About "Drive My Car"

From the original Beatles Album "Rubber Soul" (1965)

GEORGE 1977: "If Paul had written a song, he'd learn all the parts and then come in the studio and say 'Do this.' He'd never give you the opportunity to come out with something. But on 'Drive My Car' I just played the line, which is really like a lick off 'Respect,' you know, the Otis Redding version. And I played the line on the guitar and Paul laid that with me on the bass. We laid that track down like that. We played the lead part later on top of it."

JOHN 1980: "His (Paul's) song, with contributions from me."

PAUL circa-1994: "This is one of the songs where John and I came nearest to having a dry session. The lyrics I brought in were something to do with golden rings, which are always fatal (to songwriting). 'Rings' is fatal anyway, 'rings' always rhymes with things and I knew it was a bad idea. I came in and I said, 'These aren't good lyrics but it's a good tune.' Well, we tried, and John couldn't think of anything, and we tried, and eventually it was, 'Oh let's leave it, let's get off this one.' 'No, no. We can do it, we can do it.' So we had a break... then we came back to it, and somehow it became 'drive-my-car' instead of 'gol-den-rings,' and then it was wonderful-- because this nice tongue-in-cheek idea came."

Comments