Rode All Night

“Rode All Night” is a jam recorded by Paul McCartney and drummer Denny Seiwell in October 1970 during the sessions for the album “Ram.” Although largely improvised, it included the line “I rode all night till I finally hit the daybreak”, which was not spontaneous but taken from a sheet with early lyrics for “Oh Woman, Oh Why.”

The track circulated for years on bootlegs before receiving an official release in 2012 as part of the “Ram – Archive Collection“.

Paul later reused its melody and lyric for “Giddy,” a song he gave to Roger Daltrey for his third solo album, “One of the Boys,” released in 1977.

A photo of Paul taken during the recording of “Rode All Night” was used in the gatefold sleeve of “Ram,” and was later repurposed for the front cover of his 1987 album “Choba B CCCP.”

The best things are often the free bits, and that gets very tricky. I go out into the studio and I know I’m going to ad-lib. If I announce I’m going to ad-lib, I can’t ad-lib because I’m no longer ad-libbing. So I’ve just got to go out there and improvise, and someone’s got to be in there in the control room very cleverly thinking, ‘He’s going to ad-lib now, I’d better tape it.’ It’s very hard because good things get missed. Last night I was doing a real ad-lib and I was in a great mood and I was exploring what there was to be done — and they missed it. The next time around when they tried the tape, I wasn’t exploring any longer.

Paul McCartney – Interview with Life Magazine, April 16, 1971

I had this idea – not well formed – for the song. I just had a few lyrics, a few chord ideas, and I knew I was going to sort of scream it. So, we came back after lunch and I said, ‘Let’s do this now, come on.’ So, me and Denny just dived into the studio – me on guitar and him on drums – and we did it. We just stormed the whole thing. At the end we were like, ‘Yeah! Great!’ And we looked up the engineer and he was looking a bit puzzled, and he was twiddling the knobs a bit, and then he said: ‘Okay, I’m ready now.’ We went: ‘But that was it! Didn’t you take it?’ He said: ‘No, I was just getting a sound.’ We went ‘Okay’, thinking very dark thoughts. But it was like, ‘What we are going to do, just sulk or do it again?’ So, this the second take.

Paul McCartney – From “Ram – Archive Collection“, 2012

[Paul]’d just come back from lunch that day and had this tune he wanted to jam. The engineers had started tearing down the mics for another session or something. So we started jamming, and it was outrageous. I considered those lyrics, “I rode all night till I finally hit the daybreak.” For me, that represented that he’d found people he really felt comfortable playing with, other than the Beatles. And this was like a major breakthrough. We just about had tears in our eyes, we had so much fun doing this thing. I really felt like something miraculous was going on.

Anyway, we got done after like seven or eight minutes of this thing, Paul looks into the booth and goes, “You got that, right?” And the engineer goes, “I’m ready now. You want to do it again?” We both looked at each other, like, “What the..?” So we did it again. The second take was good, but it didn’t have the magical spark in that first one.

Denny Seiwell – Interview with The Morton Report, May 2012

Lyrics

Officially appears on

Bootlegs

Going further

Paul McCartney: Music Is Ideas. The Stories Behind the Songs (Vol. 2) 1990-2012

This new book by Luca Perasi traces Paul McCartney's post-Beatles output from 1990 to 2012 in the form of 250 song entries, filled with details about the recordings, stories behind the sessions and musical analysis. His pop albums, his forays into classical and avant-garde music, his penchant for covering old standards: a complete book to discover how these languages cross-pollinate and influence each other.The second volume in a series that has established itself as a unique guide to take the reader on a journey into the astonishing creativity of Paul McCartney.Read our exclusive interview with Luca Perasi

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