FEATURE:
The Girl That’s Driving Me Mad
The Beatles' Ticket to Ride at Sixty
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RECORDED on 15th February, 1965…
and released on 9th April, I want to look ahead to the sixtieth anniversary of The Beatles’ Ticket to Ride. The first single from their fifth studio album, Help!, it became The Beatles' seventh consecutive number one in the U.K. and their third consecutive number one hit (and eighth in total) in the U.S. Viewed as psychological deeper than anything the band released to that point. Ticket to Ride was primarily written by John Lennon but credited to Lennon-McCartney. One of The Beatles’ best-loved and acclaimed singles, I am going to come to some background about the song and usual information. I am going to start with some critical reaction to Ticket to Ride:
“In his contemporary review of the single, Derek Johnson of the NME admired the "depth of sound" and "tremendous drive" of the recording. Music critics Richie Unterberger of AllMusic and Ian MacDonald both feel that "Ticket to Ride" is an important milestone in the evolution of the musical style of the Beatles. Unterberger said, "the rhythm parts on 'Ticket to Ride' were harder and heavier than they had been on any previous Beatles outing, particularly in Ringo Starr's stormy stutters and rolls." MacDonald describes it as "psychologically deeper than anything the Beatles had recorded before ... extraordinary for its time – massive with chiming electric guitars, weighty rhythm, and rumbling floor tom-toms", and he views the production as a signal of the band's next major change of musical direction, with "Tomorrow Never Knows" in April 1966. MacDonald also comments that, while the Kinks' "See My Friends" has been identified as the inspiration for the Beatles' use of Indian instrumentation later in 1965, the subtle drone in "Ticket to Ride" could equally have influenced the Kinks when they recorded "See My Friends".
Writing for Mojo in 2002, musician and journalist Bob Stanley said the track was "where moptop Beatlemania ends and [the Beatles]' weightless, ageless legend begins". In his song review for Blender, Johnny Black similarly described it as a "watershed" recording and attributed its relatively poor US sales to the song's "weird soup of hypnotically chiming, droning guitars, stuttering drums and contrasting vocal textures that, in the context of the 1965 charts, was far ahead of its time". Neil McCormick of The Daily Telegraph sees a darker edge to Lennon's lyric writing during the Help! period and he cites "the drone of riffing, proto-heavy-rock song Ticket to Ride" as an example of the band's more sophisticated sound, and of how the album "contains some of their greatest early songs". Writing for Rough Guides, Chris Ingham similarly views the track as "magnificently brooding" and "the most intense music The Beatles had yet recorded". In his review of Help! for BBC Music, David Quantick includes "Ticket to Ride" among the album's "flashes of brilliance" and describes it as "the song that saw The Beatles take on The Kinks, the Stones and The Who at their own, more rocky game".
Prior to finishing off with a feature from Stereogum, I want to get to this interesting feature from the Beatles Bible. Although it has been disputed whether John Lennon wrote most of the song, it was an even split between him and Paul McCartney or McCartney deserves more credit, it is clear that this was a revelation and revolution from a band who had developed so quickly. One of their most accomplished songs to that point. It remains this masterpiece that hinted at what would follow. The Help! album was released in August 1965:
‘Ticket To Ride’ was the first song to be released from Help!, The Beatles’ fifth album. The band’s performance of the song, filmed on the ski slopes in Austria, was one of the highlights of the Help! film.
The song was written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, although the precise nature of their contributions has been disputed. In one of his final interviews, Lennon claimed it as mainly his work.
That was one of the earliest heavy-metal records made. Paul’s contribution was the way Ringo played the drums.
John Lennon
All We Are Saying, David Sheff
In his authorised biography, published in 1994, McCartney claimed ‘Ticket To Ride’ to have been a more collaborative effort.
We wrote the melody together; you can hear on the record, John’s taking the melody and I’m singing harmony with it. We’d often work those out as we wrote them. Because John sang it, you might have to give him 60 per cent of it. It was pretty much a work job that turned out quite well…
John just didn’t take the time to explain that we sat down together and worked on that song for a full three-hour songwriting session, and at the end of it all we had all the words, we had the harmonies, and we had all the little bits.
Paul McCartney
Many Years From Now, Barry Miles
McCartney also explained how he was particularly proud of the double-time coda in ‘Ticket To Ride’:
I think the interesting thing was a crazy ending: instead of ending like the previous verse, we changed the tempo. We picked up one of the lines, ‘My baby don’t care’, but completely altered the melody. We almost invented the idea of a new bit of a song on the fade-out with this song; it was something specially written for the fade-out, which was very effective but it was quite cheeky and we did a fast ending. It was quite radical at the time.
Paul McCartney
Many Years From Now, Barry Miles
The first Beatles single to be longer than three minutes, ‘Ticket To Ride’ was heralded by the music press upon its release as a departure from the group’s familiar territory. Certainly its unusual drum patterns and downbeat lyrics were a departure from The Beatles’ usual upbeat optimism.
