“Tomorrow Never Knows” by The Beatles

"Tomorrow Never Knows" closes Revolver, released in August 1966, yet it was the first thing the Beatles cut for the album, and it's where they stopped caring whether any of it could be played on a stage. John Lennon wrote most of it, fired up by LSD and by Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner's The Psychedelic Experience, and the track barely strays from a single chord, with George Harrison's droning tambura and Ringo Starr hammering a lopsided beat that never lets go.

On top it's pure mad science: homemade tape loops thrown in live over the backing, guitars running backwards, and Lennon's voice pushed through a Leslie cabinet so he sounds like he's chanting from a mountaintop. George Martin produced and Geoff Emerick engineered. Plenty of fans and critics were baffled or scornful at first; psychedelic and electronic music have been borrowing from it ever since.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.