60 Years Later: The Beatles' 'Tomorrow Never Knows' Could Be Their Most Influential Song

One has to wonder: Did the Beatles know they were about to record one of the most influential songs in rock history when they stepped into the studio 60 years ago this week?

"Tomorrow Never Knows," the last track on Revolver, was actually the first song to be recorded for the album, according to the Beatles Bible, with sessions taking place on April 6, 7, and 22.

The title (which doesn't actually appear anywhere in the song) came from one of Ringo Starr's sayings, while the lyrics were inspired by the 1964 book The Psychedelic Experience by Harvard psychologists Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert.

In Leary's introduction, John Lennon read the words, "turn off your mind, relax, float downstream" (which, of course, became the first line of "Tomorrow Never Knows").

As Paul McCartney recalled in Anthology, the song was "definitely John's."

"Round about this time people were starting to experiment with drugs, including LSD," he explained. "John had got hold of Timothy Leary’s adaptation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which is a pretty interesting book. For the first time we got the idea that, as with ancient Egyptian practice, when you die you lie in state for a few days, and then some of your handmaidens come and prepare you for a huge voyage. Rather than the British version, in which you just pop your clogs. With LSD, this theme was all the more interesting."
'Tomorrow Never Knows' helped shape the sound of modern music.

Source: yahoo.com/Jacqueline Burt Cote

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