Ticket To Ride
	no production credits
	Released on April 1965
	UK CHART POSITION #1 (RE-CHART POSITION #70, 1985) . . . US CHART POSITION #1 (B-SIDE CHART POSITION #39) . . . ROLLING STONE TOP 500 SONGS: #384
	Find it at GEMM
5407 wo. picture sleeve [high resolution scan]

I n the Seventies Apple issued the Blue and Red albums, which featured an actual discography of The Beatles including singles with the B sides (!) listed. Imagine. Anyway, one single in particular always caught my eye: “Ticket To Ride/Yes It Is.” (I don’t know who first came up with the idea of separating A and B sides by a forward slash, but we’re still doing it today.) You see, “Yes It Is” hadn’t appeared on any album yet, so it was a complete mystery to me. A Beatles song I hadn’t even heard of before? I won’t liken it to finding the lost Dead Sea scrolls, but it did make my world a little larger. When I heard “Yes It Is” for the first time, larger still. It’s a mopey, downbeat ballad wherein John laments a lost love and the guitars drift in and out like ghosts. It puts a lump in my throat every time. “Ticket To Ride” (aah, finally getting to the A side) is an early cousin to “Norwegian Wood,” experimenting with feedback while watching a relationship fall apart from a detached distance. Speculation on the song’s true meaning apparently runs rampant, so I’ll spare you from the sparring on Songfacts this time. Yes, The Carpenters did do a version of “Ticket To Ride.” And, yes, it did blow giant monkey chunks.

TRACK LISTING

1. TICKET TO RIDE    (John Lennon/Paul McCartney)    3:02
2. YES IT IS    (John Lennon/Paul McCartney)    2:40

CREDITS

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