How ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ transformed music: A song too complex to ever be played live
Amadeus Mozart is a maestro — a genius, in fact — but you’ve never heard a single note from him. We may have his sheet music to show for it, but barring a few thousand of Europe’s lofty elites, nobody ever heard him play. In short, for pretty much the entirety of human existence, live music has been all there is. The modern ‘recorded’ era is the top inch on the Eiffel Tower of our musical history, yet it didn’t take long for The Beatles to create a masterpiece too complex to ever escape the studio once that inch arrived.
Granted, ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ has drawn plenty of plaudits over the years – it is an ineffably cool anthem – but when looked at as a pioneering work, the fact that it doesn’t just stand up today, but dominates the psychedelic scene, proves that it seems to have been short-changed when it comes to praise. Many great psychedelic tracks have followed, but few have rivalled it—it is the equivalent of the first-ever TV broadcast competing with Breaking Bad. That’s quite some feat for four lads from Liverpool and their savvy producer, George Martin.
While the song channels the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the swirling sentiment that LSD was imbuing upon the zeitgeist, the zenith of the song is not its wildly fresh thematic constitution but how it transformed recorded music into an artistic entity of its own rather than a modern means to an end. John Lennon may have labelled it “almost the first acid song”, but perhaps a truer epitaph would be the first song too complex to ever be played live.
Stereo sound only rose to the fore in music in 1961 with Enoch Light’s experimental break-trough Stereo 35/MM, yet a short five years later, The Beatles were sharing his experiment as a transfigured work of art with an enraptured public. They were suddenly using the studio as a new fifth member of the band, evidenced by one of Lennon’s strange demands whereby he wanted his voice to “sound like the Dalai Lama chanting from a mountaintop”.
That might be the sort of line you come across all the time now in promotional press releases, but back then, it was contrary to everything the music industry had come to expect. Lennon was bigger than Christ — why would you want your prized voice to sound anything other than instantly recognisable? Up to this point, The Beatles had mastered the key tenet of pop immediacy in the most perfunctory sense, with many of their early hits simply beginning with the title of the song. This made them instantly recognisable, instantly catchy and instantly commercial — all of which got you played on the radio by the tonne. Wanting to sound like a deity halfway up a hill is the antithesis of this.
By overlaying various tracks, this was achieved in the same way. When it was put to The Beatles that they could never recreate that live, what did they care, live was one thing and the studio was now another. This was a revolutionary take that shifted music into a new era. Nowadays, Billie Eilish can croon in a whisper to a crowd of 200,000 while her backing track consists of a perfectly balanced mix of instruments, screeching tyres edited to sound like violas, and 15 basslines blended into one. ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ was the vital first great leap in this trajectory.
For the first time, a simple C chord was stretched to its extremes with distortion, backwards looping, and multitrack layering; laughter was even sped up and textured into the mix, and note-lengthening drones blurred the picture; these hadn’t just been placed in a pop song before, they were techniques that the Beatles and Martin were inventing on the wing; in the process, completely liberating studio music from any expectation of how it might be performed—that would have to come later. As George Harrison explained, ”It was a number of experimental things that all came together on the one song.” And what a song it remains.
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