Tomorrow Never Knows: How The Beatles Invented the Future with Studio Magic and LSD
Tomorrow Never Knows: How The Beatles Invented the Future with Studio Magic and LSD
Tomorrow Never Knows is arguably the most pivotal song of The Beatles career. It’s a mind-bending three-minute collage of sonic experiments that helped kick open the doors to a bold new era for popular music. It’s also packed with production quirks, anomalies, and even a few unsolved mysteries. In this episode, I’m going to take you through the fascinating recording history of Tomorrow Never Knows and dissect some of these curiosities. As a fair warning, once I point them out, you can’t unhear this.
Tomorrow Never Knows is the final song on the Beatles’ landmark 1966 album, Revolver. Despite appearing last on the album, Tomorrow Never Knows was actually the first song the band worked on for the Revolver sessions, following an unprecedented 5 month-long break after their previous album, Rubber Soul. After a much-needed reset – and some encounters with LSD – the band was brimming with new ideas, among them a new song concept from John that defied pretty much every convention of pop music at the time: the lyrics didn’t rhyme, the chord progression didn’t really progress,
and instead of romantic love the subject matter was expanding one’s psychic consciousness through ego death. Naturally, the recording process would also be anything but normal. The band assembled at EMI Studios on April 6, 1966, to collaborate on John’s new composition, which at this stage was known as “The Void” and listed on studio documentation as “Mark I”. An important new addition to the supporting team at EMI was a young, creative and ambitious engineer named Geoff Emerick, who would help pioneer many of the
innovative recording techniques used on the Revolver sessions and beyond. For his first order of Beatle business, Geoff would indulge the band’s newfound curiosity with tape loops, inspired by the musique concrete movement that used recorded sounds to create avant-garde sound collages. For their first attempt on The Void, the band recorded a short loop of two electric guitars and drums, which was then slowed down and drenched in echo to create a droning backing track. Geoff’s other engineering task was to satisfy
John’s request of making his voice sound, quote “like the Dalai Lama chanting from a mountaintop”. His solution was to pump John’s voice through a Leslie speaker, which was normally paired with an organ to create a vibrato effect through the use of a revolving chamber – pardon the pun. Satisfied with the Dalai Lennon transformation, John recorded a vocal track on top of the existing guitar and drum loop. Meanwhile, Paul and Ringo added a bass and drum track. There was a small problem, however: the backing loop drifted increasingly out of
sync with the overdubbed live parts. Keep in mind, in the pre-digital era, everything had to be timed manually; digital tools like Auto-tune were still decades away. Facing this challenge, the band scrapped this initial idea, but would revisit using tape loops in a slightly different way soon. Returning to their usual method of live recording, the four Beatles – John on vocals, George on tambourine, Paul on bass and Ringo on drums – made two attempts at a suitable backing track, settling on the second one, labeled Take 3, as the final. Contrary to some accounts, Ringo’s
hypnotic drum part here is not a tape loop. It’s 100% live Ringo, and it’s frankly amazing. Tape loops did come back into the picture at this point. Before heading home that night, Paul suggested a new idea: that the band record their own tape loops and bring them to EMI the next day. With tape segments of random sounds in hand, the band returned to EMI on April 7th and sorted through their overnight creations. Of the many options, they settled on 5 that would make it into the final song. Due to the heavy saturation and other manipulation, there’s some debate over
what these original sounds were, but I’ll play a snippet how each one sounds when isolated: Here’s the first, Paul’s voice sped up to sound like a seagull The second, an orchestra playing a B-flat major chord The third, notes played on a Mellotron The fourth, more notes played on a Mellotron And fifth, a sitar, sped up considerably Unlike digital sampling, creating and adding these loops in this analog environment was a formidable challenge. Each loop was simultaneously fed into a separate tape machine while the various loops were routed to the main mixing console. The band,
sitting at the mixing board, conducted a live performance of all of these incoming loops, fading up and down the different sounds at different moments. The marvelous end result of their efforts wound up on Track 2 of the four-track master tape. After the exhausting tape loop session, the band decided to take a break from The Void and work on a few other songs, including George’s new song Taxman, which would become relevant to the completion of Tomorrow Never Knows – but more on that, later.
On April 22nd, two weeks after the tape loops session, the band revisited Tomorrow Never Knows to add some finishing touches. To enhance the song’s psychedelic ambience, they added two sonic elements to the backdrop: a simple organ part and second, an Indian instrument called a tamboura, heard clearly during the lead-in and continuing throughout the song. Also on this day, John re-recorded his main vocal track, but with different effects applied to the first and second sections. For the first half, he double-tracked his vocals – that is,
sang it through twice to enhance the sound of his voice. Then, for the second half of the song, his voice was put through the Leslie speaker to get the vibrato effect he used on Take 1. So if you listen carefully, you’ll notice two distinct vocal treatments in the song, separated by the solo section in the middle. Speaking of that middle solo section, which at this point featured a bunch of tape loops, they decided to add another Beatle first here: a backwards guitar solo. There’s a debate, however, over who actually played this scorching backwards solo.