‘Ticket To Ride’ was slightly a new sound at the time. It was pretty f*****g heavy for then, if you go and look in the charts for what other music people were making. You hear it now and it doesn’t sound too bad; but it’d make me cringe. If you give me the A track and I remix it, I’ll show you what it is really, but you can hear it there. It’s a heavy record and the drums are heavy too. That’s why I like it.
John Lennon, 1970
Anthology
The song’s meaning has been subject to a number of interpretations over the years. While ostensibly about a liberated girl choosing her own path in life, a pair of incidents in The Beatles’ past may have inspired the song in part.
McCartney’s cousin Bett and her husband Mike Robbins owned a pub on Union Street in Ryde, on the north coast of the Isle of Wight. In the early 1960s Lennon and McCartney hitch-hiked to stay with them, and several years later the journey inspired a pun on the phrase ‘ticket to Ryde’ in the song.
I remember talking about Ryde but it was John’s thing.
Paul McCartney
Many Years From Now, Barry Miles
McCartney was more forthcoming about the Ryde connection in his 2021 book The Lyrics: 1956 To The Present:
John and I always liked wordplay. So, the phrase ‘She’s got a ticket to ride’ of course referred to riding on a bus or train, but – if you really want to know – it also referred to Ryde on the Isle of Wight, where my cousin Betty and her husband Mike were running a pub. That’s what they did; they ran pubs. He ended up as an entertainment manager at a Butlin’s holiday resort. Betty and Mike were very showbiz. It was great fun to visit them, so John and I hitchhiked down to Ryde, and when we wrote the song we were referring to the memory of this trip. It’s very cute now to think of me and John in a little single bed, top and tail, and Betty and Mike coming to tuck us in.
Paul McCartney
The Lyrics: 1956 To The Present”
I am going to end with Stereogum. As part of their feature series that looks at iconic number one singles (in the U.S.), they shared their opinions on The Beatles’ Ticket to Ride in 2018. Although it only stayed at number one for a week in the U.S., it made a huge impact around the world:
“Of all the Beatles songs that made it to #1 in the US — and there were so, so many of them — “Ticket To Ride” is, for my money, the best. It’s the one where it suddenly became obvious, to anyone paying attention, that being world-dominating pop stars wasn’t enough for this band. It’s the moment it became obvious that they were going to use their position as world-dominating pop stars to bend and twist and pull the sounds on the radio, translating them into something new, something wild. It’s a transitional moment for the Beatles. And it’s the transitional moment where everything that was ever great about them — the melodic fire, the excitement, the wandering-spirit restlessness — came together into something beautiful.
John Lennon wrote most of “Ticket To Ride,” though Paul McCartney has taken credit for a decent chunk of it. And Lennon once called “Ticket To Ride” “one of the earliest heavy metal records made.” He was wrong, and he was wrong for interesting reasons. The real early heavy metal bands — including Vanilla Fudge, who released their cover of “Ticket To Ride” two years after the Beatles’ original came out — turned blues progressions into something leaden and overwhelming. That music was heavy because it dragged you down into its sodden, wrathful headspace. But what makes “Ticket To Ride” sing is its lightness — the way it’s always dancing away from you.
There are sounds on “Ticket To Ride” that had never made it anywhere near the top of the charts before. There’s George Harrison’s glistening Rickenbacher riff — a starry-eyed jangle that helped make the world safe for the Byrds and for the psychedelic folk-rock hordes that would follow. There’s the low-end drone of the bass, which foreshadowed the Beatles’ interest in Indian ragas. There’s Ringo Starr’s awkwardly perfect stop-start drumming, which sends electric shocks pulsing all through the song.
These things should’ve made brains explode when the Beatles suddenly brought them to the radio. Maybe they did; I wasn’t around to tell. But the Beatles didn’t hit #1 just by indulging their most experimental impulses. “Ticket To Ride” resonated the way it did because the band figured out how to plug these impulses into one hell of a pop song.
“Ticket To Ride” is a song about heartbreak. Lennon opens it up by wailing, “I think I’m gonna be sad / I think it’s todaaaaaay.” At the beginning of that line, he’s calm, sober, almost matter-of-fact. But by the time McCartney joins in on harmony, he’s wailing at the heavens. Throughout the song, Lennon tries to reconcile the idea that the girl is leaving, that there’s nothing he can do. And it sounds grown-up and mature, in ways that no previous Beatles song had done. Lennon is not singing about teenage heartbreak. There’s a line — “she said that living with me was bringing her down” — that suggests cohabitation. Lennon is contemplating an uncertain future, and the sounds that he’s bringing are adult, as well.
