Tomorrow Never Knows

• 1. Introduction

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  "Tomorrow Never Knows" arrived on the 5th of August 1966 as the final track on Revolver, closing a Beatles album like nothing the band had ever recorded before. It had been the very first song attempted during the Revolver sessions, yet the group held it back until last. That sequencing was deliberate. Author Mark Hertsgaard observed that placing it at the end ensures the track serves as "the summit to which the entire album ascends".

  The song is built almost entirely on a single chord. Lennon's vocal was fed through a Leslie speaker cabinet, a device normally reserved for the Hammond organ, to make it sound, as Lennon told producer George Martin, like a thousand Tibetan monks chanting from a mountaintop. Tape loops prepared by all four Beatles were overdubbed live onto the rhythm track in a process so complex and random that Martin said the finished mix could never be repeated. Reverse guitar parts made this the first pop recording to use reversed sounds, although the Beatles' 1966 B-side "Rain" was actually issued more than two months before Revolver reached stores.

  When the song first played on the radio in July 1966, days before the album went on sale, the editor of an Australian teen magazine declared that everyone from Brisbane to Bootle hated it. Years later, the music staff of Time Out London ranked it the second greatest Beatles song ever recorded, and one NME critic crowned it the greatest of all. How a piece that attracted ridicule became one of the most studied recordings in pop history is a question that runs through the entire story of "Tomorrow Never Knows".

• 2. The Book That Wrote the Song

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  John Lennon wrote "Tomorrow Never Knows" in January 1966, drawing its lyrics almost directly from The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a 1964 book by Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner. Paul McCartney recalled that he and Lennon had visited the newly opened Indica bookshop, where Lennon had originally been looking for a copy of The Portable Nietzsche. He found Leary's book instead, and inside it came the lines: "Whenever in doubt, turn off your mind, relax, float downstream."

  Lennon later said he bought the book, went home, took LSD, and followed its instructions exactly. The book argued that the ego death experienced under psychedelic drugs closely resembles the dying process described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and requires similar guidance. Lennon described 1966 as his "Tibetan Book of the Dead period."

  George Harrison questioned whether Lennon fully grasped what he was writing. Harrison said the song is "basically saying what meditation is all about" and the goal of transcending waking, sleeping and dreaming, before adding: "I am not too sure if John actually fully understood what he was saying. He knew he was onto something when he saw those words and turned them into a song."

  The title itself came from a different source entirely. Ringo Starr had uttered the phrase "Tomorrow never knows" in a television interview in early 1964, laughing off an incident at the British Embassy in Washington, DC, where a guest had cut off a portion of his hair. The piece had been working under the titles "Mark I" and "The Void" until the band began remixing Revolver tracks in June 1966. Lennon said he chose Starr's malapropism "to sort of take the edge off the heavy philosophical lyrics", while also admitting that "The Void" would have been more fitting but was too obviously drug-associated.

• 3. One Chord, Many Sounds

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  George Martin, the Beatles' producer, acknowledged when McCartney told him the song's harmony was mainly restricted to the chord of C that it was "rather interesting". According to author Peter Lavezzoli, "Tomorrow Never Knows" was the first pop song to abandon formal chord changes altogether. The harmonic structure draws from Indian music, a genre that Harrison had introduced to the band's recordings in late 1965 via his sitar part on "Norwegian Wood". Here, the foundation is a high-volume C drone played on a tambura, with the musical key being C Mixolydian.

  Musicologist Dominic Pedler found that despite the harmonic restriction, the Beatles' ingenuity shows in the upper melody. The phrase "Turn off your mind" is a run of unvarying E notes, while "relax" involves an E-to-G shift and "float downstream" drops through an E-C-G descent. The line "It is not dying" introduces a B note against the C root, creating what Pedler calls a VII/I polychord. Because Lennon adhered so closely to Leary's text, the song was also the first Beatles track to abandon any form of rhyming scheme.

