At the very mid-point of the 1960s, The Beatles’ second feature film, Help! was released. Although a more out-and-out comedy than its artsier predecessor A Hard Day's Night (which did a better job of balancing absurdism with style) Help! did arguably sport a richer songbook.
You only need to look as far as its rollocking title track, now understood to have been Lennon's anguished admission of depression, then there’s the Dylan-esque wisdom of the exquisite You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away, and of course, one of McCartney’s all-time masterworks, Yesterday. The Help! LP revealed a marked progression in the Beatles’ fortitude as songwriters.
Often overlooked by all but the most ardent Beatles-heads, Help! served as a bridge from the earlier, more chart-angled version of the band to the questing creative juggernauts that would helm many of the greatest records of all time.
Rubber Soul was just around the corner, but Help! definitely laid the groundwork.
For our money, the most effective moment in the Help! movie is the sequence depicting the Beatles skiing in the Austrian ski resort of Obertauern, synchronised to the strains of the era’s first single, Ticket to Ride. A forerunner of the music video by dent of its to-the-beat editing.
Written primarily by Lennon, (or was it… more on that later) Ticket to Ride’s distinctive chiming guitar sound was conjured by George Harrison on his 12-string 1963 Rickenbacker 360-12, rigidly in-step with Ringo Starr’s quirkily clattering drum pattern. It was a hypnotic groove that was quite different to what anyone had heard before…
Post-Beatles, John Lennon continued to hold a high opinion of the song, and retrospectively placed Ticket to Ride as a ground zero moment for rock's harder-edged pantheon.
“It was slightly a new sound at the time. It was pretty f*****g heavy for then,” claimed John Lennon in Playboy five years later. “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. If you'd give me the eight-track now, [to] remix it, I’ll show you what it is really,” Lennon said.
![The Beatles - The Beatles - Ticket To Ride (Official Music Video) [Remastered 2015] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/SyNt5zm3U_M/maxresdefault.jpg)
The gleaming, trebly shimmer of Harrison’s repetitive 12-string picking motif, and the insistent metallic thrum of the guitar drone - backed by the pulse of McCartney’s bass (and Ringo's slightly inebriated beat) melded into a somewhat breezy backing for Lennon’s self-critical lyrics, which were becoming more prevalent during this period…
She said that living with me
Is bringing her down, yeah
For she would never be free
When I was around
She's got a ticket to ride
But she don't care
Ostensibly a narrative about rejection, the smile-inducing vocal harmonies (worked up by both Paul and John) and the song's skittish time signature switch-ups, made Ticket to Ride feel anything but sad.
The relaying of the words of this partner - that it was the lyrical protagonist's own fault she was leaving him for ‘bringing her down’ - contributed to the sense that Lennon - and the Beatles more broadly - were growing up.
This wasn't the giddy prospect of young love depicted in I Want to Hold Your Hand or the heart-stopping euphoria of I Feel Fine - Ticket to Ride was the numb reality of the end of a relationship. One apparently shattered by Lennon's own hubris.
Teenage jealousy and possessiveness had been hallmarks of the younger Lennon's writing, but were now giving way to incisive self-criticism.
Perhaps the most compelling part of the lyric is that titular ‘ticket to ride’ chorus. Within the song as written, it’s clearly an indication that the girlfriend in the scenario had purchased a ticket to ride away from her partner on a bus, or train, to pastures new.
However, according to Paul McCartney, the origins of this lyric actually also nod to a real experience that he and Lennon shared in the town of Ryde on the Isle of Wight.
According to Paul, he and John had visited McCartney’s cousin Betty and her husband Mike, who were running a pub in the idyllic coastal town.
“If you really want to know, [the lyric] also referred to Ryde on the Isle of Wight, where my cousin Betty and her husband Mike were running a pub,” McCartney said in his 2021 book The Lyrics: 1956 To The Present.
“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.”
Another claim on the phrase's origins came from journalist Don Short. When interviewed in Steve Turner’s A Hard Days Write: The Story Behind Every Beatles Song, Short remembered that Lennon himself had quietly informed him of a seedier inspiration…
“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,” Short recollected.
“I was with the Beatles when they went back to Hamburg in June 1966 and it was then that John told me that he had coined the phrase ‘a ticket to ride’ to describe these cards. He could have been joking - you always had to be careful with John like that - but I certainly remember him telling me that.”
Regardless of where the phrase truly stemmed from (if not all of the above), it made for a memorable lyrical refrain.
The session for Ticket to Ride took place in the afternoon of the 15th February 1965 at EMI Studios (aka, Abbey Road) with George Martin, of course, behind the desk. “I liked it straightaway,” Martin later said.
Beyond its resulting sound, Ticket to Ride also innovated in other ways. Namely, its recording heralded a new approach for studio tracking.
Previously, the group had painstakingly learned and rehearsed each song, so the results could be captured in a live take. For Ticket to Ride, it was decided that the group would build up a foundational rhythm track, and overdub various further elements atop it.
This would soon become standard practice for pretty much every band that followed.
The session was also the first time that the Beatles would leave their four-track tape machines running throughout the session, to capture rehearsals and so not lose any better performances of parts that could later be incorporated.
Captured in just two takes, the backing track consisted of Lennon's lead vocal and rhythm guitar, Harrison on lead guitar, McCartney’s backing vocal and bass and Starr’s drums. It made for a notably hefty spine.
