traumatic for people to hear his voice knowing about his crimes.Share
59:27
So while I know that showing the slightest consideration for my listeners feelings will lead to a barrage of comments from angry old men calling me awoke snowflake for daring to not want to re traumatize vulnerable listeners, I'll give a little warning before I played the first of two segments of his recordings in a minute. When I do. If you skip forward approximately 90 seconds, you'll miss that section out.
Share
59:49
Harris
was an Australian homeland entertainer known in Britain for his novelty records, like the unfortunately racist Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport
, which The Beatles
later recorded with him in a non racist version for a BBC
session. But he had also in 1960 recorded and released in Australia, a song he had written based on his understanding of aboriginal Australian religious beliefs and backed by aboriginal musicians on Did we do? And we're going to hear that clip now.Share
Rolf Harris
01:00:30
[Rolf Harris - Sun Arise]
Share
Andrew Hickey
01:00:49
EMI
British label had not wanted to release that as it was. So he got together with George
Martin
and they put together a new version for British releas. That had included a new Middle Eight, giving the song a tiny bit of harmonic movement and Martin
had replaced the didgeridoos with eight cellos playing a Drone
Share
Rolf Harris
01:01:09
[Rolf Harris - Sun Arise]
Share
Andrew Hickey
01:01:46
Okay, we'll just wait a few seconds for anyone who skipped that to catch up. Now there are some interesting things about that track. That is a track based on a non western religious belief based around a single
Drone
.Share
01:01:59
The version that
Martin
produced had a chord change for the Middle Eight, but the verses were still on the drone, using the recording studio to make the singer's voice sound different with a deep pulsating drum sound and using a melody with only a handful of notes which doesn't start on the tonic but descends to it. Sound familiar? Oh, and the young assistant engineer had worked with George
Martin
on that session in 1962.Share
01:02:23
In what several sources say was their first session together and all sources say was one of their first. That young assistant engineer was
Geoff Emerick
who had now been promoted to the main engineer role and was working his first Beatles
session in that role on Tomorrow Never Knows
.Share
01:02:39
Emerick
was young and eager to experiment and he would become a major part of The Beatles
team for the next few years, acting as engineer on all their recordings in 1966 and 67 and returning in 1969 for their last album. To start with, the group recorded a loop of guitar and drums heavily treated.Share
01:03:20
That loop was slowed down to half its speed and played throughout.
Share
01:03:54
Onto that, the group overdubbed a second set of live drums and
Lennon's
vocal. Lennon
wanted his voice to sound like the Dalai Lama
singing from a mountaintop or like thousands of Tibetan monks. Obviously the group weren't going to fly to Tibet
and persuade monks to sing for them. So they wanted some unusual vocal effect.Share
01:04:13
This was quite normal for
Lennon
actually. One of the odd things about Lennon
is that while he is often regarded as one of the greatest rock vocalists of all time, he always hated his own voice and wanted to change it in the studio.Share
01:04:26
After
The Beatles
first album, there's barely a dry land and solo vocal anywhere on any record he ever made, either he would be harmonizing with someone else or he double tracked his vocal or he'd have it drenched in reverb or some other effect.Share
01:04:40
Anything to stop it sounding quite so much like him. And
Geoff Emerick
had the perfect idea. There's a type of speaker called a Leslie speaker
, which was originally used to give Hammond organs a swirling sound, but which can be used with other instruments as well. It has two rotating speakers inside it, a base one and a troubled one. And it's the rotation that gives the swirling sound.Share
01:05:02
Ken Townsend
, the electrical engineer working on the record, hooked up the speaker from Abbey Road's
Hammond organ into Lennon's
mic. And Lennon
was ecstatic with the sound.Share
John Lennon
01:05:18
[The Beatles -
Tomorrow Never Knows
]Share
Andrew Hickey
01:05:43
At least he was ecstatic with the sound of his vocal, though he did wonder if it might be more interesting to get the same swirling effect by tying himself to a rope and being swung around the microphone. The rest of the track wasn't quite working though and they decided to have a second attempt.
Share
01:05:58
But
Lennon
had been impressed enough by Emerick
that he decided to have a chat with him about music. His way of showing that Emerick
had been accepted. He asked if Emerick
had heard the new Tiny Tim
record, which shows how much attention learning was actually paying to music at this point.Share
01:06:13
This was two years before
Tim's
breakthrough with Tiptoe Through The Tulips
and his first single, unless you count a release from 1963 that was only released as a 78 in the 60s equivalent of a hipster cassette only release. A version of April Showers back with Little Girl
, the old Folk
song also known In the Pines
or Where did you sleep last night?
Share
01:07:11
Unfortunately for Emmerich, he hadn't heard the record and rather than just say so, he tried bluffing saying yes, they're great.
Lennon
laughed at his attempt to sound like he knew what he was talking about before explaining that Tiny Tim
was a solo artist though he did say nobody's really sure if it's actually a guy or some drag Queen
.Share
01:07:31
For the second attempt, they decided to cut the whole backing track live rather than play to a loop.
