There is a very funny section in Simon Garfield’s The Nation’s Favourite where Radio 1 decide to resurrect the “Ticket To Ryde” pun for some unspeakable bit of organised jollity. Lennonword play that got “corrected” by a publishers eventual error. I’d heard that Lennon actually wrote this as ” Ticket to Ryde “, as in Ryde in the Isle of Wight. Hahaha, that will have been at my instigation, following the london bootleg orchestra’s original discovery at glastonbury…Ĭarsmile | Email | 02.21.05 – 7:11 am | # The band didn’t seem too happy with our experiment but science won the day. The irony of the LBO’s efforts is that I’d forgotten how relatively lugubrious the original is.Ī drunken Sinister crowd once attempted to Prove By Science TTR’s versatility by singing it loudly over every song played by an awful pub band in Finsbury Park. I hear you can bootleg this song with pretty much anything given a raw enough vocal style It’s not something the average adolescent could completely understand, but the song retains its appeal forty years on as most of us have by now learned exactly what it means.ĭoctor Mod | Email | 02.21.05 – 1:55 am | # I recall that some were shocked about the line “She said that living with me was bringing her down / She would never be free when I was around.” This might be one of the first suggestions of marital cohabitation in mainstream pop. There are no parental or other authority figures to blame–just him, her, and the eponymous “ticket,” and he’s trying to make sense of it all. This is well beyond adolescent romance, full of the tangled issues of adult life. There had been “resentful dumpee” lyrics before (e.g., “I’ll Cry Instead”), but this one is far more complex than any of the previous. But on the songs where they did break it - at least on the ones that hit #1 - I don’t think they ever sounded quite this great.This is, of course, a major turning point in the Beatles’ career, one that foreshadows Rubber Soul. It’s the sound of a band starting to bend pop music, not quite ready to break it yet. It’s a toe-dip, a dabble, in the waters of the infinite. (“Ticket To Ride” did, after all, appear on the same album where the Beatles covered Buck Owens.) “Ticket To Ride” was the first Beatles single that broke the three-minute mark - but it only broke it by 10 seconds. It sounds like the acid-rock wig-outs that would show up atop the charts soon enough, but it also sounds like a honky-tonk throwdown. As the song ends, the band lurches suddenly into a double-time rave-up - as if to prove that they can still supercharge your soul, or to mentally force themselves out of the song’s depression-fog. Lennon is contemplating an uncertain future, and the sounds that he’s bringing are adult, as well.īut they’re not too adult. There’s a line - “she said that living with me was bringing her down” - that suggests cohabitation. Lennon is not singing about teenage heartbreak. And it sounds grown-up and mature, in ways that no previous Beatles song had done. Throughout the song, Lennon tries to reconcile the idea that the girl is leaving, that there’s nothing he can do. But by the time McCartney joins in on harmony, he’s wailing at the heavens. 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. “Ticket To Ride” is a song about heartbreak. “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. But the Beatles didn’t hit #1 just by indulging their most experimental impulses. These things should’ve made brains explode when the Beatles suddenly brought them to the radio. There’s Ringo Starr’s awkwardly perfect stop-start drumming, which sends electric shocks pulsing all through the song. There’s the low-end drone of the bass, which foreshadowed the Beatles’ interest in Indian ragas. 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 are sounds on “Ticket To Ride” that had never made it anywhere near the top of the charts before. But what makes “Ticket To Ride” sing is its lightness - the way it’s always dancing away from you. That music was heavy because it dragged you down into its sodden, wrathful headspace. The real early heavy metal bands - including Vanilla Fudge, who released their cover of “Ticket To Ride” two years after the Beatles’ original came out - turned blues progressions into something leaden and overwhelming. And Lennon once called “Ticket To Ride” “one of the earliest heavy metal records made.” He was wrong, and he was wrong for interesting reasons. John Lennon wrote most of “Ticket To Ride,” though Paul McCartney has taken credit for a decent chunk of it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |