5-1-08 The Beatles – Tomorrow Never Knows
Posted by gavortnik on May 1, 2008
Good to see you up, Shanoah! When I didn’t see a post from you, I started to get a little worried.
Well, I have to apologize to you. I said I was going to have something on LSD and Alfred Hoffman today. But I haven’t had any time to research the subject, and I don’t want to go off half-cocked (or at least go off as non-half-cocked as possible).
What little I know about LSD is the government line I’ve been fed. I know it absorbs through the skin; that’s how Hoffman found it was a psychotropic (and psychedelic) drug, and it scared the shit out of me as a kid when I heard some Charles Manson-types were coating the backs of stickers with LSD. I’ve heard horror stories about visual vapor trails and undefined “flashbacks” and the drug getting absorbed by fat cells and genetic alteration… Waitaminnit, LSD turns me into a mutant? Rawk!
That’s what I know. Pretty pathetic, huh? So looks like it’s time for me to hit the books before I shove my foot any further into my mouth. You’ll be hearing more on this subject in the near future.
But I don’t want to leave you hanging too much. I have to thank Fabio on WFMU for your selection today. He had much the same idea as I had – a stoner show. And about halfway through, he played something that blew my mind: the Beatles’ Tomorrow Never Knows, off 1966’s Revolver.
It reminds me a lot of Are You Experienced?, by Jimi Hendrix. It’s one of those song where you just want to lie back and relax, be happy. Strangely enough, Tomorrow Never Knows was written only two years after the Beatles’ first experience with getting high (according to this excerpt from Nick Bromell’s aptly-named book Tomorrow Never Knows, which also give you some idea of the times that spawned this song) and only one after Lennon and Harrison first tripped on LSD. They went from the straight rock of A Hard Day’s Night to Tomorrow Never Ends, with all the little steps in between, in just two years.
You can’t tell me this song wasn’t acid rock. I mean, come on: “Relax, turn off your mind and float downstream”? Just look at the studio setup they had for Tomorrow Never Knows (not to mention this disturbingly minute breakdown of the song by Alan W. Powell). Someone was trippin’.
Video cirected by Bob Pipe at MrBobPipe (MySpace here). Nice.
5-20-08 The Day They Came To Suck Out Our Brains « One Neat Thing a Day said
[...] Pipe sounds familiar, that’s because he did the video that I posted earlier this month for Tomorrow Never Knows. I have a feeling you’ll be seeing more from him on this [...]
9-8-08 Ulrich Schnauss - Stars « One Neat Thing a Day said
[...] Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi, George Hickenlooper’s Factory Girl and John “Tomorrow Never Knows” [...]