I Can't Count the Intro to "Drive My Car" To Save My Life

[Teasing the Korean]

The first guitar note falls on the and of four. It adds up mathematically, but I can't feel it to save my life. I got "Yesterday and Today" for Christmas in 1969, in mono. I guess I will always hear it like I did when I was 5. Maybe that's not a bad thing.

Edited May 12, 2014 by Teasing the Korean

[JSngry]

If you count the eight notes, there's 17 of them, and the 17th (i.e.) is the extra eight before the song proper starts. Mathematically, that, to me, implies two bars of four recorded separately, and then left to hang for an extra beat before the song gets spliced in.

If you count the intro with a 1 starting when the bass hits the second tonic, ( and-four-and-ONE), the 9/8 counts naturally, in place. That still leaves the first 4/4 (or 8/8), and yeah, that sure doesn't fall like the guitar note is organically hitting on the one. But you can count is as a bar of 8/8, and once the second bar comes around, everything is back naturally on the one...until they add that extra eighth before it hits for real.

The Purple Chick Rubber Soul sessions have some rehearsal takes for some numbers (as do all Purple Chick sets), but nothing for "Drive My Car". My gut tells me that somebody had some fun and deliberately built it that way. Seriously doubt that it was either initially designed or played live like that...for that matter, the solo itself sounds like pieces extracted/constructed, not played in real time. The rehearsal takes from the PC Revolver sessions show that to be something they were playing with (no pun intended)

[JSngry]

Ok, listened some more, and this works...as much as anything...the guitar comes in on the 2nd beat of a 5/4 measure, and the second measure is on its way to being another 5/4 measure until they cut it half-a-beat short. That still gives you the 4 full beats (8 eighth notes) & 4 1/2 beats (9 eighth notes) for the total of 17 eight notes, and still has the bass landing on the one ON the one, right?

It counts out like this, the guitar intro does:

2-and 3-and 4-and(5)-and 1 2-and 3-and(4)-and5/ONE

or in eighth-based time (but really, unless it gets freaky-proogy odd-metery, I don't think most rock bands of this or any other era counted in 8, although they sure felt it in 8...that takes away a good bit of the viscerality of syncopation, when an upbeat becomes just another number in the sequence)...

...a bar of 10/8 starting on 3, and then a full bar of 9/8 (which could just as easily have been made into another 10/8 bar by placing the splice half-a-beat later, which still has me wondering how intentional THAT part was). But start counting eighth notes at "3" when the first guitar-into note hits. You'll get to a logical "1" after 10, and then you hit the tune after the next 9, in fact, it feels logical to go another 10, the shortening to 9 is quite abrupt/"unnatural", at least once the counting becomes comfortable.

It's the bass, for me, that determines where "one" is...maybe that was manipulated, but the 5/4 thing sounds real enough to me now, as a possible initial source.

So I guess what I ask now is what were they playing around with in 5/4 time that led to this source material being available in the first place?

[JSngry]

Doing some cursory websearch for some musiclly literate discussion of this thing, and what there is of it (which is not very much at all, everybody all obsessed with who's playing what and on what axe, hello "serious" fan(dumb) is all predicated to one degree or another on the notion that this is a construction conceived of as a 4/4 unit, and what follows from there is variants of "where does the extra eighth fall?", a conceit which I myself always held to, not really paying that much attention to the counting, having never really had to. One guy goes so far as to mock the Japanese transcribers who had it as a bar of 4/4 and a bar of 9/8 as pussies. although to my ears, that's clearly what it would be, given the bass line, if it was supposed to be a 4/4 construct.

But...(and don't even look on YouTube...people be getting it right and wrong and nobody is aware of the math, which is ok for as long as it doesn't matter, and at some point it will, if only because are you smart or are you just lucky, hello money won't change you but time will take you out?)

Rut...I digress.

I think it's actually two 5/4 bars, with the phrase starting on the second beat of the first bar, and the last bar "artificially" shortened by a splice. The more I listen to it like that, the more organic it sounds, the more naturally it flows, the less batshit crazy it feels.

So...5/4. That's the secret right there. 5/4.

[Teasing the Korean]

Thanks, Jsngry, for the detailed response.

From day one, I have always felt the rhythm as you describe it in your second post (#3 in the thread).

But I checked one more source, the version on the Beatles Rockband video game, which uses actual studio chatter and countoffs from the sessions.

