On the trail of Paul McCartney, the Beatles' not-so-secret guitarist
John Lennon once called the Beatles' Ticket to Ride "one of the earliest heavy metal records made."
Try to imagine that song pumping through the house speakers before a Morbid Angel show, and you might conclude that Lennon's statement was a bit of a stretch. Still, the song's lumbering groove and droning riff were unusually heavy for 1965, especially within a pop landscape dominated by tracks like Wooly Bully and Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter.
Ticket to Ride was groundbreaking for another reason, though; It was the first Beatles record to feature Paul McCartney on lead guitar. He'd quietly slipped some gentle acoustic strumming into I'll Follow the Sun the previous year, but Ticket to Ride was different.
His electric leads enthusiastically leaped across the divides between the song's bridges and verses, then returned to playfully bob and weave throughout the outro, introducing listeners to a side of McCartney most fans barely realized existed.
"I guess I think of myself as a guitar player, really," he said in 1990. "If I couldn't have any other instrument, I would have to have an acoustic guitar.
"To the general public, McCartney is, of course, all about that bass. Publications from Rolling Stone to Bass Player have routinely ranked him as one of the greatest bassists ever, and four-string giants like Flea, Geddy Lee, John Paul Jones, Chris Squire and Sting have extolled his inventive, melodic approach to the instrument.
Source: yahoo.com/Damon Orion
