That Was the Ticket!

Song 229: This week's playlist song is Ticket to Ride by The Beatles, written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. The Beatles had totally rocked my world from the moment of that February 1964 Ed Sullivan Show appearance, and I listened to every song by them that I could get to hear, but since the rest of my family, other than my little brother, didn't like the Fab Four, and actually disapproved of their music, I could mostly only hear them, and other rock and rollers, by visiting friends who had the records, or occasionally sneaking some listening time on the transistor radio somewhere alone. Under those circumstances, I couldn't really follow the progress of their latest releases, so when a classmate brought this new record into our music class at the end of the school year in June of '65, I could feel the earth rocking once again. I had already loved their music, but it had never occurred to me that they could get even better, yet somehow they did. Over the course of my own development as a musician, I went through various rounds of understanding and appreciating the music of The Beatles. At a certain point, having learned to play Ticket to Ride, I marveled at the chording on the tune -- as Dylan said of the mop tops, "Their chords were just outrageous," and they were. In Evanston in the mid-'70s, a singer/songwriter friend once remarked to me about the double-time effect at the end of this track, which I hadn't fully appreciated until he pointed it out. A decade later, my Oakland friend Doug, as an ex-drummer who shared my affection for the music of The Beatles, spoke about the unique, sort of off-balance (as he put it) drum beat on this record that I had also somehow never focused on, and I found myself marveling again. Then, in the 2007-2009 era, working on recordings of my own music with my production partner David Seitz, I began to hear elements of record sound quality that I had missed before, and I recognized that some of the songs I like were produced (recorded and mixed) much better than others. In this process, I noticed the consistently high production quality of Beatles records, and when I mentioned this to David, he remarked that despite all the improvements in recording over the 5 intervening decades, in terms of sound production quality, some of those old Beatles sides still can't be beat, or even equalled, and Ticket to Ride still stands as one of the best-sounding rock and roll records ever produced. If you're not sure, put on some headphones and compare it to a dozen other tracks, from any era, and I bet you'll probably agree.