Tomorrow Never Knows : The Experimentalism of The Beatles

by Ade Rowe

 

Experimentalism has always played a part in The Beatles recording methods. From the accidental guitar feedback at the start of 1964's I Feel Fine, to the white noise descent on the last three minutes of 1969's I Want You (She's So Heavy), The Beatles, along with their producer George Martin, constantly experimented with ways to push musical boundaries and break new ground in the recording studio. However, experimentalism in music wasn't a new creation that was birthed by The Beatles. There has always been a level of musical experimentalism existing in one form or another, The Beatles just injected it into popular music and thus created a new kind of sound.

As far back as the 1910's, the futurist art movement, most notably, Italian painter Luigi Russolo, experimented with sounds and noises in the truest sense. Russolo wrote a manifesto entitled The Art of Noises, which posed the point that the future of composition laid within the industrial sounds and noises that we heard around us every day and that electronics would be the advancement of orchestral composition. 

Luigi Russolo was also one of the first composers and performers of noise music, a genre that is defined by its use of noise within a loose musical context. He would build his own experimental musical instruments to perform the avant garde noise sounds. Luigi Russolo's work, along with that of avant garde composers John Cage and Karheinz Stockhausen, was well known within the 1960's art crowd. During 1965, Paul McCartney started visiting art galleries, eventually becoming interested in the work of these avant garde composers and was most often the main driving force behind The Beatles' more adventurous experimental work. When John Lennon would be stuck with which direction a song should go, McCartney suggested off the wall ideas that would result in how the finished song sounded. A good example of this is the song Tomorrow Never Knows from the band's seventh studio album Revolver. Early versions of the song show a straighter approach than the finished album version. Ringo Starr's frenetic drum sound along with many of the song's effects are said to be mainly the result of McCartney's avant garde ideas.

Revolver is where The Beatles laid down their use of experimentalism a year before the landmark Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cemented the band's legacy as ground breaking recording artists. From the opening splices of studio talk on Taxman, right up to the reversed guitar solo of the psychedelic mantra Tomorrow Never Knows, Revolver has a plethora of musical influences in between. We have Indian raga, classical, and soul sounds infused with the The Beatles own brand of rock n roll. The classical backing of Eleanor Rigby is groundbreaking in itself. A marriage of the old and the new that has never, or at least not successfully, been done before. The strings on Yesterday from the 1965 Help album featured accompaniment from Paul McCartney's guitar, whereas Eleanor Rigby has none of the band's instruments, just an orchestral backing. This is something that was usually done on crooners such as Perry Como and Pat Boone's records but not by a popular rock band. Indian influences came to the fore on Revolver, and continued to appear on future songs such as Within You Without You and The Inner Light. The Beatles previously touched on incorporating Indian music into their songs with Rubber Soul's Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) but because of George Harrison's growing passion for Hindi music and culture, it was inevitable that these sounds would eventually become dominant as heard on Revolver's Love You To. Harrison would later take his experimentalism of sound further with the solo album Electronic Sound, on which he played around with his latest acquisition, a Moog synthesizer. Electronic Sound was released on The Beatles' short lived experimental music label Zapple. A sub label of their Apple Records label, Zapple released just two albums, the aforementioned Electronic Sound by George Harrison and John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Unfinished Music 2: Life with the Lions, before it was laid to rest. 

Going back to the Revolver album, The Beatles played around with backwards guitar sounds and other effects that were unheard of on a rock album at the time. Reversed guitar and vocals are also used to great effect on the Paperback Writer single's flipside Rain during this period of creativity and showed the world a glimpse of a band that would continue to push musical boundaries and give the record industry a well needed kick in the backside with their next full length album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Considered by many to be the greatest rock album of all time, Sgt Pepper stunned its listeners with sounds that incorporated fairground music, straight-on Hindi experimentalism and music hall nostalgia. The album is a melting pot of creativity. From it's colourful Peter Blake designed sleeve right up to the record's final nonsensical locked groove, Sgt. Pepper blew away all competition. The use of samples on some of the album's songs is also worth mentioning: crowds cheering, an alarm clock, animal noises. The samples add a touch of surrealism to the whole listening experience of the album. Sampling is a technique that The Beatles would continue on their next self titled white album. You could even say that both Sgt Pepper and the white album have a theme running from one album to the other. Animal samples that begin on Sgt Pepper's Good Morning Good Morning continue on the white album's Blackbird and Piggies. Accidental or deliberate, this adds a certain charm when listening to both albums back to back.

