Beatles Released Day Tripper Demo Without Its Famous Riff. Lennon and McCartney Laugh on It and Are Still Looking for the Song

The Beatles released a home recording on which John Lennon and Paul McCartney compose Day Tripper. The song on it does not yet have the guitar riff by which almost everyone recognizes it today. The recording was released as a preview ahead of the expanded edition of the Rubber Soul album, which is set to be released on October 2. Rolling Stone ↗

A Song Without What Makes It a Song

The recording is titled Day Tripper (Songwriting Work Tape) and was made in Kenwood, Lennon's home in Weybridge in Surrey. Lennon and McCartney play two acoustic guitars on it and the song is missing precisely what carries it in listeners' memory: the opening riff. That is attributed to Lennon and without it the composition sounds remarkably different. Far Out ↗

What is interesting is that the chords the pair plays already show the direction the riff eventually took. The recording thus does not capture an idea that fell from the sky, but an intermediate step when the song is largely finished and missing the flourish that we today remember as the first thing. Rolling Stone ↗

The tape runs approximately two minutes and it is not a clean recording. There are false starts, places where the playing falls apart, and twice Lennon and McCartney laugh so hard that they have to start over. Stereogum ↗



For comparison: the finished version from December 1965, the one with the riff.

Why Day Tripper Isn't on Rubber Soul at All

The song was created during the recording of Rubber Soul, but did not make it onto the album. It was released in December 1965 as a double-sided single with the song We Can Work It Out, thus at the same time as the album. On the expanded edition, a song that was never on the original record will appear. Stereogum ↗

A Song Nobody Knew About

The reissue comes out on October 2 under Apple Corps, Capitol and UMe. In addition to the new stereo mix and Dolby Atmos mix by Giles Martin and Sam Okell, it brings the original mono mix and the American version of the album from Capitol Records. Plus twenty-four early recordings, of which twenty previously unreleased versions and three home demos. Far Out ↗

The most interesting item is a recording titled Little Girl. It is a Lennon sketch of a song that according to the publisher was never released or speculated about, and comes from Lennon's estate. It is not a finished band recording, but a home sketch that enters the Beatles' archive after sixty years. Rolling Stone ↗

Day Tripper is not the first preview. Before it, the band released the first version of the song Michelle, which is on the original album. Stereogum ↗



Giles Martin, son of the band's longtime producer George Martin, said about the original album that it was born out of frustration that they no longer wanted to be little boys. According to him, it is the first record where the Beatles did not try to write a couple of singles and then decide which ones to release. Rolling Stone DE ↗

An Archive That Opens at a Well-Chosen Time

The Beatles announced the reissue itself in late July and Slovak and Czech media covered it then. What is new is the release of the working tape, which serves as a preview ahead of the album's release. Musicserver ↗

The archive is opening at a time when there is extraordinary interest in the band. Director Sam Mendes is shooting a quartet of Beatles films and in August the crew recreated the famous photograph from the cover of the album of the same name in front of the Abbey Road studio. The Guardian ↗

Read also: Paul McCartney released an album about his youth in Liverpool

Illustration photo: The Beatles with producer George Martin in the studio, 1966. Author Capitol Records, public domain, Wikimedia Commons.

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