Watch the Beatles Dissect "Tomorrow Never Knows" in the Nineties
In the mid-Nineties, while Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were working on the Beatles' massive Anthology project, they got together with George Martin, their old producer, at Abbey Road Studios to discuss and dissect a few classic Beatles tracks. In the incredible clip below, you can watch as they go through the various parts of John Lennon's Revolver masterpiece, "Tomorrow Never Knows," a song that signaled the band's new direction for 1966.
At the 1:10 mark, watch as Martin and McCartney grab the faders to reveal the many different layers of "Tomorrow Never Knows." "People tend to credit John with the backwards recordings, the loops and the weird sound effects, but the tape loops were my thing," McCartney says in Barry Miles' Many Years From Now. "The only thing I ever used them on was 'Tomorrow Never Knows.' It was nice for this to leak into the Beatle stuff as it did. We ran the loops and then we ran the track of 'Tomorrow Never Knows' and we played the faders, and just before you could tell it was a loop, before it began to repeat a lot, I'd pull in one of the other faders, and so, using the other people, 'You pull that in there,' 'You pull that in,' we did a half random, half orchestrated playing of the things and recorded that to a track on the actual master tape, so that if we got a good one, that would be the solo. We played it through a few times and changed some of the tapes till we got what we thought was a real good one. I think it is a great solo."
Rumor has it that McCartney's "Tomorrow Never Knows" guitar parts are actually transplants from "Taxman."
By: Damian Fanelli
Source: Guitar World
