Day Tripper

From Wikipedia:

“Day Tripper” is a song by the Beatles, released as a double A-side single with “We Can Work It Out“. Both songs were recorded during the sessions for the Rubber Soul album. The single topped the UK Singles Chart and the song peaked at number five on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in January 1966.

Composition

Under the pressure of needing a new single for the Christmas market, John Lennon wrote much of the music and most of the lyrics, while Paul McCartney worked on the verses.

“Day Tripper” was a typical play on words by Lennon: “Day trippers are people who go on a day trip, right? Usually on a ferryboat or something. But [the song] was kind of … you’re just a weekend hippie. Get it?“

In the same interview, Lennon said: “That’s mine. Including the lick, the guitar break and the whole bit.“

In his 1970 interview with Rolling Stone, however, Lennon used “Day Tripper” as one example of their collaboration, where one partner had the main idea but the other took up the cause and completed it. For his part, McCartney claimed it was very much a collaboration based on Lennon’s original idea.

In Many Years From Now, McCartney said that “Day Tripper” was about drugs, and “a tongue-in-cheek song about someone who was … committed only in part to the idea.” The line recorded as “she’s a big teaser” was originally written as “she’s a prick teaser.“

According to music critic Ian MacDonald, the song: “…starts as a twelve-bar blues in E, which makes a feint at turning into a twelve-bar in the relative minor (i.e. the chorus) before doubling back to the expected B—another joke from a group which had clearly decided that wit was to be their new gimmick.“

In 1966 McCartney said to Melody Maker that “Day Tripper” and “Drive My Car” (recorded three days prior) were “funny songs, songs with jokes in.“

Recording

The song was recorded on 16 October 1965. The Beatles recorded the basic rhythm track for “If I Needed Someone” after completing “Day Tripper“.

The released master contains one of the most noticeable mistakes of any Beatles song, a “drop-out” at 1:50 in which the lead guitar and tambourine momentarily disappear. There are also two more minor drop-outs at 1:56 and 2:32. Bootleg releases of an early mix (which present an extended breakdown as opposed to a polished fadeout) feature a technical glitch on the session tape itself, with characteristics of an accidental recording over the original take as the recorder comes up to speed. This was later fixed on the 2000 compilation 1 and on the remastered Past Masters.

In 1966, “Day Tripper” was featured on the US album Yesterday and Today and the British A Collection of Beatles Oldies compilation. It was later included on the 1962–1966 compilation (aka “The Red Album”), released in 1973.

Music video

The Beatles filmed three different music videos, directed by Joe McGrath, on 23 November 1965. These videos, along with a batch of other mimed performances (including the song’s flip-side, “We Can Work It Out”), were meant to be sent to various television music and variety shows, to air on those programs in lieu of personal studio appearances. The Beatles’ decision to send out independently produced videos to promote their music on television was, in practice, an embryonic form of the modern music video – George Harrison would later remark jokingly that the Beatles had “invented MTV.” One of the November 1965 promotional videos was included in the Beatles’ 2015 video compilation 1, and two were included in the three-disc versions of the compilation, titled 1+. […]

Paul McCartney in "Many Years From Now", by Barry Miles:

Day Tripper was to do with tripping. Acid was coming in on the scene, and often we’d do these songs about ‘the girl who thought she was it’… But this was just a tongue-in-cheek song about someone who was a day tripper, a Sunday painter, Sunday driver, somebody who was committed only in part to the idea. Whereas we saw ourselves as full-time trippers, fully committed drivers, she was just a day tripper. […]

I remember with the prick teasers we thought, That’d be fun to put in. That was one of the great things about collaborating, you could nudge-nudge, wink-wink a bit, whereas if you’re sitting on your own, you might not put it in.

From The Usenet Guide to Beatles Recording Variations:

• [a] stereo 26 Oct 1965.
  US: Capitol ST 2553 Yesterday & Today 1966, Apple SKBO-3403 The Beatles 1962-1966 1973.
  Australia: Parlophone PCSO 7534 Greatest Hits 2 1967.
• [b] mono 29 Oct 1965.
  UK: Parlophone R5389 single 1965, Parlophone PMC 7016 Collection of Oldies 1966.
  US: Capitol 5555 single 1965, Capitol T 2553 Yesterday & Today 1966.
  CD: EMI single 1989.
• [c] stereo 10 Nov 1966.
  UK: Parlophone PCS 7016 Collection of Oldies 1966, Apple PCSP 717 The Beatles 1962-1966 1973.
  CD: EMI CDP 7 90044 2 Past Masters 2 1988, EMI CDP 7 97036 2 The Beatles 1962-1966 1993.

The two stereo mixes differ noticeably. The lead guitar intro in [a] starts left and jumps to the right when the other instruments come in; in [c] it starts in both channels instead, apparently by ADT (artificial double tracking). As the ending begins, after the first “day tripper!”, [a] reveals an off-mike “yeah” by John, while [c] has a partially successful attempt to fade out the word.On both the stereo mixes, the lead guitar track suddenly goes silent twice around 1:50-1:55, to cover a tape or recording problem. The first spot is after the first “tried to please her” line, where, with no vocal, one side of the mix just goes dead silent, and the second spot is under the second “tried to please her”. A bootleg of the whole take reveals a squeaky tape noise at the first spot and some problem with the guitar sound for more than 10 seconds thereafter (possibly this section is a drop-in, recorded over the original sound on the track). The mono mix [b] has this all fixed somehow; there the guitar may have been dubbed in from another verse or take.

TM Century, which presses CDs for radio station play in the US, put out a sampler in 1990 with a stereo version that has the first dropout fixed. This is not a new mix but their own edit. It is apparently mix [c] with a small edit piece copied from elsewhere in [c]. This is not an official edit, nor was the record released for sale.

