Drive My Car

Story Section status: Outdated

Recording

Equipment

Recording Timeline

• 12 October 1965 (Tue) — the album opens the day before, EMI Studio Two — work on the LP began with an afternoon session, 2.30–7.00pm, that produced “Run For Your Life” in five takes, and an evening one, 7.00–11.30pm, that produced a complete first version of “This Bird Has Flown”. The song under discussion here was cut the very next evening, which places it second in the album’s recording order and explains its position at the head of side one: it was among the first things finished and it opens like an opener.¹
• 13 October 1965 (Wed), 7.00pm–12.15am — takes 1–4 and every overdub, EMI Studio Two — P: George Martin. E: Norman Smith. 2E: Ken Scott. Recording: “Drive My Car” (takes 1–4). Take 4 was the only complete run through and became the master. The overdubs then ran on into the small hours: lead vocal by Paul and John, backing vocal by George, tambourine, lead guitar, rhythm guitar, drums, piano and cowbell. The session is the first in the group’s recording career to extend past midnight, and the log frames it as a landmark on that basis alone.¹
• 25 October 1965 (Mon), 10.00am–1.00pm — mono remixing, Studio Two control room — P: George Martin. E: Norman Smith. 2E: Ken Scott. Mono remixes for the LP and single, made from take 4, in a batch that also handled “In My Life”, “If I Needed Someone”, “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” and “Nowhere Man”. Five masters in three hours is the working rate of the period, and mono was the mix the group themselves attended.¹
• 26 October 1965 (Tue), 10.00am–12.30pm — stereo remixing, Studio Two control room — P: George Martin. E: Norman Smith. 2E: Ron Pender. Stereo remixes, again from take 4, again as a batch, and with a different second engineer at the desk from the previous morning. Two and a half hours the day after the mono pass is not enough time to reconsider anything; the stereo is a spread of what the mono had already settled, which is why the two differ in placement rather than in balance.¹

