Beatles - song that epitomised youth culture in the 60's?

lindsmuse

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I'm watching a series 'Mad Men' and this song gets played - on a stylish record player - by a main character - who is an ad man in the sixties, trying to get a handle on the the youth culture whom he has to pitch to from time to time. It is perfect for where they played it and I really think it's a goodie.

Some interesting info popped up as I read a bit about it. It was from the album 'Revolver' (one I'm not that familiar with)

'To license Tomorrow Never Knows, Lionsgate, the studio that produces Mad Men paid $250,000 for the song's sync fees, way above the average of $100,000 for most pop songs.Although covers of Beatles songs turn up in TV commercials from time to time, the band's master recordings are rarely heard on television or in films. The surviving Beatles and their heirs are notoriously selective when it comes to licensing the band's music - requests are almost always turned down.

"Whatever people think, this is not about money," Weiner (creator of series) said. "It never is. They are concerned about their legacy and their artistic impact." (quoted more or less from a site 'music radar')

The lyrics are adapted from the book 'The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead' by Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and Ralph Metzner, which in turn was adapted from the 'Tibetan Book of the Dead'.

'Turn off your mind relax and float down stream
It is not dying, it is not dying

Lay down all thoughts, surrender to the void,
It is shining, it is shining.

Yet you may see the meaning of within
It is being, it is being

Love is all and love is everyone
It is knowing, it is knowing

And ignorance and hate mourn the dead
It is believing, it is believing

But listen to the colour of your dreams
It is not leaving, it is not leaving

So play the game "Existence" to the end
Of the beginning, of the beginning'

How Lennon - who they say was the main author got to write it was follow the instructions of the book ...

Finally they got REALLY CREATIVE to get the trippy sounds they wanted for the song. But that will take another page of writing. ?

Bob-Dubery

The engineer on this track (and many others by the Beatles) was Geoff Emerick. In his book Here, There and Everywhere Emerick provides quite a bit of information about the recording of this song. Emerick gives a fair bit of credit for the finished track to Paul McCartney, though the basic idea was certainly Lennon's. McCartney made the tape loops that are such a prominent feature of the track.

Emerick paints a fascinating picture of the mixing of the track. They needed lots of tape machines so they could run the loops and fade them in and out as required. They didn't have a spare machine in the studio the Beatles preferred, but there were machines in other studios, and the Abbey Road complex was wired so that a tape unit in one studio could be accessed in another. So they hooked up five more tape machines and had trainee engineers standing in the corridors holding pencils with the loops running around them to maintain the correct tension. Emerick and the Beatles were in the main studio fading the loops in and out.

Other points of technical interest: Lennon had given very vague instructions as to how he wanted the track to sound. One of the techniques they used was to play the basic track (just Ringo on drums and Lennon on acoustic guitar) very fast so that they could slow it down when the vocals were overdubbed. Lennon had said that he wanted his vocals to sound like the Dalai Lama chanting on a mountaintop, and Emerick satisfied that requirement by putting the vocals through a Leslie (he says that this had never been done before).

Tokai-SA

The Beatles & Jimi Hendrix...without them who knows whether we'd be chatting on this forum right now. ?

'Tomorrow never knows' released in 1966, Jimi's 'Purple Haze' in 1967, both songs influenced in a good way by LSD.
In 1968 Syd Barrett fries his brain with LSD and goes insane, and in 1970 Jimi passes away.

"Tomorrow never knows"...so true.

Bob-Dubery

Tokai SA wrote: The Beatles & Jimi Hendrix...without them who knows whether we'd be chatting on this forum right now. ?

We would. Those guys were very big influences on popular music but popular music already existed, and was morphing like crazy in the 60s, and in parallel ways, not sequentially with first the Beatles and then Hendrix. So things would have happened anyway, just maybe different things.

Wormwood

our youth culture is awful

Ray

Wormwood wrote: our youth culture is awful

Not enough LSD?

nick

Best part of that song is as far as I recall it is literally a single note, A.

