THE BEATLES - “Ticket To Ride”
(24th April 1965)
Like almost any break-up, “Ticket To Ride” flickers between sadness and anger. The sadness is tentative, the anger mixed with denial, and you could read the perky coda as acceptance if you like. It sounds to me, though, like a tacked-on “Beatley bit” - even unto the handclaps - appeasing anyone put off by the startling drone and drag of the song proper. Which is thankfully great enough to shrug off such crassness.
It’s an acute lyric with a coy drug reference or two if you’re squinting right - but “Ticket To Ride” works because the music fits that lyric so well. The lead-weighted, hesitant rhythms match our not-quite-hero’s reluctance to meet the inevitable: he thinks it’s today, affecting vagueness when the matter is out of his hands. He doesn’t deny the rightness of his girl’s diagnosis - he hardly needs to, when his resentment at her newfound decisiveness seeps through every bar. 8
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Anonymous on February 23rd, 2005
This is, of course, a major turning point in the Beatles’ career, one that foreshadows Rubber Soul. 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. This is well beyond adolescent romance, full of the tangled issues of adult life. 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. 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 [non-]marital cohabitation in mainstream pop. 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.
Doctor Mod | Email | 02.21.05 - 1:55 am | #
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i hear you can bootleg this song with pretty much anything given a raw enough vocal style
Alan | 02.21.05 - 5:03 am | #
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The irony of the LBO’s efforts is that I’d forgotten how relatively lugubrious the original is.
Tom | Homepage | 02.21.05 - 5:37 am | #
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A 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. The band didn’t seem too happy with our experiment but science won the day.
robster | Email | 02.21.05 - 6:03 am | #
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hahaha, that will have been at my instigation, following the london bootleg orchestra’s original discovery at glastonbury…
carsmile | Email | 02.21.05 - 7:11 am | #
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I’d heard that Lennon actually wrote this as ” Ticket to Ryde “, as in Ryde in the Isle of Wight.
Lennonword play that got “corrected” by a publishers eventual error.
Brian C | Email | 02.21.05 - 9:56 am | #
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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.
Tom | Email | Homepage | 02.21.05 - 9:59 am | #
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So if it is/was Ryde - it becomes your basic 3-way ( pun that is )…..
Brian C | Email | 02.21.05 - 10:11 am | #
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My Favourite Beatles song. I like what Dr. Mod says about the lyrics and it’s a musical step forward too with it’s humpback rhythm and slightly heavier, more stagey guitar delivery. I read that Paul came up with the drum part and taught Ringo to play it that way. I love the phrase “I *think* I’m gonna be sad/I *think* it’s today”. He *thinks*, he doesn’t know.
Dr. C | Email | 02.21.05 - 10:35 am | #
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A technical critique of every Beatles song :
http://www.recmusicbeatles.com/public/files/awp/awp.html
Brian C | Email | 02.21.05 - 10:51 am | #
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Lennon actually wrote this as ” Ticket to Ryde “, as in Ryde in the Isle of Wight
Influenced, no doubt, by the Marvin Gaye classic “Can I Get To Widnes?”
LondonLee | Email | Homepage | 02.21.05 - 11:56 am | #
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This is where I came in. Hit number 1 on my birthday. I like to think I was at least partly responsible for the ‘major turning point’ mentioned above.
jeff w | 02.21.05 - 2:18 pm | #
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That goes without saying, Jeff
Dr. C | Email | 02.21.05 - 4:54 pm | #
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Lennon actually wrote this as ” Ticket to Ryde “, as in Ryde in the Isle of Wight
Influenced, no doubt, by the Marvin Gaye classic “Can I Get To Widnes?”
Or even ‘Sexual Ealing’.
rosie | Email | 02.21.05 - 6:32 pm | #
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My second-favorite Beatles song*. And even Lou Reed, for all that he swears he always hated the Beatles, couldn’t resist ripping it off: “There She Goes Again” from the first Velvets album is essentially “Ticket To Ride” played sideways.
*”Paperback Writer” still rules my hert.
Jack Fear | Email | Homepage | 02.22.05 - 9:38 am | #
Frank Kogan on March 3rd, 2005
From Why Mucus Slacks (WMS#4, 1988), this comment from John W�jtowicz: “Remember the highway sign that read ‘RYE’ with ‘PLAYLAND’ underneath? Mark Hatton once told me that, as a child, some of his best times were at Playland, and so he could not understand the girl whom the Beatles were singing about: ‘She’s got a ticket to Rye - and she don’t care!’ (Young Mark: ‘Why would anyone not want to go to Playland?’)”
(Hatton’s also the fellow who said, “If I hear a bustle in my hedgerow, I’m reaching for my shotgun.”)
OLREG on December 29th, 2005
She’s got a ticket to rye,
She’s got a ticket to rye yy,
She’s got a ticket to rye,
But she don’t care
I don’t profess to know where it came from but nowhere in the song do you hear the word ride. Hell, maybe Paul knows.
jeff w on September 27th, 2006
Dave Cousin on December 16th, 2007
I always thought that the lyrics were ‘ticket to Rye’ when I was young up until when I was about 9 or 10 then I was told it was ‘Ride’, but It seems they were singing Rye after all then so I was right to begin with.