Ticket to Ride (song)

• 1. Introduction

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  "Ticket to Ride" arrived in April 1965 and sounded like nothing the Beatles had released before. Recorded at EMI Studios in London on the 15th of February that year, the track carried a weight and a drone that sat uneasily alongside the beat-pop filling the charts around it. Ian MacDonald, one of the most perceptive writers to examine the Beatles' catalogue, described it as "psychologically deeper than anything the Beatles had recorded before" and "extraordinary for its time". John Lennon later claimed it was the first heavy metal record ever made. Whether or not that holds up, something genuinely strange and new was happening in that recording studio. Where did that heaviness come from? Who actually wrote the song, and what does it mean? And why did a track that reached number 1 on both sides of the Atlantic fail to earn gold accreditation in America?

• 2. The Writing Dispute

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  Lennon's account of who wrote "Ticket to Ride" shifted considerably depending on when he was asked. In 1965, close to the recording, he told an interviewer the song was "three-quarters mine and Paul changed it a bit. He said let's alter the tune." By 1980, Lennon had revised that assessment downward, saying McCartney's contribution amounted to little more than suggesting the drum pattern Ringo Starr played. McCartney's own version, given in his 1997 authorised biography, reads quite differently. He described a full three-hour songwriting session in which the two sat down together, and offered to give Lennon sixty percent of the credit. The credit line on the record, as on virtually all Beatles originals, reads Lennon-McCartney. What is not in dispute is the structural ambition of the composition. The song uses an expanded version of the standard AABA pop format, with a nine-bar primary bridge rather than the more typical eight. A sustained A chord over the verses creates an implied drone that MacDonald likens to a "raga-like" melody, drawing a connection to Indian classical music. Simon Philo, another author who examined the track, called it "avant-garde masquerading as pop".

• 3. Inside the Recording

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  The session on the 15th of February 1965 was the Beatles' first since completing their Beatles for Sale album the previous October. In between, they had toured the UK and performed a season of Christmas shows in London. Author Mark Lewisohn identified this session as the opening of what he calls "a more serious application in the recording studio" by the group, including taping rehearsals and concentrating on rhythm tracks before adding overdubs. Musicologist Walter Everett regarded the recording as a radical departure, noting that vocals and lead guitar parts were overdubbed for the first time. George Harrison played the main guitar riff on his Rickenbacker 12-string, a part that went down with the rhythm track. Harrison said the riff came from watching how Lennon strummed the chord when first showing the song to the band. That staggered motion, Harrison recalled, then inspired the drum pattern that Ringo Starr chose to play. Author Mark Hertsgaard highlighted the idea for the riff and for Starr's "jagged, whack-and-jump" drum pattern as evidence of McCartney's growing role as the band's musical director. McCartney also supplied the guitar fills that close the bridges and the solo over the coda, playing an Epiphone Casino. The coda itself shifts to double-time, built on a repeated phrase close to "My baby don't care", played over a constant A major chord. Lennon said that closing section was one of his "favourite bits" in the song.

• 4. What the Title Actually Means

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  McCartney and Lennon offered entirely different explanations for the phrase "ticket to ride", and neither can be verified from the lyric alone. McCartney said it referred to a British Railways ticket to the town of Ryde on the Isle of Wight. Lennon said it described cards carried by prostitutes in Hamburg during the 1960s, indicating a clean bill of health. The Beatles had played Hamburg early in their career, and Lennon pointed out that "ride" was British slang for sex. Gaby Whitehill and Andrew Trendall of Gigwise read the song as the story of a woman leaving her boyfriend to enter that world. The lyrics themselves describe a girl riding out of the narrator's life, leaving him to cope with the loss. Whether the ambiguity was deliberate or simply unresolved, it gave critics something to argue about for decades. Neil McCormick of The Daily Telegraph found a darker edge to Lennon's lyric writing during the Help! period generally, and pointed to this song as an example of the more sophisticated, brooding tone the band was developing.

