(1966) "Tomorrow Never Knows"

The Beatles

AlbumRevolver (1966)

ReleasedAugust 5, 1966

LabelParlophone

ProducerGeorge Martin

StudioAbbey Road Studios (Studio Three)

SongwritersLennon-McCartney (John Lennon)

Genres

Primary

Experimental rockPsychedelic rockArt rock

Secondary

Tape musicSound collageAcid rockRaga rockMusique concrèteKrautrockDroneSpace rock

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The first thing recorded for Revolver was the last thing anyone expected to hear on a pop album. On April 6, 1966¹, the Beatles walked into Studio Three at Abbey Road and, instead of cutting another single, built a track that had more in common with the tape experiments of Karlheinz Stockhausen and the drone music of Indian classical tradition than with anything on the pop charts. “Tomorrow Never Knows” sits on a single chord of C. Nothing resolves. The vocal floats over loops of manipulated tape while a drum pattern holds the only pulse. It lasts two minutes and fifty-eight seconds, and by the time it ends, the vocabulary of what recorded popular music could attempt has permanently expanded.

The sound

Start with what does not happen. The harmony never moves. A high C drone, played on a tambura — the long-necked Indian instrument that sustains a tonic hum under a raga — sits under the entire track, and McCartney’s bass locks to an ostinato in the same C, so that the song reads in C Mixolydian and effectively as one chord held for three minutes.² Where a pop record of 1966 would lean on a chorus arriving on the IV or a bridge swinging to the relative minor, this one offers no such landmark. The interest has to come from somewhere other than harmonic motion, and it comes from texture and rhythm, the two parameters the studio could now shape directly.

The pulse is Ringo Starr’s. His pattern is a lopsided figure with the accents pulling against the backbeat: the first stress lands on the downbeat, the second falls late in the bar, and the whole thing reads closer to a ritual march than a rock groove, repeating without variation across the take.³ Geoff Emerick close-miked the kit and ran it through heavy compression, which is what gives the toms their thick, swallowing thud and makes a steady pattern sound enormous and slightly menacing rather than merely repetitive.⁴ Over that bed the loops surge and recede. Five of them ride above the rhythm track, the most recognizable a snatch of McCartney’s laughter sped up until it shrieks like a gull, alongside a sustained orchestral chord, two Mellotron settings, and a sitar phrase recorded with heavy saturation and run fast.⁵ Lennon’s voice begins dry and close, then drops at the halfway point into a different acoustic world, fed through a Leslie rotating-speaker cabinet so that it seems to swing around the room and arrive from a great distance.⁶ A reversed guitar solo erupts out of the wash near the center, a smeared, backward-blooming line with no clear beginning or end.⁷ The effect is a record that deepens instead of progressing, circling its single chord while the surface keeps transforming.

What Lennon asked for, and what the studio answered

Lennon arrived at the session with a set of lyrics adapted from Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and Ralph Metzner’s The Psychedelic Experience (1964), itself a rewriting of the Tibetan Book of the Dead as a manual for LSD use. The book’s instruction “Whenever in doubt, turn off your mind, relax and float downstream” becomes the song’s opening line almost verbatim.⁸ He wanted his voice to sound like the Dalai Lama singing from a mountaintop, or a thousand Tibetan monks chanting.⁹ What he handed the studio was a demand no microphone technique could meet directly, and the answer the studio improvised is the reason the record exists in the form it does.

The session was Emerick’s first as balance engineer, a twenty-year-old promoted to replace¹⁰ Norman Smith. His solutions to Lennon’s demands were immediate and permanent. To get the chanted-from-a-distance quality, he broke into the electronic circuitry of the studio’s Leslie cabinet, a speaker built to spin sound for Hammond organs, and routed Lennon’s vocal through it — the first time a voice had been treated that way on a pop record.¹¹ He close-miked Ringo’s drums against EMI’s standing rules, producing a sound punchy and present where Abbey Road’s house style kept drums distant and polite.¹² Ken Townsend’s automatic double-tracking, devised during these sessions to spare Lennon the tedium of singing every line twice, thickened the vocal image without a second pass.¹³ The working title through the spring was “Mark I”; the final title came from one of Ringo’s malapropisms, “tomorrow never knows” for “tomorrow never comes,” which Lennon kept to take the edge off the heavy philosophical lyrics, so that the band’s most far-reaching record carried a joke for a name.¹⁴

