October 13th, 1965, was the first time that one of their scheduled recording sessions went past the midnight mark and into the next day. Although this habit became more commonplace even by the end of that year it ended up pretty much being the rule as early as the next year (www.beatlesebooks.com)
Although John described the song as co-written by him and Paul during his Hit Parader interview in 1972, during his Playboy interview in 1980 he pretty much gave Paul full credit. When asked about “Drive My Car,” he then stated: “Paul’s song. It has a Motown bass line. He got this ‘drive my car’ thing and the ‘beep beep beep’ in the studio. I think we just threw it in.
”Songwriting History
It was written at John’s Kenwood home Paul apparently had the melody already in mind as he showed up at John’s place “with a fairly good tune, but it had crappy lyrics, like ‘I can give you diamond rings, I can give you golden rings, I can give you anything,’ and John said, ‘Oh!’ he didn’t like them and we had a deep sad moment.”
Paul explains further: “The lyrics were disastrous and I knew it. Often you just block songs out and words just come into your mind and when they do it’s hard to get rid of them. You often quote other songs too and you know you’ve got to get rid of them, but sometimes it’s very difficult to find a more suitable phrase than the one that has insinuated itself into your consciousness.” Other songs he used as a template in this case most likely include “Can’t Buy Me Love” and “I Feel Fine,” both of which include lines about buying a “diamond ring” for someone.
“This is one of the songs where John and I came nearest to having a dry session,” Paul continues. “’Rings’ is fatal anyway, ‘rings’ always rhymes with ‘things’ and I knew it was a bad idea. I came in and I said, ‘These aren’t good lyrics but it’s a good tune.’ The tune was nice, the tune was there, I’d done the melody. Well, we tried, and John couldn’t think of anything, and we tried and eventually it was, ‘Oh let’s leave it, let’s get off this one,’ ‘No, no. We can do it, we can do it.’”
Since the inspiration wasn’t there, Paul came up with a plan. “So, I said to him, ‘I’ll tell you what, let’s have a cup of tea and a ciggie and we’ll just relax for a minute.’…and suddenly it came: ‘Wait a minute: “Drive My Car!”’ Then we got into the fun of that scenario: ‘Oh, you can drive my car.’ What is it? What’s he doing? Is he offering a job as a chauffeur, or what? And then it became much more ambiguous, which we liked, instead of golden rings, which was a bit poofy. ‘Golden rings’ became ‘beep beep, yeah.’ We both came up with that. Suddenly we were in LA: cars, chauffeurs, open-top Cadillacs, and it was a whole other thing.”
Paul also reveals that chauffeurs weren’t the only thing that was meant by these lyrics. “”It was wonderful because this nice tongue-in-cheek idea came and suddenly there was a girl there, the heroine of the story, and the story developed and had a little sting in the tail like ‘Norwegian Wood’ had, which was ‘I actually haven’t got a car, but when I get one you’ll be a terrific chauffeur.’
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So to me it was LA chicks…and it also meant ‘you can be my lover.’ ‘Drive my car’ was an old blues euphemism for sex, so in the end all is revealed.
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