If you’re a bass player searching for expertise in Paul McCartney’s approach, search no further than this isolated copy of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s song ‘Lovely Rita.’
‘Lovely Rita,’ released on June 1, 1967, is among Sgt. Pepper’s sketchiest tracks. The tune is laced with a heavy dose of reverb and simmers with the intensity of peak summer. Paul McCartney wrote it as a humorous jab at people in authority, with the eponymous female traffic officer reflecting on present life’s monotonous routine. “I was thinking it should be a hate song… but then I thought it would be better to love her,” McCartney later explained.
The track’s lyrics, as per McCartney, were composed while he was walking along the street at his brother Michael’s residence in the Wirral, near Liverpool. “I remember one night just going for a walk and working on the words as I walked,” McCartney told Barry Miles. “It wasn’t based on a real person but, as often happened, it was claimed by a girl called Rita [sic] who was a traffic warden who apparently did give me a ticket, so that made the newspapers. I think it was more a question of coincidence: anyone called Rita who gave me a ticket would naturally think, ‘It’s me!’ I didn’t think, Wow, that woman gave me a ticket, I’ll write a song about her – never happened like that.”
On February 23rd, 1967, the Beatles recorded ‘Lovely Rita’ in Abbey Road Studio Two. The rhythm song was recorded in eight sessions, with George Harrison and John Lennon on acoustics, Ringo Starr on drums, and Paul McCartney on piano.
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