• 5. Chart History and Release

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  The record was issued by EMI's Parlophone label on the 9th of April 1965 in the United Kingdom, and by Capitol Records on the 19th of April in the United States. It went straight to number 1 on the Melody Maker chart, held that position for three weeks, and topped Ireland's chart in its first week. In the UK overall, it sat at number 1 for three weeks, making it the seventh consecutive chart-topping single for the Beatles there. On the Billboard Hot 100 in America, it held the top spot for one week. A notable fact printed on the US single's label identified the A-side as coming from the forthcoming United Artists film Eight Arms to Hold You, the original title of the Beatles' second film. The title was changed to Help! after the single's release. The song also became notable as the first Beatles track released with a running time exceeding three minutes. In America, it was the third of six consecutive number 1 singles the Beatles placed, a record at the time, alongside "I Feel Fine", "Eight Days a Week", "Help!", "Yesterday" and "We Can Work It Out", all within twelve months beginning in January 1965. When "Ticket to Ride" hit the top spot, the Beatles became the fourth consecutive British group to hold it, following Freddie and the Dreamers, Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, and Herman's Hermits. As part of EMI's anniversary reissue programme, the song returned to the UK chart in April 1985, peaking at number 70.

• 6. Film, Television, and Promotion

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  A portion of the Beatles' Top of the Pops performance of "Ticket to Ride" survived only because it was incorporated into the Doctor Who episode "The Executioners", broadcast on BBC1 on the 22nd of May 1965. The episode was part of the serial The Chase, in which the Doctor uses a time-space machine to observe historical figures including William Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln, and the Beatles. The song also features in the film Help! itself, directed by Richard Lester, during a sequence in which the band attempts to ski while avoiding assassins from a cult pursuing Ringo Starr. That scene was filmed at Obertauern in the Austrian Alps in March 1965. On the 23rd of November that year, the Beatles filmed promotional clips for "Ticket to Ride" and four other songs at Twickenham Film Studios in south-west London. The director was Joe McGrath, who had assisted Lester on Help!. The clip showed the band miming against a backdrop of oversized tickets, with Starr standing at his kit and the others seated in director's chairs. Part of the clip appeared in the 1995 documentary The Beatles Anthology; the full version was included on their 2015 video compilation 1. The band also performed the song during their last BBC Radio session, on the 26th of May 1965, broadcast under the title The Beatles (Invite You to Take a Ticket to Ride).

• 7. Critical Standing

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  Derek Johnson, reviewing the single for the NME on its release, praised the "depth of sound" and "tremendous drive" of the recording. In 2002, Bob Stanley wrote in Mojo that the track was "where moptop Beatlemania ends and the Beatles' weightless, ageless legend begins". Johnny Black, writing in Blender, called it a "watershed" recording and attributed its relatively modest US sales to a "weird soup of hypnotically chiming, droning guitars, stuttering drums and contrasting vocal textures" that was well ahead of the 1965 charts. Dave Marsh ranked it 29th on his 1989 list "The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made". Rolling Stone placed it at number 17 on their list of the 100 greatest Beatles songs, and Mojo ranked it at number 23 on a comparable list. In 2009, PopMatters placed it at number 10 among the 25 "Classic" Beatles tracks, describing those as songs through which listeners might gain the deepest appreciation for the band's popular genius. USA Today named it the best Beatles song in 2014, calling it "perfection all the way through". MacDonald went further than chart positions and awards, arguing that the subtle drone in "Ticket to Ride" could equally have influenced the Kinks when they recorded "See My Friends" later that same year. He also identified the recording as a signal pointing toward "Tomorrow Never Knows", released in April 1966.

• 8. A Song Covered and Transformed

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  Richard Carpenter heard "Ticket to Ride" being played as an oldie early in 1969 and decided it would make a nice ballad. The Carpenters' version, released as their debut single, transformed the song into the lament of a castoff lover, opening with the repeated line "I think I'm gonna be sad". Karen Carpenter sang lead and played drums; Herb Alpert played shaker; Joe Osborn played bass. The single peaked at number 54 on the Billboard Hot 100 in May 1970 and reached number 19 on the Adult Contemporary chart. Its success was enough that the parent album was reissued under the title Ticket to Ride. Before the Carpenters' version, George Harrison's former Beatle colleague George Martin covered the song for an orchestral album also titled Help!, and Billboard's reviewer considered it worth the price of the album. Mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian opened her 1967 album Beatles Arias with a baroque interpretation arranged by Luciano Berio, having first performed it at Carnegie Hall and surprised her audience. Alma Cogan, with whom Lennon had an extramarital affair, covered "Ticket to Ride" in the style of Dionne Warwick for her final album, Alma, released a year after her death in 1966. Hüsker Dü contributed a version to NME's Big Four EP distributed free with the 1st of February 1986 issue of the magazine. Echo and the Bunnymen recorded a version in 2001, later cited as one of the ten best Beatles covers by Vulture.com. And on some releases of The Dark Side of the Moon, a brief orchestral sample of "Ticket to Ride" can be heard faintly at the end of "Eclipse", the closing track on Pink Floyd's eighth studio album.