Tomorrow Never Knows

Revolver album artworkWritten by: Lennon-McCartney
Recorded: 6, 7, 22 April 1966
Producer: George Martin
Engineer: Geoff Emerick

Released: 5 August 1966 (UK), 8 August 1966 (US)

Available on:
Revolver
Anthology 2
Love

Personnel

John Lennon: vocals, organ, tape loops
Paul McCartney: lead guitar, bass guitar, tape loops
George Harrison: guitar, sitar, tambura, tape loops
Ringo Starr: drums, tambourine, tape loops
George Martin: piano

‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, the monumental closing track on Revolver, was also the first song to be recorded for the album.

While the title, like ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, was a Ringoism particularly liked by John Lennon, the lyrics were largely taken from The Psychedelic Experience, a 1964 book written by Harvard psychologists Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert, which contained an adaptation of the ancient Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Lennon discovered The Psychedelic Experience at the Indica bookshop, co-owned by Barry Miles. On 1 April 1966 Lennon and Paul McCartney visited the bookshop.

John wanted a book by what sounded like ‘Nitz Ga’. It took Miles a few minutes to realise that he was looking for the German philosopher Nietzsche, long enough for John to become convinced that he was being ridiculed. He launched into an attack on intellectuals and university students and was only mollified when Paul told him that he had not understood what John was asking for either, and that Miles was not a university graduate but had been to art college, just like him. Immediately friendly again, John talked about Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, laughing about his school magazine the Daily Howl: ‘Tell Ginsberg I did it first!’ Miles found him a copy of The Portable Nietzsche and John began to scan the shelves. His eyes soon alighted upon a copy of The Psychedelic Experience, Dr Timothy Leary’s psychedelic version of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. John was delighted and settled down on the settee with the book. Right away, on page 14 in Leary’s introduction, he read, ‘Whenever in doubt, turn off your mind, relax, float downstream.’ He had found the first line of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, one of the Beatles’ most innovative songs.
Many Years From Now
Barry Miles

The full title of the book was The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based On The Tibetan Book Of The Dead. It was intended as a guidebook for those seeking spiritual enlightenment through the use of psychedelic drugs.

The final track on Revolver, ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, was definitely John’s. Round about this time people were starting to experiment with drugs, including LSD. John had got hold of Timothy Leary’s adaptation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which is a pretty interesting book. For the first time we got the idea that, as with ancient Egyptian practice, when you die you lie in state for a few days, and then some of your handmaidens come and prepare you for a huge voyage. Rather than the British version, in which you just pop your clogs. With LSD, this theme was all the more interesting.
Paul McCartney
Anthology

According to the notorious biographer Albert Goldman, Lennon recorded himself reading the book’s paraphrase of the Tibetan Book of the Dead into a tape recorder. He played back the passage as the drug took hold, and was so enthralled by the result that he resolved to capture the LSD experience in song.

I remember John coming to Brian Epstein’s house at 24 Chapel Street, in Belgravia. We got back together after a break, and we were there for a meeting. George Martin was there so it may have been to show George some new songs or talk about the new album. John got his guitar out and started doing ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and it was all on one chord. This was because of our interest in Indian music. We would be sitting around and at the end of an Indian album we’d go, ‘Did anyone realise they didn’t change chords?’ It would be like ‘S**t, it was all in E! Wow, man, that is pretty far out.’ So we began to sponge up a few of these nice ideas.

This is one thing I always gave George Martin great credit for. He was a slightly older man and we were pretty far out, but he didn’t flinch at all when John played it to him, he just said, ‘Hmmm, I see, yes. Hmm hmm.’ He could have said, ‘Bloody hell, it’s terrible!’ I think George was always intrigued to see what direction we’d gone in, probably in his mind thinking, How can I make this into a record? But by that point he was starting to trust that we must know vaguely what we were doing, but the material was really outside of his realm.

Paul McCartney
Many Years From Now, Barry Miles

The idea of basing a song on a single chord was something The Beatles had attempted with ‘The Word’, and was a direct result of their growing interest in Indian music.

Indian music doesn’t modulate; it just stays. You pick what key you’re in, and it stays in that key. I think ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ was the first one that stayed there; the whole song was on one chord. But there is a chord that is superimposed on top that does change: if it was in C, it changes down to B flat. That was like an overdub, but the basic sound all hangs on the one drone.

Although it was initially known as ‘The Void’, Lennon knew that this would be too far out for the majority of The Beatles’ 1966 fans, and settled instead on a phrase coined by Ringo Starr. The Beatles’ drummer had first said “tomorrow never knows” in public on 22 February 1964, during a BBC television interview at London Airport on the band’s return from conquering America.

That’s me in my Tibetan Book of the Dead period. I took one of Ringo’s malapropisms as the title, to sort of take the edge off the heavy philosophical lyrics.
John Lennon
All We Are Saying, David Sheff

George Harrison later questioned whether Lennon fully understood the true meaning of the song’s lyrics.

You can hear (and I am sure most Beatles fans have) ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ a lot and not know really what it is about. Basically it is saying what meditation is all about. The goal of meditation is to go beyond (that is, transcend) waking, sleeping and dreaming. So the song starts out by saying, ‘Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream, it is not dying.’

