Song of the Day 4/17: The Beatles, “Tomorrow Never Knows”

The Dominion-Fox lawsuit has been postponed until tomorrow. Will it even happen, or will the parties reach a settlement first? As Ringo Starr once put it, tomorrow never knows, an observation that became this song’s title when John Lennon thought its working title, “The Void,” would be off-putting.

Lennon’s trippy meditation on his LSD experience, the closing track on the Beatles’ “Revolver” LP, was pretty widely panned on its release. The strange instrumentation, the droning melody and the abstruse subject matter were literally unheard of in pop music at the time. When Paul McCartney played it for Bob Dylan months before its release, Dylan said, “Oh, I get it. You don’t want to be cute anymore,” and left the room.

Retroactively, respect for the composition is nearly universal. It makes lots of lists of the Best Songs of the Sixties and so forth, and usually ranks high on lists of the band’s best songs.