The Beatles Lyric That Embraced Psychedelia With Open Arms

The Beatles‘ insistence on writing songs that spoke to their life experiences, even if those songs might not have been what the public expected, stands out as one of their most important characteristics. They took the chance their audience would follow them on this journey, and in the process, they exploded the boundaries of what pop music could be.

Perhaps no song is more emblematic of this tendency in the group than the stunning “Tomorrow Never Knows,” the final song on The Beatles’ 1966 album Revolver. It found the band providing a vivid snapshot of the psychedelic experience, through both John Lennon’s cosmic lyrics and the wildly innovative music.

Going Boldly Into “Tomorrow“

John Lennon was hanging out with Paul McCartney at the Indica Bookshop in London one day when he stumbled upon the book The Psychedelic Experience. Written in 1964 by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert, the book was a rough translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the tenets of which the authors correlated to the experience of taking psychedelic drugs.

By that time, Lennon was familiar with LSD. The book immediately captured his imagination, and he set about writing a song using some of the phrasing the authors had coined. In fact, the first line of the song that would become “Tomorrow Never Knows” came pretty much word for word from the text: Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream.

Feeling a bit self-conscious about the nature of the song, Lennon chose a title based on one of the comical phrases Ringo Starr often used. (He originally called the song “The Void,” which is a bit more daunting than “Tomorrow Never Knows.”) When he played the song for the rest of the group and producer George Martin, they were surprised to hear it was essentially all one chord in the mode of Indian music.

To dress that simplicity up, The Beatles and Martin used their studio wizardry to create a stunningly innovative track. Among the techniques used were clever miking of the bass and drums to create a pummeling, droning rhythm; tape loops that created a wild guitar “solo”; and filtering Lennon’s voice through an organ speaker to give the effect of him calling out to the faithful from a great distance.

Behind the Lyrics of “Tomorrow Never Knows”

Much as he did in “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” Lennon took source material and cut and pasted different sections to create the lyrical effect he wanted. In that way, he ingeniously condensed the book’s message into a concise, potent package.

While “Tomorrow Never Knows” is definitely tied to the experience of using LSD, you can also look at it as Lennon’s promotion of a different way of looking at life, one in which people don’t get hung up so much on the ups and downs of daily existence. It is not dying, he explains, regarding the process of shutting down one’s conscious mind.

Lay down all thoughts, surrender to the void / It is shining, he sings, suggesting enlightenment only occurs when one lets everything else go. This is a notion that’s found in many ancient philosophies. When he sings, That you may the see the meaning of within, Lennon implies all the knowledge and insight we need already sits dormant within us, waiting to be accessed.

Lennon then ties this into a message The Beatles promoted throughout their career: That love is all and love is everyone. Having laid out the path, he then ends the song by giving a glimpse of the alternative, one where the tangible, physical lives we lead are actually the illusion: Or play the game existence to the end / Of the beginning.

John Lennon would later describe “Tomorrow Never Knows” as coming from a “period” of his, and he went through many of those in his life, acquiring and later shedding different philosophies and gurus as he saw fit. What matters is he took us on that intellectual and spiritual journey with him, as he and the rest of The Beatles fearlessly transported listeners where they didn’t even know they needed to go.

Photo by Bettmann/Getty Images