Beatles – "Ticket to Ride" (1965)

She’s got a ticket to ride

She’s got a ticket to ride

She’s got a ticket to ride

But she don’t care

The Beatles released 17 studio albums in the United States in just over six years.

Believe it or not, 15 of those albums made it to the #1 spot on the Billboard album charts.  The two that didn’t make it all the way to #1 made it to #2.

The Beatles were great . . . but they weren’t that great.  (I doubt that it’s even possible to be that great.)

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Say something the least bit negative about the Beatles and I guarantee you’ll hear from the haters.  

2 or 3 lines has never been afraid to call ’em as I sees ’em.  When a best-selling recording artist is overrated – I’m talkin’ about you, Elvis Presley, and Bruce Springsteen, and the Grateful Dead (to name just a few) – I don’t hesitate to say so.

The people who squeal the loudest when I cut their favorites down to size are without a doubt Beatles fans.  If you question their belief that every Fab Four record is a work of unadulterated genius – much less suggest that the Beatles may not be the G.O.A.T. when it comes to pop music – the Beatlenazis squeal indignantly.

I would never question that  John Lennon and Paul McCartney (and, to a lesser extent, George Harrison) were prodigiously talented pop songwriters.  They cranked out hit songs like the rest of us crank out bowel movements.

Songs like “Taxman,” and “A Day in the Life,” and “I Am the Walrus,” and “Helter Skelter,” and “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” are as good as anything recorded in the sixties.

But “Yellow Submarine,” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” and “When I’m Sixty-Four,” and “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” and “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill,” and “Rocky Raccoon,” and “Come Together,” and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” and “Let It Be” are unadulterated crap.  

Feel free to blame drugs and/or Yoko Ono for all that crap, but please . . . don’t try to deny that the Beatles recorded a lot of crap.

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All those songs – both the really good ones and the really bad ones – came from the Beatles’ later album.  

The main issue that I have with the songs the Beatles recorded in 1964 and 1965 – which is to say before the drugs and before Yoko – is that most of them are what I would call “songlets” instead of songs.

I recently took a close look at the tracks on the Help! album – the 8th of the 17 Beatles albums released in the U.S. before the band broke up – and discovered that virtually every song on it is cast from the same mold.  

Songs like “The Night Before” and “I Need You” and “Another Girl” and “You’re Going to Lose That Girl” all contain 80 or 90 seconds of original material that is stretched to within an inch of its life in order to produce a track of acceptable length (i.e., between two and three minutes).

As I’ve discussed in the previous two posts, that stretching was accomplished through rather unimaginative repetition.   

Of course, repetition is very common in pop music.  In particular, choruses wouldn’t be choruses if they weren’t repeated.

But songwriters and record producers need to be careful with repetition.  Most of the time, you don’t want to repeat something so that it sounds exactly the same as it sounded the first time – it should be louder, or faster, or something. 

And repetition shouldn’t be utilized willy-nilly.  For example, you might close a song by repeating the first verse – but something should have happened during the course of the song that makes the verse have a somewhat different meaning the second time it’s sung than it did the first time.

Unfortunately, the Beatles repeated verses, bridges, instrumental solos . . . they repeated everything.  And many times there was no reason for that repetition except that the song would be too damn short otherwise.  

Right or wrong, one of the conventions of sixties pop music – with very occasional exceptions – is that songs need to be at least two minutes long, but not much longer than three minutes.  (There are a lot of great sixties records that are significantly longer than three minutes, but most of them aren’t exactly tight – they feature lengthy instrumental breaks, etc., that didn’t really work in the classic “Top 40” format that ruled American radio back in the day.)

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Here’s what Paul had to said about “Tell Me What You See” (which appeared on the UK version of Help! but not on the version released in the U.S.):

[This song is] not awfully memorable. Not one of the better songs, but they did a job, they were very handy for albums or “B” sides.  

He could have said the same thing about “Another Girl” and “The Night Before” and “You’re Going to Lose That Girl,” all of which I picked on in the previous two posts.

None of those songs were hit singles – unless you owned the Help! album, you may have never heard them.  So you might think I’m intentionally cherry-picking from the Beatles’ weaker songs here to make my point.

But what about “Ticket to Ride”?  

It was a #1 single for the Beatles in 1965, and Rolling Stone magazine ranked it as one of the twenty best Beatles songs ever.

Be that as it may, it’s still a songlet.

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There’s not a lot to “Ticket to Ride” – it’s half filler, like a padded bra. 

The verses are quite short – two lines per stanza.

The bridge is four lines long – but the fourth line is identical to the second one.

And the chorus is a typical Beatles chorus:

She’s got a ticket to ride

She’s got a ticket to ride

She’s got a ticket to ride

But she don’t care

(Come on, guys – would it have hurt you to put a little more effort into your choruses?)

Add it all up and there’s barely 80 seconds of original material. 

I’m going to be generous and allow the Beatles to repeat the first verse after the bridge – that would have made the song roughly two minutes long, which would have been acceptable (barely) by the standards of the sixties.

But the Beatles not only repeated the first verse, they repeated the bridge and then repeated the second verse as well.

In other words, the Beatles essentially performed their little songlet twice.  First, they did verse 1/chorus/verse 2/chorus bridge.  Then they did verse 1/chorus/bridge/verse 2/chorus.

All that effort to stretch “Ticket to Ride” to just over three minutes long – making it the first Beatles recording to break the three-minute mark.

That is a very telling fact.

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“Ticket to Ride” is a catchy, charming little song – I wouldn’t dream of changing stations when it comes on the radio.

But a lot of my feelings about the song are based in nostalgia – they say that the pop music you like the best is the music that was popular when you were a teenager, and God knows that’s true of baby boomers and their affection for the Beatles.

Apologies to my fellow boomers.  I love “Ticket to Ride,” and so do most critics.  But I would be more enthusiastic about it if the Beatles had put a little more effort into the chorus, written three verses instead of just two, and skipped repeating the bridge.

When my kids were young, we got a babysitter and went to a movie every Sunday just to get out of the house.  Most of the movies we saw seemed pretty good while we were watching them – they at least pulled you in and held your attention until the climax.  

But if you thought them about on the way home, or talked about them with your friends at work the next day, you realized that they didn’t really hang together all that well.  There were often flaws in the script that you didn’t notice at first, but that became apparent if you analyzed them.

“Ticket to Ride” is kind of like one of those movies.  When it comes on the radio, it grabs me – I turn up the volume and happily sing along to it.  But when I sit down with the lyrics in front of me and listen to it more critically, the fact that it’s a somewhat flimsy piece of work is all too apparent.

 

There are other songs from 1965 – “Satisfaction” and “My Generation” are two good examples – that are so much more satisfying.  

“Ticket to Ride” was a #1 hit that still has great appeal.  

But “Satisfaction” and “My Generation” are true works of art that captured the zeitgeist.  They mattered in a way that “Ticket to Ride” and all the other Beatles hits from that era didn’t.

Click here to listen to “Ticket to Ride.”

And click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: