92. Lovely Rita

A playful song about courting a meter maid, which hits a lot harder than you'd expect

Even during the several decades that Sgt. Pepper spent as the default ‘greatest album of all-time,’ there were never all that many odes to the genius of Lovely Rita. That’s partly due to its slightly campy subject matter. It’s also one of the few songs on the album that you could plausibly call ‘rock and roll’ which makes a bit of an odd duckling amidst a bunch of songs that were focused on getting outside the boundaries that has previously defined the genre.

But now that Pepper has been downgraded to ‘merely’ one of their good albums, I think Rita has actually started to be more appreciated. If you’re no longer searching for evidence of unparalleled genius, it may be a bit easier to simply appreciate this one for what it is: a stomping good song.

I also think that some of the renewed Rita love stems from the remasters. As I’ve mentioned a few times before, I mostly avoid that sort of thing—actively preferring to experience the versions of these songs that I grew up with (the ones which represent the output the Beatles at the time were intending to generate).¹ But even in my grumpiness about the persistent efforts to rewrite the past, I can acknowledge the occasional banger that emerges from this process. And Rita is one of those.

That’s actually a broader truth about Pepper overall, which is probably the album most afflicted by the limitations of contemporary studio equipment. Having officially abandoned touring, they were for the first time ready to fully commit to being a studio band, with all the bells and whistles they could muster. Unfortunately, the studio itself was not really ready for the paces they wanted to put it through. Specifically, they were still stuck using four-track tape machines, which simply did not offer enough room for them to include everything they wanted to include. As a result, they resorted to recording the rhythm tracks first, which were then mixed together into one composite rhythm track, leaving three more new tracks open for overdubs. Unfortunately, that means the drums and bass are consistently degraded in the mix. Which is a shame because Pepper marks an important advancement in Paul’s bass work—which had already advanced significantly on Rubber Soul and Revolver, but is taken to another new level here—as well as some of Ringo’s best drumming.

The remasters bring those elements back to the front, and I think Rita might be the most significant illustration of this difference.² Listening to my dad’s old Pepper LP, I always liked the song, and regarded it as a nice energetic tune. But it still felt a little bit light: a mid-tempo rocker but no more than that. But the remaster is significantly more dynamic than the original mix, with an absolutely stomping bass line.

And my journey to a better understanding of the song has also helped me to reconceptualize it a little bit as part of the larger puzzle of Sgt. Pepper. Which, quite famously, was regarded as a ‘concept’ album, despite having only the most threadbare of actual concepts linking it together. But I think the frontline concept of ‘the Beatles pretend to be a different band’ is actually just a red herring for the actual concept: the interpellation of opposition. It’s really an album about taking different pieces of collective identity which might appear to be in opposition (old-timey and contemporary music, the west and the orient, conservative and countercultural values, fame and anonymity, happiness and angst) and re-characterizing them to express them as different aspects of the same underlying unity. The ‘concept’ of the Lonely Hearts Club Band is obviously one piece of this, but basically every song on Pepper plays with the disassociation between past, present, and future versions of the self. That’s most obvious on songs like When I’m Sixty Four, Mr. Kite, or Within You Without You—where the entire premise is to play with the idea of singing across time and space.³

I never quite saw how Rita fit into that, and tended to just accept it as an outlier. But once I fully grasped just how much they had advanced the sound of their performance, it opened up a new perspective. Because the reality is that as a composition—which takes the rather stodgy profession of traffic warden, polishes it up a bit with the American terminology of ‘meter maid,’ and relocates it to ‘swinging London’—Rita would actually have made far more sense on Rubber Soul. An interesting, independent working woman propositioned by an admirer, with the courtship played both straight and for laughs at the same time. Is that Lovely Rita? Or is it Drive My Car? Or Norwegian Wood? Or maybe even Girl?⁴

And then consider that the ‘swinging London’ vibe of the song actually feels far more appropriate to 1965 as well. By 1967, the center of the cultural world was once again on the move, heading to San Francisco with flowers in its hair.

All of which makes the concept of Rita feel slightly anachronistic. It’s a pretty narrow distinction—only the matter of eighteen months—and it’s not the sort of thing that would even be noticeable in many contexts. But when we’re talking about the hyperspeed evolutions of the Beatles, eighteen months is like a decade or more in normal people time.

But if I call Rita anachronistic, I mean that as a feature, not a bug. It’s doing the same kind of work as When I’m Sixty-Four, except on a far more compressed timeline: taking something that should be out-of-date and insisting on its relevance, not as an act of defiance but as form of recognition. It’s a spoof, but one which invites us to laugh at ourselves as well. Which is why you get the outro, with its simulated sex noises—something that would have been inconceivable even a year before, but which here feel almost silly, more than they feel risqué.

All of which is to say: Rita certainly doesn’t perform the same kind of radical self-displacement as A Day in the Life, or anything of that nature, but neither should it be dismissed as simply one more nice McCartney tune. Play it loud and you may find that it moves you a lot further than you’d expect.

1. In many cases, ‘the Beatles’ weren’t involved in the mixing, of course, and it was more about George Martin’s sensibilities than anything else. But I also am fine putting my trust in the contemporary George Martin, so that’s fine.

2. The track that follows it, Good Morning Good Morning, is the other best candidate for biggest update in the remaster, which I’ll discuss when I get to it.

3. I want to stress that I don’t think this was in any way an intentional ‘conceptual’ plan. I just think that it reflects the particular time and place in which they were writing, which was given a bit of an accelerative boost by Paul’s notion that they might playact as someone else for an album.

4. One might also note that the piano fill replicates the trick George Martin used on In My Life of recording at a slower pace and then speeding it up.