In 1966, Paul McCartney and John Lennon visited the newly-opened Indica Bookshop in London. Lennon was searching for a copy of The Portable Nietzsche. Instead, he came upon the book The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead by Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (aka Ram Dass) and Ralph Metzner. Lennon read the following line: “Whenever in doubt, turn off your mind, relax, float downstream.”
The Psychedelic Experience postulates that the “ego death” experienced under the influence of LSD is similar to the dying process. Eastern mystics call this state of being samādhi (total awareness of the present moment). Lennon purchased the book, went home and took LSD. As he surrendered to the experience, strings of words appeared in his head. Afterwards, he wanted to write a song depicting his experience. Using the book as a guide he transcribed ideas for lyrics: “lay down all thoughts, surrender to the void that you may see the meaning of within.”
Lennon composed a guitar melody utilizing a repetitive C-major chord. He eschewed chord progressions, focusing on a static harmony recalling his vivid acid trip. The song was reminiscent of the Indian ragas George Harrison had become entranced with. As Harrison later explained in the Beatles Anthology, “Indian music doesn’t modulate; it just stays. You pick what key you’re in, and it stays in that key… The basic sound all hangs on the one drone.”
In the book Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now, Paul described the band’s interest in Indian music. “We would be sitting around and at the end of an Indian album we’d go, ‘Did anyone realize they didn’t change chords?’ It would be like ‘Shit, it was all in E! Wow, man, that is pretty far out.’”
Lennon wasn’t sure if he had the makings of a song.
In April of 1966, the Beatles entered EMI Studios to record their new album Revolver. The first song they tackled was Lennon’s acid-inspired dirge. The song’s working title was “The Void” (also known as “Mark I”).
The band quickly laid down a one-minute opening verse. The song begins with a pulsating sitar-like instrument called a tamboura. Paul added a bass line while Ringo played a hypnotic drum track with repetitive floor-tom eighth notes. The lyrics are meant to describe the process of letting go of your thoughts so you can live in the moment.
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
That you may see
The meaning of within
It is being
It is being
After recording the first verse, the band didn’t know where to go next. They put the song aside and worked on other tracks like “Taxman” and “Eleanor Rigby.” Two weeks later, they returned to “The Void.”
McCartney had the idea to incorporate tape loops. He told author Keith Badman, “We only had one verse and I think we stretched it to two verses and we couldn’t think of any more words cause we’d said all we wanted to say. So we had to try and work out how to make it different. I decided to do some of those loops I’d been doing on my own tape recorder.”
Inspired by avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, McCartney had spent hours at home recording various sounds into a Brenell tape recorder. He encouraged his bandmates to do the same. Lennon taped an orchestral chord from a Sibelius symphony. Harrison added a sitar-like electric guitar played in reverse. Paul recorded himself laughing and played it in reverse yielding a seagull-like sound.
Key to the recording process was 21-year-old sound engineer Geoff Emerick. Emerick had worked as assistant engineer on previous Beatles tracks, and was familiar with tape loops. The band “wanted to break the rules” and record each instrument until it “sounded unlike itself.” Emerick slowed down an electric guitar loop to create a buzzing track. When Lennon said he wanted his voice to sound “like the Dalai Lama chanting from a mountaintop,” Emerick recorded Lennon’s vocals through a Leslie speaker paired with a Hammond organ. This created a double-tracked mesmerizing vibrato.
The final version consisted of two verses bookended around a 30-second tape loop montage. The band mixed the analog backing tracks on the fly. They sat at the studio console randomly fading loops in and out. The process was exhausting and took nearly a week. The end result was a three-minute experimental musical collage with a hypnotic psychedelic sound.
Harrison told an interviewer in 1966, “It’s easily the most amazing new thing we’ve ever come up” even though it may sound like “a terrible mess of a sound to listeners without open ears. It’s like the Indian stuff. You mustn’t listen to Eastern music with a Western ear.”
Lennon was eager for feedback from his contemporaries. He played the song for Bob Dylan in a London hotel suite. Dylan said, “Oh, I get it. You don’t want to be cute anymore.” Dylan then walked out of the room. McCartney played the song for The Stones and The Who. He said, “they visibly sat up and were interested.” Ray Davies of the Kinks was unimpressed with the track. He told a rock journalist, “George Martin must have been tied to a totem pole when they did this.”
The song was given a new name inspired by a Ringo quote in a 1964 interview: “Tomorrow Never Knows.” According to Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn, Lennon said “The Void” would have been a more suitable title but the band wanted “to take the edge off the heavy philosophical lyrics and its obvious drug connotations.”
Revolver was released on August 5, 1966.
The album received positive reviews though reaction to “Tomorrow Never Knows” was mixed. Music journalist Tony Hall described the song as “the most revolutionary ever made by a pop group… It’s like a hypnotically horrific journey through the dark never-ending jungle of someone’s mind.”
Traditional Beatles fans were confused by the song. In the book The Beatles Forever, author Nicholas Schaffner wrote, “some people thought Lennon was sprouting complete gibberish and concluded the poor lad had slid off the deep end.” An Australian teen magazine called Mirabelle wrote, “Everyone, from Brisbane to Bootle, hates that daft song Lennon sings at the end of Revolver.”
1966 was a key juncture in The Beatles; career. They’d stopped touring mid-year and their only place to workshop songs was the studio. The band’s foray into tape loop experimentation inspired later hits like “Strawberry Fields” and “A Day in the Life.”
Lennon described the song as “the first acid song” ever written. Harrison disagreed, believing the song wasn’t about drugs but meditation. In The Beatles Anthology Harrison said, “The goal of meditation is to go beyond waking, sleeping and dreaming… John knew he was onto something when he saw those words and turned them into a song. But to have experienced what the lyrics in that song are actually about? I don’t know if he fully understood it.”
“Tomorrow Never Knows” is now recognized for its innovative brilliance. In his book Electronic and Experimental Music, author Thom Holmes wrote that the song “ushered in a new era of electronica in rock and pop music.”
The song was covered by Phil Collins, Brian Eno, Los Lobos and John’s son Sean Lennon. Noel Gallagher referenced the song in the lyrics to the Oasis song “Morning Glory” writing, “Tomorrow never knows what it doesn’t know too soon.” Ultravox lead singer John Foxx said of the song, “As soon as I heard it, I knew it contained almost everything that I would want to investigate for the rest of my life.” The Chemical Brothers credited “Tomorrow Never Knows” as the template for their music.
Music producer Tony Visconti recognizes “Tomorrow Never Knows” as one of the first songs to implement sampling and tape manipulation. As such, the song is a legitimate ancestor to the sample-heavy genres of rap and hip-hop.