Wormwood

Ray wrote:
Wormwood wrote: our youth culture is awful
Not enough LSD?

haha possibly

vic

@ Lindsmuse.......The Revolver album is brilliant. This IMHO set the scene for "alternative pop". "Here, there and everywhere" from this album is an awesome piece. Speaking of "youth culture" in another sense, take a listen to "She's leaving home" (youtube) from the Sergeant Peppers album. I think you may like it.

lindsmuse

Wormwood wrote: our youth culture is awful

It seems like there's been a bit of a Big Bang in the youth culture to put it mildly. There's so many streams it's confusing. With us it was much simpler. Much. ? Plus being here in SA in those years, it was difficult to access the, by then, variety that was happening in the US and UK. So it was quite an intense experience - without really being aware of just how, at the time. I wonder whether there's a song today that would epitomise this decade ...

Vic wrote: @ Lindsmuse.......The Revolver album is brilliant. This IMHO set the scene for "alternative pop". "Here, there and everywhere" from this album is an awesome piece. Speaking of "youth culture" in another sense, take a listen to "She's leaving home" (youtube) from the Sergeant Peppers album. I think you may like it.

Yes Vic I remember those - beautiful. I think I sort of became 'album conscious' round about Sgt Peppers and then of course the White Album. Loved those two albums!

Bob-Dubery

lindsmuse wrote: It seems like there's been a bit of a Big Bang in the youth culture to put it mildly. There's so many streams it's confusing. With us it was much simpler. Much. ? Plus being here in SA in those years, it was difficult to access the, by then, variety that was happening in the US and UK. So it was quite an intense experience - without really being aware of just how, at the time. I wonder whether there's a song today that would epitomise this decade ...

'Twas ever thus. There wasn't a single youth culture in the 60s. Joe Boyd doesn't deal with it directly in his book, but it's implied in a couple of things he talks about around the UFO Club (an early flash point of psychedelia in 60s London).

One is the accusation that he wasn't keeping the club for the REAL freaks, that too many "weekend hippies" were coming to the club (presumably the suggestion is that they just wanted to check out the real thing as if they were some sort of curiosity).

The second is what happened when the club had to move from it's original premises in Covent Garden to what is now the Chalk Farm Roundhouse. Suddenly they were in a different part of London, and the pubs in the area where they now found themselves were the hangouts of skinheads. The skinheads regarded the hippies as their natural enemies and as being on the soft side. Bags were grabbed, bells snatched from chains and eyes were sometimes blacked. This was one lot of 60s youth with a distinct culture beating up another lot of 60s youths with another culture. Boyd resolved the problem by hiring from amongst a third group - Black Panthers. They acted mean and tough and struck karate poses and scared the skins off.

Bottom line: there was no single 60s youth culture. The kids who came to groove at the UFO club had a very different set of standards from the kids who burned their Beatles records.

We look back on the 60s as a time of peace, love and understanding, but it wasn't - or not universally, maybe not even for a majority. By the end of the 60s there had been Altamont and also reports coming back from Viet Nam about fighter pilots strafing defenceless villages and villagers whilst they were listening to Hendrix or Dylan on the headphones.

It was, for sure, a wonderful, golden time for popular music and the Beatles were one of the brightest jewels in the crown of 60s pop music.

singemonkey

Mad men is interesting to me in just how bleakly uniform and restrictive middle class culture used to be. Rock and roll was so important for those kids bored stiff by the lives of parents who just wanted to live in quiet prosperity and never go back to f***ing Iwo Jima.

There's a great Velvet Underground song where Lou Reed sings:

Jenny said when she was just five years old
There was nothin' happenin' at all
Every time she puts on a radio
There was nothin' goin' down at all,
Not at all
Then one fine mornin' she puts on a New York station
You know, she don't believe what she heard at all
She started shakin' to that fine fine music
You know her life was saved by rock 'n' roll
Despite all the amputations you know you could just go out
And dance to the rock 'n' roll station

And it was alright

And somehow it was the British kids who were most fired up about it. The thrill of rock 'n roll was so huge for them that they turned it from a passing fad into the bedrock of a new youth culture.