Tomorrow Never Knows takes us back to the primal scene of the 1960s and asks: what happened when young people got high and listened to rock as if it really mattered - as if it offered meaning and sustenance, not just escape and entertainment? What did young people hear in the music of Dylan, Hendrix, or the Beatles? Bromell's pursuit of these questions radically revises our understanding of rock, psychedelics, and their relation to the politics of the 60s, exploring the period's controversial legacy and the reasons why being "experienced" has been an essential part of American youth culture to the present day.

"[A] short, passionate study written from inside the history it tells." - Greil Marcus, salon; "Music historians and social historians understate the interrelations among drugs, rock and roll, and the sixties, in part because most are thoroughly daunted by them as writers and thinkers. Nick Bromell renders them like he's been there and understands them like he's thought long and hard about them afterward. Tomorrow Never Knows reads like the best journalistic criticism both stylistically and interpretively - it's vivid, credible, and original." - Robert Christgau; "Tomorrow Never Knows brings us closer to the heart of what we call the sixties than any other book I know." - Jon Wiener, The Nation; "Bromell is aware of the underside of drug use, but he makes a convincing case that... the Sixties produced a way of seeing the world that succeeding generations can learn from." - Rolling Stone

Nick Bromell is professor of English and American literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, as well as the author of By the Sweat of the Brow: Literature and Labor in Antebellum America, also published by the University of Chicago Press.