Tomorrow Never Knows: How The Beatles Invented the Future With Studio Magic, Tape Loops & LSD

“Tomor­row Nev­er Knows” could­n’t be made today, and not just because the Bea­t­les already made it in 1966. Mark­ing per­haps the sin­gle biggest step in the group’s artis­tic evo­lu­tion, that song is in every sense a prod­uct of its time. The use of psy­che­del­ic drugs like LSD was on the rise in the coun­ter­cul­ture, as was the aware­ness of the reli­gion and music of far­away lands such as India. At the same moment, devel­op­ments in record­ing-stu­dio tech­nol­o­gy were mak­ing new approach­es pos­si­ble, involv­ing sounds that musi­cians nev­er would have imag­ined try­ing before — and, when brought togeth­er, pro­duced a result that many lis­ten­ers of just a few years ear­li­er would hard­ly have rec­og­nized as music at all.

In the new You Can’t Unhear This video above, host Ray­mond Schillinger explains all that went into the record­ing of “Tomor­row Nev­er Knows,” which he calls “arguably the most piv­otal song of the Bea­t­les’ career.” It seems that John had under­gone some con­sid­er­able expe­ri­ences dur­ing the group’s five-month-long break after Rub­ber Soul, giv­en that he turned up to EMI Stu­dios after­ward with a song 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.” A young Geoff Emer­ick, who’d just been pro­mot­ed to the role of the Bea­t­les’ record­ing engi­neer, rose to the chal­lenge of facil­i­tat­ing an equal­ly non-stan­dard stu­dio process.

The whol­ly new son­ic tex­ture that result­ed owes in large part to the use of mul­ti­ple tape loops, lit­er­al sec­tions of audio tape con­nect­ed at the begin­ning and end to allow the­o­ret­i­cal­ly infi­nite rep­e­ti­tion of their con­tent. This was a fair­ly new musi­cal tech­nol­o­gy at the time, and the Bea­t­les made use of it with gus­to, cre­at­ing loops of all man­ner of sped-up sounds — an orches­tra play­ing, a Mel­lotron, a reversed Indi­an sitar, Paul sound­ing like a seag­ull — and orches­trat­ing them “live” dur­ing record­ing. (Ringo’s drum track, despite what sounds like a super­hu­man reg­u­lar­i­ty in this con­text, was not, in fact a loop.) Oth­er tech­no­log­i­cal­ly nov­el ele­ments includ­ed John’s dou­ble-tracked vocals run through a revolv­ing Leslie speak­er and a back­wards gui­tar solo about whose author­ship Bea­t­les enthu­si­asts still argue.

What John had called “The Void,” was reti­tled after one of Ringo’s sig­na­ture askew expres­sions (“a hard day’s night” being anoth­er) in order to avoid draw­ing too much atten­tion as a “drug song.” But lis­ten­ers tapped into the LSD scene would have rec­og­nized lyri­cal inspi­ra­tion drawn from The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the ancient work that also informed The Psy­che­del­ic Expe­ri­ence, the guide­book by Tim­o­thy Leary and Richard Alpert (lat­er Baba Ram Dass) with which John direct­ed his own first trip. But even for the least turned-on Bea­t­le fan, “Tomor­row Nev­er Knows” was “like step­ping from a black-and-white world into full col­or,” as Schillinger puts it. The Bea­t­les might have gone the way of the Rolling Stones and cho­sen to record in an Amer­i­can stu­dio rather than their home-away-from-home on Abbey Road, the uncon­ven­tion­al use of its less-than-cut­ting-edge gear result­ed in what remains a vivid­ly pow­er­ful dis­patch from the ana­log era — even here in the twen­ty-twen­ties, when con­scious­ness expan­sion itself has gone dig­i­tal.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How John Lennon Wrote the Bea­t­les’ Best Song, “A Day in the Life”

The Amaz­ing Record­ing His­to­ry of The Bea­t­les’ “Here Comes the Sun”

The Exper­i­men­tal Move­ment That Cre­at­ed The Bea­t­les’ Weird­est Song, “Rev­o­lu­tion 9”

How “Straw­ber­ry Fields For­ev­er” Con­tains “the Cra­zi­est Edit” in Bea­t­les His­to­ry

Hear Bri­an Eno Sing The Bea­t­les’ “Tomor­row Nev­er Knows” as Part of The Best Live Album of the Glam/Prog Era (1976)

The Bea­t­les’ 8 Pio­neer­ing Inno­va­tions: A Video Essay Explor­ing How the Fab Four Changed Pop Music

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.