Then it says, ‘Lay down all thoughts, surrender to the void – it is shining. That you may see the meaning of within – it is being.’ From birth to death all we ever do is think: we have one thought, we have another thought, another thought, another thought. Even when you are asleep you are having dreams, so there is never a time from birth to death when the mind isn’t always active with thoughts. But you can turn off your mind, and go to the part which Maharishi described as: ‘Where was your last thought before you thought it?’

The whole point is that we are the song. The self is coming from a state of pure awareness, from the state of being. All the rest that comes about in the outward manifestation of the physical world (including all the fluctuations which end up as thoughts and actions) is just clutter. The true nature of each soul is pure consciousness. So the song is really about transcending and about the quality of the transcendent.

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. But to have experienced what the lyrics in that song are actually about? I don’t know if he fully understood it.

George Harrison
Anthology
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118 thoughts on “Tomorrow Never Knows”

  1. When I first got into the band, I used to play this game with myself, where I’d try to imagine what the song sounded like, just from knowing its name, as I figured out how to conjour up the money to buy an album. I was always way off beam, naturally. I didn’t know that the words “tomorrow never knows” didn’t appear as a phrase in the song until I actually heard it, so I always imagined the phrase across the same melody as “And nothing to get hung about” from Strawberry Fields Forever. The “Tomorrow” would shadow “And nothing,” the “Never” would shadow “to get” and the “Knows” would shadow “hung about,” but would be a 3-syllable pronunciation, “Know-ee-o’s.”
    I was good at amusing myself, especially on long, boring journeys !

    As an aside, I find it interesting and quite funny that John says that he used one of Ringo’s phrases as the title “to take the edge of the heavy philosophical lyrics.” As though “Tomorrow never knows” is a bog-standard, commonplace, everyday phrase among working class Scousers, or anyone else, for that matter ! It is way more heavy-edged philosophical than any part of the music or lyric, and that’s saying something, for this is one of the most heavy-edged philosophical songs that I’ve ever come across.

  2. cold turkey 1987 said on 15 September 2014:

    This is my second favorite closing track of any of album second only to a day in the life

    As a closer, it is on a par with “I’ll Be Back” and “Run For Your Life.” Lagging just behind is “Everybody’s Trying To Be My Baby.” I love “A Day in the Life” and it’s one fantabulous song, but although it’s the best closer of the ‘Pepper’ songs, I don’t think it’s a great album closer.
    Go figure.
    If we were including the original Magical Mystery Tour” EP, “I am the Walrus” would beat, as a closer, not only every other Beatles’ closer, but most LP closers, although Deep Purple’s “Hey Joe,” Larry Norman’s “Nightmare,” Pavlov’s Dog’s “Of Once and Future Kings” and the closers on the Indo-jazz fusions 1 {“Subject”} and 2 {“Mishra Blues”} by the Joe Harriott-John Mayer Double Quintet also take some beating.

    Would love to hear it if john could get down the thousand monks chanting sound in proper fashion to record it to flow with the rest of the song

    Even if he had lived beyond 1980, we’d never be in his head to hear what he envisaged or what role the monks would have played. But I think it would have sounded awful. I say that with total bias, of course, because I happen to love the song as is.
    For about 4 years, I so wanted to hear the first take, after having read Mark Lewisohn’s description of it in his book on the Beatles’ recording sessions. It sounded so immense and wonderful and even influenced the way I did my own recordings, with his descriptions of “ocean-bed reverb” and the like, giving the impression of great deep sounds, slathered in gorgeous otherworldly reverb . Of course, I had no reference to measure his words by and ruined many a recording by putting way too much reverb on drums or bass or vocals and created an unlistenable mush. I learned the hard way that less, more often than not, is more !!
    So yeah, between ’92 and ’96, I really wanted to hear the first take of Tomorrow Never Knows and when the Anthology II came out, I went all the way from London down to Brighton to snag a copy.
    And what a disappointment. I think it’s an awful track, truly horrendous. It has the same ‘awful’ {clearly my word of the day !!} irritating, nerve-crawling, swirlingly itchy sound as the Kinks’ “Lazy Old Sun,” a song that would be a classic forever had they recorded it properly. TNK’s first take is one of the most overrated pieces of trash I’ve come across and I’m absolutely ever so glad that the Beatles didn’t like it and went away and thought some more about it, and gave us one of the great psychedelic numbers of the era.
    Even if John wasn’t thrilled with the end result, Paul, George and George Martin clearly were, Geoff Emerick seemed to be and just by the way he played, Ringo seems bathed in the joys of lightning.
    And not a monk in sight !

    Certainly their most psychedelic song

    I wouldn’t agree with that. For me, the bulk of their 1966-67 recordings {and I would add to those, “Across the Universe” and “The Inner Light” from ’68} were psychedelic in sound and even when not, in lyric or the worldview that underpinned, or gave rise to, the lyric. In fact, lyrically, the band were psychedelic right to the end {even Ringo in Octopus’ Garden”}, if one takes ‘psychedelic’ in its literal sense of “mind expanding.” With that in mind, the list is huge and no one song was ‘more’ psychedelic than another. Psychedelia had many different facets to it, and English psych was very different in it’s many-sided scope to the more aggressive and raw American psych of the time.

  3. Kalle – it’s an observation and still a good one if you go back and read everything. If you just want to state something without any backup then maybe state that. And I do agree with your last lines about “No one knows … ” In fact that’s the only think we do know. Peace.

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