The “tongue-in-cheek” Beatles song with a disputed authorship
After a certain period, John Lennon and Paul McCartney largely stopped writing songs together. While the two most prominent songwriters in The Beatles were famous for writing “eyeball-to-eyeball” in their earliest days, the pair had begun to live more independent lives by the mid-1960s. Because of that, songwriting would often fall to one or the other, despite the pair retaining their double credit on all songs composed by either one.
One of the first songs that showed a different approach to their work habits was ‘Day Tripper’, the 1965 single that embraced riff rock and psychedelia more directly than the band’s previous efforts. Both Lennon and McCartney share lead vocals on the track, so it would seem logical that the pair wrote the song together. However, the two musicians had different recollections of who was responsible for the song.
“That’s mine. Including the lick, the guitar break and the whole bit,” Lennon told David Sheff in 1980. “It’s just a rock ‘n’ roll song. Day trippers are people who go on a day trip, right? Usually on a ferryboat or something. But it was kind of – you know, you’re just a weekend hippie. Get it?”
“‘Day Tripper’ was [written] under complete pressure, based on an old folk song I wrote about a month previous,” Lennon recalled in Anthology. “It was very hard going, that, and it sounds it. It wasn’t a serious message song. It was a drug song. In a way, it was a day tripper – I just liked the word.”
By his recollection, McCartney remembers the song being a two-man job. “That was a co-written effort; we were both there making it all up, but I would give John the main credit,” McCartney told Barry Miles in the book Many Years From Now. “Probably the idea came from John because he sang the lead, but it was a close thing. We both put a lot of work in on it.”
“‘Day Tripper’ was to do with tripping,” McCartney added. “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. Whereas we saw ourselves as full-time trippers, fully committed drivers, she was just a day tripper.”
Specifically, McCartney recalled the line “she’s a big teaser” as being dirtier in the original draft, suggesting his editing contribution. “I remember with the prick teasers, we thought, ‘That’d be fun to put in.’ That was one of the great things about collaborating; you could nudge-nudge, wink-wink a bit, whereas if you’re sitting on your own, you might not put it in,” McCartney said.
There are only a few disputed writing claims in the hallowed halls of the Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership. Often, this came up as Lennon claiming full authorship and McCartney disputing the claim with his own contributions. Songs like ‘Help!’, ‘In My Life’, and ‘Ticket to Ride’ were songs that Lennon claimed as his. On the other hand, McCartney would claim that ‘Eleanor Ribgy’ was entirely his, despite Lennon’s insistence on writing most of the words. ‘Day Tripper’ is more clear cut, but it’s still fuzzy regarding who did what to bring the song to life.
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