Lennon
had had trouble staying in sync with the loop, but they had like the thunderous sound that had been got from slowing the tape down.Share
01:07:43
As
Paul
talked with Ringo
about his drum part, suggesting a new pattern for him to play, Emerick
went down into the studio from the control room and made some adjustments. He first deadened the sound of the bass drum by sticking a sweater in it.Share
01:07:56
It was actually a promotional sweater with eight arms made when the film
Help
had been provisionally titled Eight Arms to Hold You, which Mark Evans had been using as packing material. He then moved the mix much, much closer to the drums than Studio rules allowed. Mix can be damaged by loud noises and he had very strict rules about distance, not allowing them within two ft of the drum kit.Share
01:08:20
Emerick
decided to risk his job by moving the mix mere inches from the drums, reasoning that he would probably have Lennon's
support if he did this. He then put the drum signal through an overloaded Fairfield limiter, giving it a punchier sound than anything that had been recorded in a British studio, up to that point.Share
01:09:06
That wasn't the only thing they did to make the record sound different though as well as
Emerick's
idea for the last speaker, Ken Townsend
had his own idea of how to make Lennon's
voice sound different. Lennon
had often complained about the difficulty of double tracking his voice.Share
01:09:20
And so
Townsend
had had an idea. If you took a normal recording, fed it to another tape machine, a few milliseconds out of sync with the first and then fed it back into the first, you could create a double tracked effect without having to actually double track the vocal. Townsend
suggested this and it was used for the first time on the first half of Tomorrow Never Knows,
before the Leslie speaker takes over.Share
01:09:43
The technique is now known as artificial double tracking or ADT, but the session actually gave rise to another term commonly used for a similar but slightly different tape manipulation effect that had already been used by
Les Paul
among others.Share
01:09:58
Lennon
asked how they got the effect and George
Martin
started to explain but then realized Lennon
wasn't really interested in the technical details and said "We take the original image and we split it through a double bifurcated splashing flange". From that point on Lennon
referred to ADT to it as flanging.Share
01:10:16
And the term spread though being applied to the other technique. Just as a quick aside, some people have claimed other origins for the term flanging and they may be right, but I think this is the correct story.
Share
01:10:29
Over the backing track they had a tambourine and organ overdubs with the organ change into a B flat chord when the vocal hits the B flat note, even though the rest of the band stays on C. And then a series of tape loops mostly recorded by
McCartney
.Share
01:10:43
There's a recording that circulates which has each of these loops isolated, played first forwards and then backwards at the speed they were recorded and then going through at the speed they were used on the record. So let's go through these. That's what people call the seagull sound which is apparently
McCartney
laughing very distorted.Share
01:11:18
Then there's an orchestral cord.
Share
01:11:26
An electron on its flute setting.
Share
01:12:03
And on its string setting.
Share
01:12:25
And a much longer loop of
Sitar
music supplied by George
.Share
01:13:25
Each of these loops were played on a different tape machine in a different part of
Abbey Road
. They commandeered the entire studio complex and got engineers to sit with the tapes looped around pencils and wine glasses while The Beatles
supervised Emerick
and Martin
in mixing the loops into a single track.Share
01:13:42
They then added a loop of a tambura drone played by
George
. And the result was one of the strangest records ever released by a major pop group.Share
01:14:21
While Paul did add some backwards guitar, some sources say that this is a cut up version of his solo from George's song Taxman. But it's actually a different recording, though very much in the same style. They decided that they were going to have a tape loop solo rather than a guitar solo.
Share
01:15:09
And finally, at the end, there's some tack piano playing from
McCartney,
inspired by the kind of joke piano parts that used to turn up on The Goon show. This was just McCartney
messing about in the studio. But it was caught on tape and they asked for it to be included at the end of the track. It's only faintly audible on the standard mixes of the track.Share
01:15:28
But there was actually an alternative mono mix which was only released on British pressings of the album, pressed on the first day of its release before
George
Martin
changed his mind about which makes should have been used and that has a much longer excerpt of the piano on it.Share
01:15:41
I have to say that I personally like that makes more and the extra piano at the end does a wonderful job of undercutting what could otherwise be an overly serious track in which the same way as the laughter at the end of Within You Without You, which they recorded the next year. The same goes for the title.
Share
01:15:57
The track was originally called The Void and the tape boxes were labeled Mark One. But
Lennon
decided to name the track after one of stars malapropisms, the same way they had with a Hard Day's Night,
to avoid the track being too pompous.Share
01:16:19
Attract like that of course had to end the album. Now, all they needed to do was to record another 13 tracks to go before it. But that and what they did afterwards is a story for another time.
Share
01:16:54
A History of Rock Music in 500 songs is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Each week, Patreon backers will get a 10 minute bonus podcast. This week's is on Keep On Running by the Spencer Davis Group. Visit patreon. com/andrewhickey to sign up for as little as a dollar a month a book based on the 1st 50 episodes of the podcast from Savoy Swingers to Clock Rockers is now available.
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01:17:36
Search Andrew Hickey 500 songs on your favorite online bookstore or visit the links in the show notes. This podcast is written and narrated by me Andrew Hickey and produced by me and Tilt Arizer. Visit 500 Songs com, That's 500 the numbers songs. com to read transcripts and liner notes and get links to hear the full versions of songs accepted here.
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01:18:11
If you've enjoyed the show and feel it's worth reviewing, please do leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. But more importantly, tell just one person that you like this podcast. Word of mouth more than any other form of promotion is how creative works get noticed and sustain themselves. Thank you very much for listening.
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Andrew Hickey
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