But they’re not too adult. As the song ends, the band lurches suddenly into a double-time rave-up — as if to prove that they can still supercharge your soul, or to mentally force themselves out of the song’s depression-fog. It sounds like the acid-rock wig-outs that would show up atop the charts soon enough, but it also sounds like a honky-tonk throwdown. (“Ticket To Ride” did, after all, appear on the same album where the Beatles covered Buck Owens.) “Ticket To Ride” was the first Beatles single that broke the three-minute mark — but it only broke it by 10 seconds. It’s a toe-dip, a dabble, in the waters of the infinite. It’s the sound of a band starting to bend pop music, not quite ready to break it yet. They’d break it soon enough. But on the songs where they did break it — at least on the ones that hit #1 — I don’t think they ever sounded quite this great”.
On 9th April, it will be sixty years since the release of Ticket to Ride. It is among my favourite Beatles songs. When ranking The Beatles’ single/songs. Ticket to Ride scores pretty well. I am going to end with a few articles where that is true.
I want to start with this feature from Rolling Stone. In 2020, they ranked The Beatles’ best one-hundred songs. Ticket to Ride came in seventeenth:
“Lennon once claimed that “Ticket to Ride” — the first track the Beatles recorded for the soundtrack to their second feature film, Help!, on February 15th, 1965 — was “one of the earliest heavy-metal records.”
“It was [a] slightly new sound at the time, because it was pretty fuckin’ heavy for then,” Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1970. “If you go and look in the charts for what other music people were making, and you hear it now, it doesn’t sound too bad. It’s all happening, it’s a heavy record. And the drums are heavy, too. That’s why I like it.”
After playing mostly acoustic guitar on A Hard Day’s Night and Beatles for Sale, Lennon had picked up his electric guitar for “Ticket to Ride.” A chiming 12-string riff kicks off the song with a jangly psychedelic flourish, and the guitars strut and crunch through the verses over Starr’s grinding groove. The sound was probably inspired by bands such as the Rolling Stones, the Who and the Kinks, who were all exploding out of Great Britain at the time. But the Beatles were still ahead of the competition.
“Ticket to Ride” was the first Beatles recording to break the three-minute mark, and Lennon packed the track with wild mood swings. His singing and lyrics teeter between ambivalence and despair in the verses. The bridge is a powerful double-time burst of indignation (“She oughta think right/She oughta do right/By me”). Another surprise came in the fade, an entirely different melody and rhythm with the repeated line “My baby don’t care,” sung by Lennon at the upper, stressed top of his range. “We almost invented the idea of a new bit of a song on the fade-out,” said McCartney, who also played the spiraling lead-guitar part in the coda. “It was quite radical at the time.”
The Beatles now saw making records as a goal in itself — rather than just a document of a song — and were changing their approach to recording as they got more comfortable with the possibilities of the studio. Instead of taping songs as they would play them live, picking the best take and then overdubbing harmonies or solos, the band now usually began with a rhythm track and slowly built an arrangement around it. Considering that, “Ticket to Ride” took almost no time to record: The entire track, including the overdubs, was finished in just over three hours. “It was pretty much a work job that turned out quite well,” said McCartney. “Ticket to Ride” effectively became their new theme song: The title of their final BBC radio special was changed to “The Beatles (Invite You to Take a Ticket to Ride).”
Lennon always maintained that McCartney’s role in writing the song was minimal — “Paul’s contribution was the way Ringo played the drums” — while McCartney contended that “we sat down and wrote it together” in a three-hour session at Lennon’s Weybridge home. That might account for the different stories on where the title came from: An obvious explanation is that it refers to a train ticket. (When the Beatles belatedly filmed a promotional clip for the song in November 1965, they lip-synced the song against a backdrop of gigantic transportation passes). But Don Short, a British newspaper journalist who traveled with the Beatles, claimed that it dated back to the band’s days in the red-light district of Hamburg, Germany. “The girls who worked the streets in Hamburg had to have a clean bill of health, and so the medical authorities would give them a card saying that they didn’t have a dose of anything,” he said. “John told me he coined the phrase ‘a ticket to ride’ to describe those cards.” McCartney had a more innocent explanation: He said that it was a play on the name of the town of Ryde on the Isle of Wight. One other possibility: On the day the Beatles recorded “Ticket to Ride,” Lennon passed his driver’s test”.
In 2023, NME placed Ticket to Ride sixtieth in their ranking. In 2019, The Guardian listed The Beatles’ singles in order of greatness. Ticket to Ride came in fourth. Last year, Time Out wrote how Ticket to Ride was the sixteenth-best song from the band. There is no doubting what a phenomenal and iconic song Ticket to Ride is. I discovered it as a small child and it still has this great power. One of the band’s catchiest choruses, it is a song I will always love. I wonder if Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney will mark its sixtieth anniversary somehow. On 9th April, we mark six decades of…
A work of genius.