  Ringo Starr's drum part was equally unconventional. Musicologist Russell Reising describes it as "a kind of stumbling march", where the first accent lands on the measure's first beat and the second stress falls in the second half of the third quarter, in what he calls double sixteenth notes "in stuttering pre-emption of the normal rhythmic emphasis on the second backbeat".

  McCartney's bass, meanwhile, holds a constant ostinato in C throughout, regardless of the implied chord changes in the verses. Reising writes that the musical drone conveys the meditative state of a psychedelic experience and that the "buzz" of a drug high is reproduced sonically through Harrison's tambura rhythm and Starr's heavily treated drum sound.

• 4. Tape Loops and the Abbey Road Experiment

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  Recording for Revolver started at 8 pm on the 6th of April 1966, in Studio 3 at EMI Studios, later known as Abbey Road. Geoff Emerick, promoted to Beatles recording engineer for this album, recalled that the band "encouraged us to break the rules" and wanted each instrument to "sound unlike itself".

  The tape loops grew from McCartney's admiration for Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge. By disabling the erase head of a tape recorder and running a continuous loop of tape through the machine, the tape would overdub itself repeatedly, creating what was known as a saturation effect, a technique also used in musique concrète. McCartney encouraged all four Beatles to create their own loops. They supplied Martin with a total of "30 or so", and he selected 16 for use on the song. Each loop was roughly six seconds long.

  The overdubbing of the loops took place on the 7th of April. The loops played on BTR3 tape machines located in various studios throughout the Abbey Road building, each controlled by an EMI technician who had to hold a pencil within the loop to maintain tension. The four Beatles operated the faders of the mixing console while Martin varied the stereo panning and Emerick watched the meters. Eight tapes ran at one time, changed halfway through the song.

  Five loops are prominent in the finished version. Author Ian MacDonald identified them as: a recording of McCartney's laughter sped up to resemble a seagull, entering at 0:07; an orchestral chord of B major at 0:19; a Mellotron on its flute setting at 0:22; a Mellotron strings sound at 0:38; and a sitar playing a rising scalic phrase, sped up and heavily saturated, at 0:56. Author Robert Rodriguez notes, however, that the manipulation applied to these recordings has made them impossible to identify with authority.

  The final overdubs, including Harrison's sitar and Lennon's Leslie-treated vocal, were recorded on the 22nd of April. Lennon later told Beatles biographer Hunter Davies: "I should have tried to get near my original idea, the monks singing. I realise now that's what I wanted."

• 5. Lennon's Voice Through the Cabinet

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  Lennon wanted his voice to sound like the Dalai Lama singing from a mountaintop, and he wanted to evoke the atmosphere of a Tibetan Buddhist ceremony. When Martin explained that a Leslie speaker cabinet could achieve the effect, Lennon's immediate response was to ask if the same result could be obtained by hanging him upside down and spinning him around a microphone while he sang into it.

  Emerick instead built a connector that broke into the electronic circuitry of the Leslie cabinet, then re-recorded the vocal as it came out of the revolving speaker. Lennon also hated doing a second take to double his vocals. To solve this, studio technical manager Ken Townsend developed what became known as artificial double tracking, or ADT. He took the signal from the sync head of one tape machine and delayed it slightly through a second machine. The two machines ran not from mains electricity but from a separate generator producing a specific frequency, keeping them locked together. By altering the speed and frequencies, various effects could be produced. Lennon's vocal is double-tracked on the first three verses, with the Leslie effect becoming audible after the backwards guitar solo.

  Rather than a conventional guitar solo at the song's centre, McCartney described the approach as a "tape solo". Harrison did record a lead guitar part for that section, but with the tape running backwards, so the resulting sound would complement the surrounding effects. The reverse guitar on this track marked the first use of reversed sounds in a pop recording. Lennon's line about the guitar technique proved to have a reach far beyond the one song: Walter Everett later identified backwards tapes in the subsequent work of Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, the Byrds, the Who, the Electric Prunes, Spirit, Tomorrow, Soft Machine and the First Edition.