The tape loops were the strangest and most consequential element. All four Beatles had prepared them at home, recording onto open-reel machines and physically cutting the tape into loops that would repeat continuously; the band brought in roughly thirty, of which Martin kept sixteen and used five.¹⁵ On the evening of April 7, Emerick and Martin fed those loops into the Studio Three console from tape machines set up in corridors and adjoining rooms throughout Abbey Road, faders worked live by EMI technicians who could not hear the full mix. The collage was performed in a single pass, mixed in real time as it was recorded over the rhythm track. Every pass was unique, and the one on the album is the one they happened to get — Martin recalled that the mix “was a random thing that could never be done again.”¹⁶

What it inherits and what it introduces

The debts are specific. The drone comes from Indian classical music, which Harrison had been absorbing since meeting Ravi Shankar, and which Lennon encountered obliquely through Leary’s psychedelic rewriting of Eastern philosophy.¹⁷ The tape manipulation descends from the musique concrète of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry and from the electronic experiments Stockhausen was conducting in Cologne¹⁸, which Lennon knew about through his art-school education and McCartney through the London avant-garde — McCartney spent early 1966 attending Berio lectures and building tape loops at home, and brought that practice into the room.¹⁹ None of these influences was new in 1966. Placing all of them inside a track on a major-label rock album was.

The track proved three things at once that nothing in pop had yet established together: that the recording studio could function as a compositional instrument rather than a device for capturing a performance, that recorded tape was itself raw material a song could be built from, and that a record could discard conventional harmony and song form and still hold a listener for three minutes. This is the founding instance of the argument pop as craft makes about the studio — that deliberate construction at the console is composition, indistinguishable in seriousness from writing on a staff — pushed past arrangement into a place where the production is the song.²⁰ Everything in the band’s late period reaches for what this track opened: the methods worked out here are what make “Strawberry Fields Forever” (1967) possible a few months later, and the studio-as-instrument premise runs straight on into Sgt. Pepper’s.

Reception and legacy

In 1966 the track baffled as much as it announced. Sequenced as Revolver’s closer, it asked listeners who had reached it through “Here, There and Everywhere” and “Got to Get You into My Life” to accept that the same band, on the same record, could end in a place with no chorus and no chord change to anchor it. Its reputation has only risen since. Peter Lavezzoli calls it the first pop song to abandon formal chord changes altogether; Steve Turner traces its sampling and tape manipulation to a “profound effect on everyone from Jimi Hendrix to Jay Z”; Ian MacDonald rated it among the most socially influential records the Beatles ever made.²¹ The innovations were absorbed so completely that the strangeness has faded — Leslie-treated vocals, close-miked drums, tape collage, drone structures, and the studio-as-instrument method are standard vocabulary now, and in 1966 none of them existed in pop.

That absorption is the measure of the influence. Psychedelic rock’s studio experiments through 1967 and 1968 all work in the space the track opened, from the Beatles’ own Sgt. Pepper’s to Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967). The drone-and-loop architecture anticipates krautrock — Can’s Tago Mago (1971) and Tangerine Dream’s early electronics build on principles the track proved viable inside rock.²² And the tape-loop collage method is the conceptual ancestor of sampling: the premise that recorded sound can be cut, manipulated, and reassembled into new compositions runs from “Tomorrow Never Knows” through hip hop’s sample-based production and the loop architecture of electronic dance music. The distance between this track and the Beatles’ previous album closer, Rubber Soul’s “Run for Your Life”, is the distance between a performance captured and a construction built, and that distinction runs through every subsequent argument about authenticity and the nature of the pop record.

MAP

Explorer

"Tomorrow Never Knows"

The sound

What Lennon asked for, and what the studio answered

What it inherits and what it introduces

Reception and legacy

See also

MAP

Explorer

"Tomorrow Never Knows"

The sound

What Lennon asked for, and what the studio answered

What it inherits and what it introduces

Reception and legacy

See also

Footnotes