Played in 4/4 but with a lumbering, backbeat feel, Ringo’s Ticket to Ride approach oriented itself in the low-end of the kit, emphasising the toms. All solid evidence that Lennon was somewhat on the money when pointing to the song as one of the first examples of a heavy rock record.
This low-end focus left a great deal of space in the frequency range for George's treble-heavy 12-string, and the addition of some folky tambourines and handclaps.
There’s also the cool passivity in Ringo’s playing; it feels a bit lackadaisical, almost slightly out of time (even though it’s firmly locked in a 4/4 groove). As author David Hepworth explained, Starr's particular gift was to make it all look very easy. His distinctive style partly stemmed from his natural inclination towards his left-hand.
"No other drummer can imitate what he does on Ticket to Ride," writes Hepworth in his book, Nothing is Real. "He was born left-handed but his grandmother was superstitious and wouldn't allow him to use his left-hand. He always had to begin his fills with his left hand. In the time it took him to get from one area of the drum kit to another he would create pauses which were every bit a part of his style as the times when his sticks were coming into contact with the skins."
Syncopated with Harrison’s mesmerising riff, Ticket to Ride's trippy groove also heralded the looming era of psychedelic folk rock. As All Music’s Richie Unterberger stated, “[George’s guitar part] was a signpost for the folk-rock wave that would ride through rock music itself in 1965.”
Decades later, Madchester bands such as The Stone Roses would knowingly hinge era-defining grooves around similarly circular jangle-riffs, (see Waterfall). As well as sport moptops…
Another Ticket to Ride first was its spritely lead guitar fills, recorded not by the 12-string wielding George, but by Paul, using his left-handed strung Epiphone 230TD Casino.
This was the first time Paul had laid down a lead guitar part on a Beatle record, creating those transitional wiry fills which join the end of the two uptempo bridge sections and weave through the song’s runaway outro.
Elsewhere, the insistent, open-A guitar drone that hummed through the song like a live electrical wire was provided by Harrison on a brand new Fender Stratocaster.
Some have pointed to these drones as being the first evidence of the Beatles taking influence from Indian music, later fully explored on Revolver’s Tomorrow Never Knows.
Meanwhile, Lennon's guitar strums the song's central chord sequence, which flows in simpatico with the beat between a progression of A, Bm, E for the verse, before switching to F#m, D - F#m, G major7 - F#m to E and A for the chorus.
The bridge section however, swings us elsewhere, with Starr completely changing tack.
His more insistent beat here coincides with an attitudinal change in the lyric.
Instead of the detached clarity of the verse, the lyrical protagonist becomes embittered and prideful. Clear evidence of the reported controlling behaviour that was so bringing his former partner down:
I don't know why she's riding so high
She ought to think twice
She ought to do right by me
Before she gets to saying goodbye
She ought to think twice
She ought to do right by me
Supporting this, Ringo’s kit beat gallops away, with a slightly deranged-D7 chord adjoining it before landing on the warmth of the E and returning to the verse, via Macca’s sinewy lead.
And how about another innovation to finish up the song?
As McCartney later described, Ticket to Ride wasn’t just the first ‘heavy-metal’ song, but one of the earliest examples of a hit single that completely pivoted on its axis - driving well clear of the lulled groove verses to chaotic frontiers for its ramshackle outro.
“I think the interesting thing is the crazy ending instead of ending like the previous verse, we changed the tempo,” McCartney said in Barry Miles’ Many Years From Now. “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.”
Released as a single on the 9th April 1965, backed by plaintive B-side Yes It Is, Ticket to Ride was a resounding success, and continued the Beatles’ unbroken string of number one hit singles in both the UK and the US (their seventh in the UK, and impressively, their eighth in the US).
Although in the years prior to his death, Lennon claimed that the bulk of Ticket to Ride was written by himself alone, McCartney later contested that assertion, saying that he and John originally wrote the song together.
"Ticket To Ride was written by John and myself in the middle of some other stuff for the film at his house one afternoon,” McCartney remembered in Many Years From Now. “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 percent of it. It was pretty much a work job that turned out quite well."
Paul's vocal harmonies are indeed an intrinsic part of the song's appeal, particularly his octave-leaping 'today, yeah!’ during the verse.
Despite his later protestations of co-ownership, at the time, the younger McCartney of 1965 was fairly lukewarm on the song. "Can't say I liked Ticket… much' he told Record Mirror a mere month after the single's release.
Regardless, Lennon was proud that he had been the first to have created what, in his view, could be said to be the first ‘heavy’ song to grace the charts. Lennon saw it as firing the starting gun for the resulting wave of heavily distorted, thundering electric blues and heavy rock purveyors.
As became fairly typical in his later years, he was keen to minimise McCartney’s contribution to being just how Ringo approached the beat. Which, if you think about it, is actually a pretty major aspect of his claim.
He told David Scheff in 1980 that, “[Ticket to Ride] was one of the earliest heavy-metal records made. Paul’s contribution was the way Ringo played the drums.”
Whether it did invent heavy rock or not, journalists and commentators later reflected that Ticket to Ride was certainly one of those notable moments where the Beatles’s commercially-led drive was superseded by the pull of innovation.
It’s perhaps subtle to hear now, but in 1965, Ticket to Ride did expand what a song - particularly a chart-topping song - could and should be.
“[Ticket to Ride] was extraordinary for its time - massive with chiming electric guitars, weighty rhythm, and rumbling floor tom-toms,” wrote the late, great Beatle-author Ian MacDonald in Revolution in the Head.
“It was psychologically deeper than anything the Beatles had recorded before."
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