Ticket To Ride: a chiming riff with weight behind it
"Ticket To Ride" was recorded at EMI Studios, Abbey Road, on February 15, 1965, with George Martin producing and Norman Smith engineering. It was the first song the Beatles taped for what became the Help! album, and the afternoon session ran from 2:30 to 5:45. The "Ticket To Ride" single reached British record shops on April 9, with "Yes It Is" on the other side, and the American edition followed on April 19.
The session marked a change in how the group worked. Until then, the Beatles had rehearsed songs and recorded what amounted to a live performance. From February 1965 they increasingly taped the rhythm tracks first and built the rest on top. The Beatles Bible calls "Ticket To Ride" the first Beatles song built from the ground up. The rhythm track took two takes, the first a false start, and the second had no vocals. Earlier overdubs had been given their own take numbers, but from 1965 they went unnumbered, so a song could look as if it were finished in a handful of takes when it had needed many more recordings. The official Beatles site makes the same point: the two listed takes do not show the time spent perfecting the master.
Session notes written by Judy Martin, George Martin's wife, and summarized by the Beatles Bible, show how the four-track tape filled up. Bass and drums sat on the first track. The second carried George Harrison's Rickenbacker 12-string playing the main riff, along with John Lennon's Fender Stratocaster. The third held Lennon's lead vocal and tambourine, plus Paul McCartney's backing vocals. The fourth took further Lennon vocals, a second Harrison guitar on a Stratocaster, McCartney's Epiphone Casino, and Ringo Starr's tambourine. McCartney played both bass and lead guitar, and the Casino lines are the ones that decorate the fade-out. It was the first time he had played lead guitar on a Beatles record. Lennon double-tracked the lead vocal, McCartney sang the harmony, and Starr handled drums, tambourine and handclaps.
The drumming on "Ticket To Ride" is the part that listeners and the band noticed most. The official site says Starr's drum patterns are very different from those on a regular pop single. Lennon told David Sheff that Paul's contribution to the record was "the way Ringo played the drums." The Beatles Bible adds that McCartney reportedly suggested Starr's distinctive pattern, which fits the session account of his role.
Who wrote what has long been disputed. In one of his last interviews, Lennon claimed the song as mainly his. In his 1994 authorized biography, McCartney described 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." He said they sat down for a full three-hour songwriting session and finished with the words, the harmonies and all the little bits.
McCartney took particular pride in the ending. "Instead of ending like the previous verse, we changed the tempo," he said. The band picked up one line, "My baby don't care," and altered its melody completely. "We almost invented the idea of a new bit of a song on the fade-out with this song," he recalled, calling the fast ending "quite cheeky" and "quite radical at the time."
Lennon thought the record was ahead of its moment. In a 1970 interview, he said it was "slightly a new sound at the time," that it was heavy by the standards of the charts then, and that he liked it because the drums are heavy too. He later called it one of the earliest heavy-metal records made. The Beatles Bible says the music press heralded the single as a departure from the group's familiar territory, and it calls the unusual drum patterns and downbeat lyrics a break from the band's usual upbeat optimism. It was also the first Beatles single to run longer than three minutes. The official Beatles site lists it at 3:10.
The title has attracted several explanations. The Beatles Bible reports that McCartney's cousin Bett and her husband Mike Robbins ran a pub on Union Street in Ryde, on the Isle of Wight, and that the two songwriters once hitchhiked there. In his 2021 book The Lyrics, McCartney said the phrase referred to riding a bus or train and also to Ryde, where the cousins ran a pub. Journalist Don Short offered a different story, saying Lennon told him he coined the phrase for the health cards issued to Hamburg's street workers. The Beatles Bible notes that Short thought Lennon might have been joking.
The "Ticket To Ride" single did well. It spent three weeks at the top of the British chart and one at the top of the American one, and it reached number one in many other countries.
In the film Help!, the song accompanies shots of the Beatles on the ski slopes at Obertauern in Austria, filmed on March 20, 1965, about a month after the recording. The official site says the sequence clearly inspired the music-video style that became common in the 1980s. The Beatles also played the song live through 1965, including their final appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show and concerts at Shea Stadium and the Hollywood Bowl. When Capitol released it in the United States, the press release described it as being from "Eight Arms To Hold You," the long-running working title for the film.
- The Beatles, Ticket To Ride — www.thebeatles.com
- The Beatles, Ticket To Ride music video — www.thebeatles.com
- The Beatles Bible, Ticket To Ride — www.beatlesbible.com
- The Beatles Bible, 15 February 1965: Recording Ticket To Ride, Another Girl, I Need You — www.beatlesbible.com