Countless songs within The Beatles‘ back catalogue can be constituted as “heavy”. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr may be perceived as lighter-than-air pop heroes, but when you dig under the shining surface of their brightest numbers, there is often an undercurrent of bleak darkness. ‘Help’, ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ and ‘ Yer Blues’ are just a few examples of what they can do.
But while the band are happy to weave through the underbelly of society into their music, one of their earlier songs is heavy for another reason entirely. ‘Ticket to Ride’ is not only drenched in sordid sexuality, but it has some of the group’s first forays into the distorted sound of heavy rock.
The track was part of The Beatles’ rejection of their pop band perception. They had found their fame in 1963 and ’64 with a range of covers and upbeat blues adaptations, but as the calendar turned on to 1965, the quartet had seemingly changed their angle and a whole new range of songs, more firmly planted in the darker side of life, were now being put forward for their never-ending release schedule.
Pau McCartney, a co-writer of the song, would innocently maintain that the song was about a girl travelling to the town of Ryde. However, Lennon, the track’s principal lyricist, maintained a more sordid arc: “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,” Daily Mirror journalist Don Short once recalled of the song’s meaning according to Lennon.
“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.”
‘Ticket to Ride’ was sonically a little heavier than fans had grown accustomed to and notably made use of drone effects, showcasing the changing attitudes of the decade. “I think the interesting thing was a crazy ending: instead of ending like the previous verse, we changed the tempo,” said McCartney when speaking to Barry Miles fo Many Years From Now.
“We picked up one of the lines, ‘My baby don’t care’, but completely altered the melody,” he continued. “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.”
In truth, ‘Ticket to Ride’ was a massive moment for both The Beatles and the wider world of music. It showed that the group were pushing boundaries from the very beginning. “It was [a] slightly new sound at the time because it was pretty fuckin’ heavy for then,” Lennon said. “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.”
