The mistake George Martin left on The Beatles song ‘Drive My Car’
Not every band comes into the world fully formed. Even if they have the potential to make something special whenever they get together, there has to normally be some kind of foundation that either holds them together or pushes them to create their classics even if they don’t think they’re capable of it. George Martin may have been the one who gave The Beatles that initial push, but he didn’t bother correcting the blatant mistake in the middle of ‘Drive My Car’.
In the context of the Fab Four’s career, though, Martin was the only de facto disciplinarian for them in the studio. Since he was practically a grown-up in their eyes, there was a school teacher mentality that he brought to every one of their records, whether that was instructing them on how to properly end songs or putting lavish orchestrations behind them unconventional for popular music.
Once they had a few albums under their belt, Rubber Soul was a different animal for them to tackle. Their projects up until that point were a glorified mixture of random songs slapped together in decent order, but this was the first time they started looking at the album as a statement by itself, where every track complimented the other perfectly.
And considering the in-joke of Rubber Soul, kicking things off with ‘Drive My Car’ was the perfect way to introduce this new sound to the world. The group weren’t exactly trying to be a Motown group, but the inherent groove of the tune is evident from the moment that Ringo Starr hits his snare drum.
Just because they were taking the album seriously didn’t mean that there weren’t some foul-ups along the way. The group still had to rush the album out to fulfil a holiday deadline, which led to John Lennon and Paul McCartney blatantly singing the wrong words in one of the final verses of the tune.
For a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, Lennon and McCartney mix up which verse they are singing, with one of them singing, ‘I told that girl’ and the other saying ‘I told the girl’. When talking about it after the fact, Martin said that he didn’t think that such a mistake actually warranted correcting, saying, “That was never intended, but they did it that way. It was live, and things such as that slipped my attention. Once it went through and I saw it was there, I didn’t think it was worthwhile calling them in again to replace a line; life’s too short!”.
If anything, that just makes the moment a lot more human. Since The Beatles already seemed to be on this righteous path to becoming one of the greatest bands in the world, hearing them screw up in the studio feels like being a fly on the wall at the sessions as they desperately try to make an album they can be proud of and still get it made as fast as possible.
When they finished, they didn’t just have a by-the-numbers Beatles record. This was a landmark achievement for any group, and with The Beach Boys not too far behind them with Pet Sounds, Rubber Soul was the album that introduced the new Beatles to the world, mistakes and all.
