Paul – lead
vocals, bass, lead guitar
John – harmony vocals, piano, tambourine
George – harmony vocals, guitar
Ringo – drums, cowbell
‘Drive My Car’ is an archetypal Lennon-McCartney collaboration. The idea and initial concept of the song came from Paul, who was developing a fairly standard ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’-type rocker. The lyrics are typically Paul in structure, in that the first line of indirect speech from “him” is followed in all three verses by “And she said” her response. However, with John’s influence and Paul’s reaction to his suggestions, this became an unusual story of role reversal, situations vacant and requited love. (Role reversal was apparently much on John’s mind at this time, as he explored it further in ‘Norwegian Wood’.) Paul’s rather unadventurous original line “I can give you golden rings / I can give you anything” was changed, inverted and given a new twist.
The change didn’t come easy, however. Paul remembers hitting a brick wall when trying to rethink the “disastrous” original lyric.
“We tried, and John couldn’t think of anything, and we tried and eventually it was, ‘Oh let’s leave it, let’s get off this one.’ ‘No, no. We can do it, we can do it.’ So we had a break, maybe had a cigarette or a cup of tea, then we came back to it … and then it was wonderful because this nice tongue-in-cheek idea came and suddenly there was a girl there, the heroine of the story, and the story developed and had a little sting in the tail like ‘Norwegian Wood’.”
So the song progresses from a finely choreographed mating ritual between a confident, mature prospective female employer and erstwhile young lover to an optimistic partnership of equals where neither has actual money, power or status, but both have everything to gain. The joyful “beep beeps”, answered at the end by an uncontrollably ebullient guitar, show that driving a car is an irrelevance, and that what both have in mind is indeed a “better time”.
The creation of this brash Hollywood wanna-be is evidently a result of the range of women the two had met in the previous eighteen months or so of touring the world, and in particular America. Long gone are the images of submissive girls who only inadvertently made their hearts go boom, who had to be persuaded to please please them, who asked them to let her boyfriend know that she loves him, or who were waiting at home while they were out getting her money to buy her things. Even on the previous album, John’s songs were mostly about the winning or losing (‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’, ‘You’re Going To Lose That Girl’, ‘Ticket To Ride’) of girls. Now these girls have become women, and new territory is opened up.
Paul was happy to push the envelope. “To me it was LA chicks, ‘You can be my chauffeur’, and it also meant ‘you can be my lover’. ‘Drive my car’ was an old blues euphemism for sex, so in the end all is revealed. Black humour crept in and saved the day.”
The previous four albums had opened with a direct vocal assault – ‘It Won’t Be Long’, ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ (admittedly preceded by that single chord), ‘No Reply’ and ‘Help!’. This one starts with a disorientating 4/4–9/8 guitar introduction that is immediately enhanced by the reassuring appearance of the bass which adopts the home key of D.
The song is then launched, with cowbell, tambourine and all, by Ringo’s snare/tom-tom and cymbal. The style of the song is very much one-note, in the mould of John’s ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ or Paul’s ‘I’m Down’ (itself inspired by the ultimate one-note song, ‘Long Tall Sally’). It is the combination of cowbell, tambourine and bass that gives the track its percussive feel, the drums themselves being relatively low in the mix.
Throughout the verses, the tambourine predicts the rhythm of the “beep beep m beep beep”. The vocal “beep beep” hook, incidentally, was introduced by Paul “in the studio live”.
The vocal track, with Paul’s raunchy lead underpinned by John’s stabilising harmony, has their two voices as far apart as they have been so far, and yet they still come across as a single vocal instrument. George joins them for the last line of the verse to give a sound similar in its strident effect (but more satisfying in context) to that used in ‘The Word’. This features a flattened third and augmented fifth in an A7 (V7) chord.
John and Paul’s voices close somewhat for the chorus line, doubling up for the off-hand but teasingly conditional “and maybe I’ll love you”.
The vocal cluster of “you can do something in between” merits a bit of a closer look – it’s an audacious and striking concoction that takes the A7 and slaps on an E# and a B# to make something like an A7#5#9. All, of course, done by just having the courage to build up a chord without a thought for a minor sixth, but just for the fact that slipping in that E# made the chord more interesting and mischievous.
It’s also interesting to compare the move to the chorus with an almost identical move in ‘We Can Work It Out’, recorded some two weeks later and released on the same day. The chord changes into the chorus of ‘Drive My Car’ are the same as those into the bridge of ‘We Can Work It Out’, but with very different effects. For ‘Drive My Car’, the move to Bm stays in the original key of G major and is simply a shift to the submediant (vi). In ‘We Can Work It Out’, however, the whole mood changes and the move can be thought of as the root of the new home key – for the bridge at least – of B minor.
There is some confusion about who plays what on this first Rubber Soul track – George is sometimes credited as playing the bass, and Paul the piano – for a couple of reasons. In Anthology, George says, “I played the bassline on ‘Drive My Car’. It was like the line from ‘Respect’ by Otis Redding”. However, he says “bassline”, not “bass” – he was clearer when interviewed by Crawdaddy magazine in 1977: “But on ‘Drive My Car’ I just played the line, which is really like a lick off ‘Respect’ – you know, the Otis Redding version – and I played that line on guitar and Paul laid that with me on bass.” Also, the album sleeve is almost certainly incorrect in stating “Paul on piano”. George confirmed in the Crawdaddy interview that Paul played lead guitar, and the stereo mix indicates piano and guitar were recorded on the same track (and appear together during the fade, ruling out any possibility that the piano was punched in), suggesting John was seated behind the piano.
The electric sound of the track gives Rubber Soul a powerful and exciting start, but misrepresents the content of the album.
This opening song gives only some indication of the depth of music, and range of tracks that will follow. For now, it seems to follow an approximately linear development from ‘Ticket To Ride’ and ‘Day Tripper’, with a standard D–G (I–IV) verse and Bm–G7 (vi–IV7) chorus. John has described many of the compositions on the LP as “forced”, because this was their second LP to be released within four months. However, the songs are significantly different to what had gone before, being written with no intention of them being performed live. Indeed, only ‘Nowhere Man’ and George’s ‘If I Needed Someone’ were ever played in concert. So, as George Martin has pointed out, Rubber Soul is less a collection of singles, and more of an album than anything the Beatles had done to date.
‘Drive My Car’ also marks a small piece of Beatles history in that it was recorded during the first of their sessions to run past midnight. Sessions ending after 2 am would soon become the norm – in fact less than a month later, the album’s final thirteen-hour session would run through until seven o’clock in the morning.