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. And it’s the transitional moment where everything that was ever great about them - the melodic fire, the excitement, the wandering-spirit restlessness - came together into something beautiful. It’s a transitional moment for the Beatles. It’s the moment it became obvious that they were going to use their position as world-dominating pop stars to bend and twist and pull the sounds on the radio, translating them into something new, something wild. It’s the one where it suddenly became obvious, to anyone paying attention, that being world-dominating pop stars wasn’t enough for this band. ![]() Of all the Beatles songs that made it to #1 in the US - and there were so, so many of them - “Ticket To Ride” is, for my money, the best. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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