Personnel:
Cliff Wilson: Vocals, Guitars, Basses
Judy Wilson: Vocals, Tambourine
Louise Wilson: Vocals
Cliff Hochberg: Drums
Why this song is on the album:
This is the first song I ever sang with Louise. I was a member of the Princeton Footnotes, a men’s a cappella group; Louise was a member of the Shwiffs, a women’s group at Connecticut College. The Footnotes visited Conn College for a concert with the Shwiffs, and brought along an arrangement of Ticket to Ride borrowed from the Katzenjammers, a co-ed group at Princeton. My recollection is that it sounded great in rehearsal, but that we screwed it up pretty badly in the concert. It seems like there might have been some frisbee throwing, weed smoking and further road tripping involved in this whole deal, too.
Performance notes:
I had hoped for this to be just me and Louise on vocals, but we needed to bring in Judy for reinforcements. (Louise and I went on to record Two of Us with just the two of us.)
I own only one electric guitar, the Fender Stratocaster I bought used in 1973. (The second Strat you see in some of the photos belongs to Brad; it’s living with me during Pandemic Displacement.) All the electric guitar parts on this album were recorded with my Strat. For this song, however, I found some samples of the 12-string Rickenbacker model that George Harrison played in the intro of this song, and I used those here. Similarly, I found some samples of McCartney’s Hofner and Rickenbacker basses, and used them to supplement or replace my Fender Precision bass in some places, including this song. (I recorded the part on my Fender bass, then converted that to midi for use with the samples.)
The first song I recorded for this project was Yesterday, which had no drums. Ticket to Ride was the first song that required a drum kit. My first attempt was to bring brother-in-law Paul and his full kit into the studio. This did not go well. Paul is a truly excellent player, but I hadn’t yet learned enough about headphone mixes to give him the loud click track he would need to lock into the beat. And, while I could synch up the drums in the edit, I didn’t know how to deal with the ringing tom-toms that seemingly could not be tamed in the mix. It was bad, and I was worried about the viability of the entire project.
Within a week I had bought a used digital drum kit from Craigslist. Eventually, Cliff Hochberg came in and re-recorded the drum part, and we were back on track. Thankfully, I have learned a lot about recording drums since then. By the end of the project, I had stuck my toe back in the water, recording basic “real” drums for When I’m 64 and Can’t Buy Me Love.
How it’s different from the Beatles’ version:
The female background vocals give this recording a different vibe, as do the different strums of the rhythm guitar parts.
McCartney played the guitar solos and fills on the Beatles recording – his first foray into lead guitar – and those parts are, to my ear, a bit strange. My parts are influenced by his, but I did not attempt to copy them verbatim. The jam at the end is my own solo.
Fun fact:
Don Short, a journalist who travelled regularly with the Beatles, relates:
“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. […] 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.”
CCW