When I was growing up, the cost of a plan ticket was prohibitive, well beyond our budget so a ‘day trip’ was much more likely for us. Wealthy people might go to the seaside for a week or two and live it up in a hotel or boarding house, but people like us would mostly just go off somewhere for the day. The idea of the day trip was something that had a new lease of life after the Second World War. It was a way of having a break. An inexpensive holiday. If you didn’t have enough time or money, you just went out for the day and it often involved a charabanc, the old term for a bus or coach. You’d all just get on that and go for a trip. If anyone had a car – though in my family I was the first to buy one – then you could drive somewhere too.

On the way out of Liverpool, we might head ‘left’ to Wales. Maybe we’d get as far as the market town called Mold, where one of my aunties lived. The name Mold might sound a little off-putting, but it’s lovely countryside round that way. That part of the country is also full of ruins and there’s a castle in Mold that we’d go and explore. Even though we were a bit disappointed that it was mostly just a little hillock with some standing stones, it was so different to what we knew in Liverpool, which was still full of bomb sites from the war.

So, the day trip was all about the quick hit. Take the kids to a seasidey place, get some ozone down their throats. The next step up would be Butlin’s holiday camps and all the fun that came along with them such as the singing competitions and knobbly knees and bathing suit contests. That wasn’t a day trip destination. That involved going for a week. Maybe two weeks, if you were lucky. Two weeks was luxury indeed. Of course, we McCartneys had our Butlin’s connections through Uncle Mike, as we called him. In actual fact, he was our cousin-in-law. He was married to my cousin Betty and his name was Mike. So, Uncle Mike he became. He was entertainments manager at Butlin’s which was very impressive indeed. It also meant ‘mates rates’ – discounted booking prices, thank you very much.

But the mainstay was Blackpool. Blackpool was the star of day trips in the north of England. We went there sometimes just to see the lights on the pier and the Illuminations, which were really terrific. In the early 1970s, I wrote a song called ‘Blackpool’ that had the line ‘That’s the place for me’, and when you grew up in Liverpool, Blackpool felt glamorous, sort of like our version of Las Vegas. Actually it’s probably closer to Atlantic City or Reno.

There was more than a little bit of naughtiness associated with going to the seaside. I’m thinking of all those saucy postcards by the English humorous illustrator Donald McGill. Lots of double entendres and innuendoes. You know, he opened his mouth, and in-nu-en-do. Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge. That kind of thing. That sauciness was really part of the lifeblood of the country. Back in those days, people were not squeamish about having a joke that might nowadays be considered really inappropriate, off-colour, blue. And some of this risqué hinterland finds its way into ‘Day Tripper’. I think of the innuendo of ‘half the way there’. We sing ‘She’s a big teaser’ but what we mean is ‘She’s a prick teaser’. Our friends would know that was what we meant. The BBC might not. In the UK, the BBC was known as ‘Auntie’ – from its ‘Auntie knows best’ refrained and refined outlook, compared to the more garish and commercial channel ITV. So, the prudish BBC would hear ‘big teaser’, and we’d get away with it. ‘She took me half the way there.’ This was our lives. Like many young men, you’d go to the cinema on a date with a girl and you’d be trying to ‘make out’, as Americans say. That was the whole point. It wasn’t really a conversational evening. It was conversation leading to your possibly being allowed to get your hands on a girl’s breast. That would be the ideal. I mean it was a totally different world. Contraception, if it had any place at all, was fairly rudimentary. The pill was not a feature of life then – that came later. I have heard people in America talking about getting to first base, then to second base. The baseball allusion. So, this would be ‘she took me to second base’, while you’re really dreaming of getting the home run.

Another important aspect of the ‘trip’ had to do with drugs. This song dates from 1965, around the time that LSD had appeared on the scene. We’d heard talk about it, and John and George tried it first courtesy of a dinner with a dentist friend. We were just in those early stages of experimenting with it. We always thought it was good to try to work contemporary stuff into songs. Again, it’s a message to your friends. ‘So, this was a day tripper. You know, you’ll know what I mean, boys. You know, one way ticket. Took me so long to find out and I found out.’ A Sunday driver was someone who wasn’t the full thing. You weren’t getting the total pleasure of sex, or drugs, or these other new freedoms. You were just getting hints of it and ‘taking the easy way out’.

Then there’s the direct reference to a ‘one-night stand’. It’s about sex, of course. But it also refers to the music world – a show that ran for one night only.

The song is extremely economical and, if I remember correctly, written and recorded quickly in time for a Christmas release. John or George wrote the opening guitar riff, and I think it was influenced by the American soul records we were listening to. It was a big single for us, backed with ‘We Can Work It Out’ – our first double A-side because we couldn’t decide which was the better song. Otis Redding ended up covering ‘Day Tripper’ the following year.

The riff became one of our most well-known and you still often hear it played when you walk into guitar shops. It’s one of those songs that revolves around the riff. Some songs are hung onto a chord progression. Others, like this, are driven by the riff, and it does that Little Richard ‘Lucille’ thing of moving the pattern from one chord – in this case E – up to A, then over to B for the solo, where the vocals work up the scale, building to a ‘Twist and Shout’–type crescendo. It has a blues kind of structure, but we got a bit inventive in the chorus with the chords.

Like many of our songs, it’s pretty short. They were getting quite long if they were moving towards the three-minute mark. That’s just how it was. I like that we kept things succinct, and to the point – just like the day trip itself.

Paul McCartney – From Paul McCartney on Writing “Day Tripper” | Vanity Fair

Lyrics

Officially appears on

Bootlegs

Related films

Videos

Live performances

“Day Tripper” has been played in 222 concerts and 15 soundchecks.

Latest concerts where “Day Tripper” has been played

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