I saw this song was next after writing the previous post, and it got me wondering. When and how did I listen to ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’? The thought got me looking back on that final third of 2009 when I really started listening to The Beatles, and surprisingly, it unlocked a memory that hadn’t been in the mental plane for a while. When I was on my Beatles discovery, trying to find out anything about any kind of song, I came across this person’s video. Made in the golden age of YouTube when everything was made on Windows Movie Maker, the video was a bunch of facts about ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ laid over the music, with some pictures here and there. My introduction to the Beatles was through songs like ‘Penny Lane’, ‘The Night Before’, ‘One After 909’… Songs that sound like a band made them. ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ was not like one of those. It was unlike any song I’d heard before. I was only 14 then, so that’s no exaggeration. And I don’t think it was too long after that that I found it was on Revolver and listened through the whole album.

The Beatles were meant to spend the first four months of 1966 making a film, which would have been their third in the four-film contract they had with some company. They said no and took a break instead. In January, John Lennon bought a book, took LSD and followed the instructions as exactly stated within the pages. The opening lyrics, “Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream”, are taken almost verbatim from it. April came around, it was time for the band to start recording a new album again, and ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ was the first song they worked on. Lennon wanted to translate the hallucinogenic experience into song, and the Beatles threw everything they had into it. They all brought in tape loops, which they manually overdubbed in a session, McCartney spurring up the idea. George Harrison played a sitar and tambura on the track, bringing his firmly established Indian inspirations into the mix. Lennon wanted to be hung upside-down and spun around a microphone while recording his vocal. New engineer Geoff Emerick tampered with a Leslie-speaker cabinet to get something to that effect. And in addition the banging drum take, Ringo Starr provided the song’s title. Not intentionally, but it was his words.

The problem with Beatles posts is that I don’t want to turn them into a casual rewrite of a Wikipedia page, and there’s a Wikipedia article for every Beatles track, I think. So any technical stuff or further insight you might want, it’s probably best you went over there. My personal take is hopefully what people are here for, so I’mma give it to you. I can’t imagine how people in 1966 reacted when this arrived as the final song on Revolver. To me, it feels like an intentional mark on the band’s part, showing that they were just on another level compared to their contemporaries. A lot of the public must have thought they’d gone insane or too weird. Or had been taking too many drugs, which isn’t wrong a judgement. This is a song that was worked on 60 years ago next week, and there are songs and bands today that solely exist to sound like it but pale in comparison. That pretty much sums up The Beatles too, honestly. A lot of people don’t want you to believe it these days, but those guys, they made some really good music.