Writers: Lennon-McCartney
Recorded: February 15, 1965
Released: April 19, 1965
11 weeks; no. 1

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.

Appears On: Help!

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