Strawberry Fields Forever is another fine result of The Beatles' adventurous studio endeavours. Toned down vocals take us on a journey to another musical dimension and just as we start to feel secure in our seats drifting into a relaxed dreamlike state, a clash of thunderous drums coupled with a backwards voice slaps us wide awake into a hellish reality. Did we just hear the voice saying 'cranberry sauce' or 'I buried Paul'? Was this a humorous nod to the ridiculous theory that Paul McCartney died in a car crash a year earlier and had been replaced by a clone? Maybe it's both, as throughout the later years of their career, The Beatles liked to give the 'Paul is dead' conspiracy theorists little clues for their own amusement. Clues like McCartney being barefoot on the crossing of the Abbey Road album cover and Lennon's reversed voice saying 'Paul is a dead man. Miss him, miss him, miss him' at the end of the song I'm So Tired, things that the fans could try to work out and end up being nearly as delusional as Charles Manson when he decided that the white album was giving him secret messages. Ok, maybe not that delusional but still ridiculous. The double A side of Strawberry Fields Forever, Penny Lane is also noteworthy, due to its experimental use of screeching feedback at the end of the song. 

The conclusion of The Beatles' Sgt Pepper period is John Lennon's I Am The Walrus. Spaced out lyrics, long wave radio frequencies and samples all add to the song's charm and intrigue. Taken from the band's television film and EP Magical Mystery Tour, I Am The Walrus ends with chants of both 'Oompah oompah stick it up yer jumper' and 'Got one, got one, everybody's got one'. So, amongst all of the sonic conjuring we have the humour of The Beatles' mop top days shining through.

After all the psychedelia haze and hype that came with Sgt Pepper, The Beatles decided to travel to India to unwind and find spiritual awakening. Already well documented, the band's trip to India spawned a huge amount of songwriting activity which resulted in the band's self titled white album. Yoko Ono was a big influence on John Lennon at this time, both personally and professionally. Ono was already established as an avant garde artist by this time and it was Paul McCartney who suggested that Lennon should see her art exhibition. The rest, as they say, is history. The white album Lennon songs are heaving with Yoko Ono's influence, especially the most experimental Beatles song ever commercially released, Revolution 9.

Over a year before John & Yoko's white album sound collage was even a thought, Paul McCartney asked his band mates to help him create an avant garde piece for the upcoming Million Volt Light and Sound Rave, also known as The Carnival of Light Rave, which was organised by design collective Brinder, Edwards & Vaughan. The Beatles' Carnival of Light is said to consist of guitar, keyboard, percussion, and vocals drenched in echo effects but remains unreleased at present and not available on any bootleg albums. Paul McCartney wanted to capture the spirit of free improvisation ensemble AMM with this experimental effort. John Lennon and George Harrison weren't lovers of the avant garde scene at the time. Lennon even commented that 'avant garde was French for bullshit' but seems to have changed his mind after meeting Yoko Ono and the pair went on to create the profoundly avant garde Unfinished Music 1: Two Virgins album, on which they experimented with noise music and found sounds.

Welding together a wide array of musical styles, The Beatles' white album remains the most experimental of the band's catalogue mainly because of the inclusion of the previously mentioned Revolution 9. A riotous blend of mob chants, garbled piano, song snippets and random talk, it was certainly a huge surprise for the Beatles fans and critics of the time who were expecting more Pepperesque material. Revolution 9 wasn't the only avant garde piece recorded for the white album. John & Yoko's sprawling abstract What's The New Mary Jane was also considered for the record but dropped in favour of the more famous sound collage. Starting off as a conventional song, What's The New Mary Jane slowly disintegrates into an echo-laden soundscape of Yoko Ono's screams and John Lennon's piano tinkering. Not the best Beatles song in the world, it was probably wise that the band decided not to use it on the white album, as it is more suited to be a separate John & Yoko project. However, the song was officially released by The Beatles on the retrospective Anthology 3 album during the 1990's.

The Beatles went back into the studio in 1969 with a back-to-basics approach. In a hope to squash the many arguments and tensions that blighted the white album recording sessions, the band recorded exhaustively and during this time recorded their final studio album Abbey Road.

Abbey Road features The Beatles last burst of experimentalism in the epic I Want You (She's So Heavy). Laying down the blues and creating the doom metal sound that Black Sabbath would take further months later, the song features a three minute descent of repeated guitar chords and white noise before ending abruptly. The gradual build up of the Moog synthesizer noise is something that would now be described as a harsh noise wall of sound and is an often overlooked achievement of The Beatles' musical ingenuity. I Want You (She's So Heavy) was the last song to be finished for the Abbey Road album and the last time all four band members were in the studio together. It is a fitting testament of a band that would change the course of popular music forever and of a band that weren't afraid to experiment with unconventional sounds. Will there ever be another rock band that will rewrite musical history? Tomorrow never knows.

Ade Rowe is a British artist, writer and musician.