Studio Notes

• The cowbell is an overdub, and that is the whole sound of the record — it is listed among the parts added after the basic take, not among the things four people played together. That has a consequence a listener can hear: an overdubbed percussion part is played to a finished performance rather than with one, so it sits dead against the beat instead of breathing with it. The relentlessness of the track’s pulse is a product of that separation, not of how hard anybody was hitting anything.¹
• Eight parts onto four tracks, with the method unrecorded — the log is precise about what was added and silent about how. On a four-track machine, eight overdubbed elements have to be combined somewhere — either played together onto one track or bounced down to make room — and the difference matters, because a combined part can never be re-balanced afterwards. The page declines to guess which. It is a genuine hole in the published record rather than a detail nobody has bothered to look up.^1,2
• Bass did not get a track of its own until later in the same album — the first Beatles recording to give the bass guitar a tape track to itself was “Michelle”, taped four weeks after this one during the same album’s sessions. Everything cut before it, this track included, has the bass sharing with something else. It is the clearest single indicator of how tight four tracks were in October 1965, and it explains why the low end on the first side of this album has a different character from the low end on the second.²
• A shouted lead, sung twice over — two voices carrying the lead line together is a different device from double-tracking, though it produces a comparable thickening. Double-tracking is one singer twice; this is two singers once, which keeps the small differences in phrasing and vowel that a single voice reproducing itself would iron out. The result is a lead part that is both bigger and less precise than either man alone, and it is the correct sound for what the song is doing.¹
• The album this belongs to made a point of spare vocals — several of the songs recorded across these weeks are noted for single-tracked lead vocals, which was a deliberate move away from the layered treatments of the previous album. This track goes the other way and puts two voices on the lead, so it is worth hearing as the exception on a record whose default that autumn was one voice and no assistance. It opens the album partly because it does not sound like the rest of it.²
• No outside musicians on the record at all — the album was made without session players, four months after the string quartet on “Yesterday” had become the first outside musicians ever used on a Beatles record. Read as a pair, the two decisions describe a group that had just proved it could hire an arrangement and then chose, for a whole album, not to. Everything on this track was played by one of the four of them, however crowded the overdub list looks.²
• What separates the released mixes — the cowbell and the vocal are the tests. In the 1965 stereo the cowbell runs through each verse, the break and the fadeout; in the 1965 mono it is much softer and disappears entirely under the fade. The lead vocal sits far right in the 1965 stereo and is pulled in towards right of centre on the 1987 remix, which leaves the cowbell and a guitar out on the right on their own. The 1987 also makes a partly successful attempt to fade out a word in the vocal that the earlier mixes carry.³
• The American mono is not a mono mix — when Capitol needed a mono of this song for its own album it did not use the British mono master; it folded the 1965 stereo down to one channel. The two are not interchangeable. A fold-down carries whatever the stereo mix decided about placement, summed — so the cowbell that the British mono keeps soft comes back up, and the vocal that sits hard right in stereo lands in the middle at full level. Anyone comparing “the mono” across territories is comparing two different objects.³
• Mixed for the album and for a single that never came — the mono session of 25 October is logged as remixes for the LP and single, which is the standard phrasing of a morning that was servicing more than one release at once. No single came of this song in Britain; what it got instead was a place at the head of the album and, the following summer, a track on an EP. The mixing was done once, for everything, and every British issue of the song for the next twenty-two years descends from that morning’s work.¹
• An album that had started looking for sounds — the echo chamber had stopped being a corrective applied to make a recording acceptable and had become, across these weeks, a matter of willingly seeking different sounds. That change of posture is the useful frame for a track whose distinguishing features are all additions rather than performances — a cowbell, a piano, a second guitar, a doubled lead — none of which the song needs and all of which it now cannot do without. The group were no longer recording an arrangement; they were assembling one.²
• Four weeks from first take to record shop — the first session for the album was on 12 October and the record was in shops on 3 December. Everything on this page — the recording, the overdubs, the mono pass, the stereo pass — happens inside a fortnight of that span, and the whole album was written, recorded, mixed, cut and pressed in under eight weeks. The tempo is the single most important piece of context for anything on Rubber Soul: nothing here was laboured over, because there was no time in which to labour over it.¹
• The clock is the story of the date — the group had worked long days before, but never past midnight, and the reason it happened here is that the overdub list is long and nobody stopped. On the album’s second day of recording that establishes a pattern for the four weeks that follow, which is a compressed schedule driven by a December release. The overtime is not indulgence; it is what an album booked into a month looks like from inside the control room.¹

Releases

Two 1965 mixes and a 1987 remix circulate, plus a Capitol-made mono fold-down that reached American buyers on a different album.

• 1965 UK mono LP — Rubber Soul (3 December 1965, Parlophone PMC 1267, side A track 1) — The album’s first sound. Everything gathered into one hot centre, with the cowbell noticeably softer than it is in stereo and gone altogether under the fade. This is the mix the group were in the room for, and the balance the record was signed off on.
• 1965 UK stereo LP — Rubber Soul (3 December 1965, Parlophone PCS 3075, side A track 1) — The parts pulled apart rather than blended: the lead vocal sits hard right, and the cowbell is audible right through each verse, the instrumental break and the fadeout instead of vanishing into it. The easiest mix to use for hearing what the overdubs actually are.
• 1966 US LP — “Yesterday”… and Today (20 June 1966, Capitol T-2553 mono / ST-2553 stereo) — Capitol left this song off the American Rubber Soul and issued it here instead, six months later and in different company. The mono on this album is not the British mono but a fold-down Capitol made from the stereo, so the American mono buyer of 1966 heard the stereo balance collapsed to one channel.
• 1966 UK EP — Nowhere Man (8 July 1966, Parlophone GEP 8952, side A track 2) — The 1965 mono on a seven-inch, alongside “Nowhere Man”, “Michelle” and “You Won’t See Me”. Nothing is remixed for it.
• 1987 CD — Rubber Soul (1987, EMI CDP 7 46440 2) — A remixed stereo. The lead vocal moves in from hard right to right of centre, leaving the cowbell and a guitar alone out on the right, and one word in the vocal is faded down — not quite successfully — where the 1965 mixes let it stand.
• 2009 remasters — Rubber Soul (2009, Parlophone 99457 2) — The remaster programme reissued the album in stereo and in mono, which put the 1965 mono back in general circulation and makes the cowbell test easy to run for the first time on disc.