Just as I suspected, Paul kicks off the tune in 4, and that first guitar eighth note comes in on the and of four, making the intro 2 full measures of four (plus the guitar pickup beat).

I can count along with it, but I'm still not feeling it. The bass notes play 3-and-4-and, and the drum fill is on beats 3 and 4 of the second measure. It doesn't help that George (or Paul?) rushes the guitar line slightly about halfway through.

Incidentally, the animation is horrible. I'll take the 60s cartoon any day.

Edited May 13, 2014 by Teasing the Korean

[Teasing the Korean]

I GOT IT!

I GOT IT!

45 years later!

[JSngry]

I would like to hear the raw session tapes before reaching any real conclusions about what it really "is". As clever and progressive as they were then (and they were very both), I don't see that intro happening organically, in real time. I just don't. They'd have to have been functioning at a level of counter-intuitiveness that runs, uh, counter to pretty much everything they'd done up to and after that point.

However it came to be, though, McCartney learned it. All the live tapes I can find have that count-off and it comes in up the upbeat of 4 every time.

[Teasing the Korean]

Here is a live clip, and the guitar comes in on the and of 4, like the rock band video.

It's crazy, now that I can feel it, it's like it always sounded that way.

[Shawn]

Sometimes I'm glad I never learned music theory, I just listen to the song and enjoy it.

[JSngry]

OTOH, be thankful that you did learn math. It's a useful tool, sometimes even in music!

[Teasing the Korean]

OTOH, be thankful that you did learn math. It's a useful tool.

When I figured out where the notes were "supposed" to land mathematically, I played it on piano, guitar in the right hand, bass in the left. But I played it a little more behind the beat, less perfunctorily than George (or Paul?), and just kept playing it over and over, Then I played the record, and there it was.

A lot of work to go through for a record I've owned since 1969, but it was worth it.

[JSngry]

I'm still not convinced that the thing was originally played conceived/whatever as beginning on the upbeat of 4, all the retro video-gaming concert countoffs notwithstanding...it just does not feel like that's the idea. This YouTube offers the advantage of hearing it slowed down to half-tempo. and there it really, really sounds like that first note is a down beat.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=427-EiWRTuw

I mean, is there anything in there that suggests that either George and/or Paul had a spontaneous moment of keen rhythmic displacement/transposition that they never recreated ever again? I mean, none of these guys were John Lee Hooker or somebody, ya' know, with the beats magically disappearing and nobody getting lost when they do?

You can also hear that Ringo's drum lead-in is a simple (but int he pocket, as always) 3-e-and-ah 4-e-and ONE, nothing fancy or off-beat about it, that's not what Ringo did, that's just so not what Ringo did, Ringo ain't gonna be Bill Bruford, you would not want that, Ringo would not want that, nobody would want that. So as far as creation goes, I'm still leaning towards some kind of studio construction and that phrase beginning on some kind of a downbeat, and the song proper beginning quite regularly apart from the splicing.

Of course, once it's on a record, it is what it is, and what it is is a space of 17 eighth notes, and if you're gonna play that live, you gotta put 1 somewhere, right, otherwise there's no sense in counting it off.

Still...I wanna hear the session tapes...I wanna hear the pieces that got put together to make this end up like this. Purple Chick, why are they not there for this song? You got almost a half hour (wasted space and time) of that blues "jam" but not one piece of this. Hey, what, is this stuff free or something?

[TODNL]

DMC has a great intro, but I think it was engineered in the studio.

The beginning of the song is pieced together from 3 separate recordings. The first part is the guitar intro with Paul's bass hitting the 1 with the D he plays. That part makes complete sense.

The second piece is Ringo's drum roll. And thirdly the first verse starts.

If you listen closely to Ringo's piece, you can hear it does not sound right: he misses a beat. A 1/16, 1/32, whatever. You may contend that it was meant that way, but it could just as easily have been a mistake.

When the whole thing was put together, timing was off. The intro was just a bit too short. And my guess is they left it that way because the result was interesting enough.

So it all just "happened" in the edit. That's what I think.

You can listen to the results of my experimenting if you're interested: http://timeofday.nl/DriveMyCar/

[mikeweil]

Now that makes sense - I guess that's the way it happened, Splicing .....

[Teasing the Korean]

Now it all makes sense.