‘Day Tripper’: The Beatles’ take on ‘Like a Rolling Stone’?
Not long after Bob Dylan had finished with ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, he described the song as “a long piece of vomit”. The freewheeling folk star vented his spleen in a stream of song that went on and on until the counterculture movement was left pulverised on the floor of Andy Warhol’s flaky Factory. It was a masterpiece that changed The Beatles forever.
With ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, Dylan revolutionised the way that people looked at songwriting and the scene that these anthems were entering into. With the glowering track, “He showed all of us that it was possible to go a little further,” McCartney told Clinton Heylin. The collision of rock ‘n’ roll with lyrical poetry and societal sagacity was a portent force that sent heads wobbling.
Now, songs didn’t have to be structured with a one-track mind. They could be unravelling onslaughts that poked a finger in the eye of the same people who were likely to buy it. Except that wasn’t necessarily the case for The Beatles. They were the leaders of the charge, and they couldn’t let up, or else they might’ve been overtaken. The pressures they faced were gruelling, and a “long piece of vomit” was an indulgence that they could ill afford.
“’Day Tripper’ was [written] under complete pressure, based on an old folk song I wrote about a month previous,“ John Lennon commented in Anthology. The group needed a new single to keep up the momentum and back up the B-side for ’We Can Work It Out’, so they dabbled at playing Dylan under duress. “It was very hard going,“ he recalled. However, this constraint did not necessarily mean they still couldn’t conflate Dylan’s fresh songwriting advancement in some way.
If anything, ’Day Tripper’ embodies the brilliance of The Beatles. While Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ may well be a masterpiece that belongs in a more elevated echelon of art than the pop hit that followed from the Liverpudlians, together they form an electrified snapshot of the zeitgeist. In a single afternoon, The Beatles were able to borrow the pop and fizz contained within Dylan’s effort and repackage it in a way that pretty much guaranteed the number one spot, where it sat for five weeks. Both songs have their roots in folk but fortify it into something searingly acidic.
Channelling a similar message of posers only partly committed to the stern ideals of counterculture, like vegans at a barbecue, The Beatles took Dylan’s lament and made it coy, poppy and populist. As McCartney explained to 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.“
He adds, “Whereas we saw ourselves as full-time trippers, fully committed drivers, she was just a day tripper.“
Unlike many of the rich dabblers dipping their toe into a movement they would happily betray three times before nightfall, The Beatles weren’t revolutionaries with a well-thumbed snooze button—they were working-class lads battling back at the constraints they were working against. And it’s not just all the expansive masterpieces that followed from the band that prove they succeeded, but also the transcendence of ‘Day Tripper’ itself.
’Like a Rolling Stone’ is an opus that doesn’t need support from any other piece of art. Nevertheless, its interconnectedness with The Beatles ensured that one galvanised the other. The Fab Four’s effort might not have the same sting, poetry or potency, and its message might be much more obfuscated, but for an afternoon’s work, it hones Dylan’s pioneering leap rather effortlessly into something that worked for them at the time. They were the masters of such feats.
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