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.
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