Have you ever wondered what the first heavy metal song in history was? For John Lennon , the answer is a Beatles from the album Help! (1965) .
While some consider "Helter Skelter" a major precursor to metal , Lennon felt that "Ticket To Ride," written three years earlier, was the better choice to fill that position.
While comparing the Beatles to heavy metal might seem absurd at first, it's important to remember that the genre didn't exist in 1965. In interviews given over the years, both John Lennon and Paul McCartney define the "heavy metal" aspect of "Ticket To Ride" as stemming from the song's structure, which starts out very pop and becomes more chaotic towards the end.
“I think the most interesting thing is that crazy ending. Instead of ending like the previous verse, we changed the tempo. We took one of the lines, ' My baby don't care ', but we completely altered the melody,” said Paul McCartney in a 1994 interview (via Far Out! ). “We almost invented the idea of a whole new section of a song as it fades out in that track… It was pretty radical for the time.”
John Lennon thought the music was "heavy" because of the drums.
John Lennon already shared this opinion back in the 70s. In an interview, the late Beatle commented (via Ultimate Classic Rock ): "'Ticket To Ride' was a relatively new sound at the time. It was quite heavy for the time, if you look at the charts and see the kind of music people were making. It's a heavy song and the drums are heavy too. That's why I like it."
But it wasn't until 1980, during an interview with David Sheff of Playboy , that Lennon spoke again about "Ticket To Ride" and effectively used the words "one of the first heavy metal songs ever made." He also reiterated the importance of the drums on the track, conceived by Paul McCartney: "Paul's contribution was the way Ringo played the drums," he commented.
Revisit "Ticket To Ride" from the album Help! (1965) and draw your own conclusions:
