About the Song:
“Driven by an indelible 12-string guitar, Ticket to Ride is another masterpiece” AM from Lennon; indeed, it is “the best pop song The Beatles had written at this stage.” AD “Instrumentally, [the] off-beat rhythm was Ringo's masterpiece.” CD “The dragging beat…adds perfectly to the lyrics’ tortured confusion.” LL
“Ticket to Ride” marks the moment “where it suddenly became obvious, to anyone paying attention, that being world-dominating pop stars wasn’t enough for this band…They were going to use their position…to bend and twist and pull the sounds on the radio, translating them into something new, something wild.” SG “It’s the sound of a band starting to bend pop music, not quite ready to break it yet.” SG
“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…‘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.” SG
This was the eighth #1 for the Beatles in the United States and their seventh in the UK. Their first trip to the top in the UK came only two years earlier in May 1963 with “From Me to You.” In the U.S., their run was even more impressive considering their first trip to the top was with “I Want to Hold Your Hand” in early 1964. Of course, the Beatles would go on to have more American #1 songs than any other group with 20, but even if their career had stopped here they’d have cemented their place as one of history’s most successful groups.
John Lennon wrote “Ticket to Ride” based on a phrase he came up with years earlier. He talked about girls working the street in Hamburg, Germany. They had to have cards from medical authorities saying they had a clean bill of health. John called it “a ticket to ride.” TC It was reportedly one of his favorite songs. DM
“’Ticket To Ride’ is a song about heartbreak.” SG “Like almost any break-up, ‘Ticket to Ride’ flickers between sadness and anger. The sadness is tentative, the anger mixed with denial, and you could read the perky coda as acceptance.” FT “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.” SG
“The lead-weighted, hesitant rhythms match our not-quite-hero’s reluctance to meet the inevitable: he thinks it’s today, affecting vagueness when the matter is out of his hands. He doesn’t deny the rightness of his girl’s diagnosis – he hardly needs to, when his resentment at her newfound decisiveness seeps through every bar.” FT
The group recorded it on February 15, 1965, supposedly in two takes. “Here, they ride their roots as a bar band in Liverpool and Hamburg to a new kind of glory.” DM Lennon sang lead, offering up “his most souful vocal ever” DM with Paul McCartney and George Harrison providing backing vocals. “Harrison’s twelve-string riffs give a touch of folk rock, McCartney adds a bluesy lead guitar and Lennon a driving rhythm. The real star of the track is Ringo, whose tempestuous drum patterns really push the urgency and anger in the song.” TC
In the book The Beatles Recording Sessions, Paul is credited with suggesting the drum pattern to Ringo. Paul also plays bass, PW his usual instrument, and serves up his first lead guitar feature on a Beatles’ single. FB Music author Paul Williams says “the most distinctive element in the recording is the lead guitar riff that opens it and threads through it.” PW
|