According to the official booklet inside the Revolver Deluxe Edition, George Harrison is playing lead guitar here. But when the backwards solo is reversed to the original direction, it sounds strikingly similar to the guitar solo from Taxman, the first song on Revolver. Taxman was indeed a George Harrison song, but the guitar solo on Taxman was actually performed by Paul. Not coincidentally, that session took place the night before the Tomorrow Never Knows solo was added. The two solos sound so similar that some
people believe it’s actually copied from the same recording. Upon closer analysis, the two solos don’t line up exactly. But they definitely share an identical style and sound, meaning it was likely Paul playing both – contrary to the liner notes. Regardless of who is actually playing, the two similar solos form a clever link from the last track on Revolver to the first, bookending the album. There’s also a fascinating little analog-era quirk caused by this innovative backwards solo. As I mentioned earlier, John double-tracked his vocals in the first
section. But the last word of the first section is mysteriously missing the double-tracking, right before the solo section begins: [being] What happened here? This anomaly can be explained by analyzing how the solo made it onto the original multi-track tape: John’s primary vocal was recorded on Track 4. His double-tracked vocal was recorded to Track 3, along with the tambourine and organ. Given the limited tape space in a 4-track setup, the backwards guitar solo was also overdubbed onto Track 3 in the 30-second gap between John’s two main vocal sections.
But to get the backwards sounding effect to work, the guitar solo was played forwards with the multi-track tape recording in reverse. So here’s what likely happened: at the very end of the guitar solo overdub, an EMI engineer simply punched out a bit too late – copying over the last snippet of John’s double-tracked vocal, along with the tambourine and organ, which were also on Track 3. You can hear all three drop out a bit too early before the solo section begins: [play this]. Unlike in a modern digital recording studio, once it happened, they couldn’t undo this. So
this happy little accident was left in, as a neat little artifact of the analog recording era. Before wrapping up, they included one final touch to close out the song: a random bit of honky-tonk piano that had been recorded a few weeks earlier. With that, the recording of Tomorrow Never Knows – still titled ‘Mark I’ at this point – was complete. But as usual, the anomalies didn’t end there. At the time, Beatles songs were mixed for two separate versions: single-channel mono, which was the dominant format at the time, and two-channel stereo, still a more experimental format. Because
these different versions were often created during different sessions, and the band usually only reviewed the mono mixes, this led to some odd variations between the two mixes. On the mono mix, you’ll notice different patterns in where the tape loops come in, different effects on the guitar solo, and even a few extra seconds of honky tonk piano at the end. Interestingly, a small batch of the first mono pressings of Revolver in the UK were mistakenly released with a different mono mix of the song. As you can imagine,
those early misprints are now collectible. For the stereo version, my favorite quirk is a seemingly random high-pitched noise heard about halfway through. This little anomaly is actually a bit of guitar feedback from the backwards solo that was likely left in by mistake. Ironically, now that stereo has become the preferred distribution format, it’s weird to hear this mistake missing from the mono version. The last bit to be addressed was the song’s title, which isn’t found in the lyrics at all. Instead, John borrowed
it from a remark Ringo made in 1964: On August 5, 1966, Revolver hit store shelves, with Tomorrow Never Knows sequenced last, marking the summit of this extraordinary album. Tomorrow Never Knows was, in a word, unconventional. But its brilliance was also immediately apparent. George Harrison called it “easily the most amazing new thing we’ve ever come up with” An early review mentioned the song specifically as among “the most revolutionary ever made by a pop group” No other song in their career marked such an abrupt shift, like stepping from a black-and-white
world into full color. I find it incredible that this piece of transcendent music happened less than three years after She Loves You. The song’s success is also a testament to the ingenuity of EMI’s engineers and the band’s producer George Martin, who from the helm would provide a feasible framework to execute their grand vision within the limitations of primitive analog-era technology. The song’s innovative use of the recording studio paved the way for countless other ground-breaking hits in their catalog. The heavy reliance on
studio production, however, made it virtually impossible for the band to play these songs live. No matter, as they had decided to give up touring altogether in late 1966, never having played any songs from the Revolver album live. In subsequent years, many other artists have performed creative covers of the song, including Phil Collins, Brian Eno, Los Lobos, and even John’s son Sean, fronting the Claypool Lennon Delirium. It was also used to great effect in the AMC television series Mad Men to signal
the vast generational shift in culture taking place in the mid-1960s. The entire Revolver album has risen in appreciation over the past few decades for being a watershed moment not only in The Beatles’ career but in music history. In a year of landmark genre-defying albums from artists such as The Beach Boys, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, The Byrds, Frank Zappa, and many more, Revolver stands tall among giants. Like its cover art, the album is an eclectic collage – from taxes and Yellow Submarines to
the sounds of India and Motown. Its grand finale, Tomorrow Never Knows, was the launchpad into the psychedelic universe that would define the following year’s Summer of Love. Listen more closely, and you can hear the future of electronic music emanating from its thunderous pulse. Tomorrow Never Knows might not be the most well-known Beatles song. But to me, it’s the most rewarding listening experience of their career. In less than 3 spectacular minutes, this ground-breaking production transports you to another dimension by way of a piece
of ancient wisdom that seems more relevant today than ever before: turn off your mind, relax and float downstream. What do you think of Tomorrow Never Knows? Let me know in the comments. As always, thanks for watching and for subscribing.