• 6. First Reactions, Mixed and Fierce

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  On the 2nd of May 1966, McCartney played "Tomorrow Never Knows" to Bob Dylan at the latter's hotel suite in London. As the track began, Dylan said dismissively: "Oh, I get it. You don't want to be cute anymore." Marianne Faithfull, who was also present, recalled that Dylan then walked out of the room.

  The Rolling Stones and members of the Who reacted differently. McCartney remembered that those musicians "visibly sat up and were interested", while Cilla Black "just laughed".

  Tony Hall, a music industry figure and journalist known for predicting trends, received a preview alongside other early Revolver tracks. Writing in his Record Mirror column in the issue dated the 14th of May, Hall described the new songs as "the most revolutionary ever made by a pop group" and singled out "The Void", as the track was still known. He wrote: "Sound-wise, it's like an hypnotically horrific journey through the dark never-ending jungle of someone's mind." He compared the track to Ornette Coleman's arrival on the jazz scene a decade earlier.

  When the album reached the public in August, Allen Evans of the NME expressed confusion, writing: "But how can you relax with the electronic, outer-space noises, often sounding like seagulls?... Only Ringo's rock-steady drumming is natural." Ray Davies of the Kinks, reviewing Revolver for Disc and Music Echo, concluded the Beatles must have had "George Martin tied to a totem pole when they did this." The Guardian's Edward Greenfield called the track "the most remarkable item on a compulsive new record", but his praise came wrapped in scepticism: he closed by writing, "Thank goodness Lennon is being satirical: at least one hopes so."

  Author Nick Bromell, who was 16 in 1966, wrote that psychedelic drugs were still a year away from erupting into American youth culture, and that most contemporary listeners heard the song as "strangeness, undiluted and outrageous strangeness". He added: "'Tomorrow Never Knows' was an enigma they would understand only gradually, through many listenings and over many months."

• 7. Influence Across Decades

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  Thom Holmes, in his book Electronic and Experimental Music, credits "Tomorrow Never Knows" with ushering in a new era for electronic sound in rock and pop. Music historians David Luhrssen and Michael Larson described the drone at its centre as reintroducing a technique absent in Western music since the Middle Ages and only recently revived by avant-garde composer La Monte Young.

  Producer Tony Visconti recalled hearing the track in 1966 and finding it "incredible how the music matched the lyrics". He said Revolver showed him how the studio could be used as an instrument, and that it contributed to his decision to move to London, because "I had to learn how people made records like this." In his 2004 book Sonic Alchemy, David Howard paired Martin's work on the track with Phil Spector's 1966 production of "River Deep - Mountain High" as two visionary achievements that established record production as an art form.

  DJ Spooky said in 2011 that "Tomorrow Never Knows" remained "in the DNA of so much going on these days" and that its "tape collage alone makes it one of the first tracks to use sampling really successfully." Steve Turner traces the song's techniques through David Byrne and Brian Eno's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, with its spoken-word and vocal samples; through recordings by Big Audio Dynamite, which incorporated film soundtrack samples; and through Moby's Play, which used disparate vocal tracks.

  The Chemical Brothers cited "Tomorrow Never Knows" as the template for their music. Their 1996 track "Setting Sun" was a direct tribute. Oasis referenced its title in the lyric to their 1995 song "Morning Glory". John Foxx of Ultravox said: "As soon as I heard it, I knew it contained almost everything that I would want to investigate for the rest of my life."

  In 2006, the song appeared remixed on the Love album, which George Martin and his son Giles Martin created for Cirque du Soleil's Las Vegas stage show. The remix combined the rhythm of "Tomorrow Never Knows" with the vocals and melody of Harrison's "Within You Without You". The same year, Pitchfork ranked the original at number 19 on its list of the 200 greatest songs of the 1960s. In 2023, Mark Beaumont of NME placed it first among all Beatles songs ever made.