55th Anniversary Album Spotlight
Rubber Soul
The Beatles
Released December 3, 1965 (UK); December 6, 1965 (US)
Chart debut: December 25, 1965
Chart peak: #1 (January 8 through February 12, 1966)
#5 on
Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time (2003)
Wiki said:
Rubber Soul is the sixth studio album by the English rock band the Beatles. It was released on 3 December 1965 in the United Kingdom, on EMI's Parlophone label, accompanied by the non-album double A-side single "Day Tripper" / "We Can Work It Out". The original North American version of the album, issued by Capitol Records, contained ten of the fourteen songs and two tracks withheld from the band's Help! album. Rubber Soul met with a highly favourable critical response and topped sales charts in Britain and the United States for several weeks.
The recording sessions took place in London over a four-week period beginning in October 1965. For the first time in their career, the band were able to record an album free of concert, radio or film commitments. Often referred to as a folk rock album, particularly in its Capitol configuration, Rubber Soul incorporates a mix of pop, soul and folk musical styles. The title derives from the colloquialism "plastic soul" and was the Beatles' way of acknowledging their lack of authenticity compared to the African-American soul artists they admired. After A Hard Day's Night in 1964, it was the second Beatles LP to contain only original material.
The songs demonstrate the Beatles' increasing maturity as lyricists, and in their incorporation of brighter guitar tones and new instrumentation such as sitar, harmonium and fuzz bass, the group striving for more expressive sounds and arrangements for their music. The project marked a progression in the band's treatment of the album format as an artistic platform, an approach they continued to develop with Revolver and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The four songs omitted by Capitol, including the February 1966 single "Nowhere Man", later appeared on the North American release Yesterday and Today.
Lennon recalled that Rubber Soul was the first album over which the Beatles had complete creative control, with enough studio time to develop and refine new sound ideas.
In Lennon's description, it was "the pot album".
As I've had occasion to mention, the UK version is my favorite album, full stop. When I was originally listening to the UK versions of the albums chronologically, this is the one that made my ears perk up and say, "
This is what I got into the Beatles for!" Hence a particular personal fondness that enables it to edge out its esteemed successors,
Revolver and
Sgt. Pepper. Its track listing, for context and comparison:
Side one
"Drive My Car"
"Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)"
"You Won't See Me"
"Nowhere Man"
"Think for Yourself"
"The Word"
"Michelle"
Side two
"What Goes On"
"Girl"
"I'm Looking Through You"
"In My Life"
"Wait"
"If I Needed Someone"
"Run for Your Life"
The Capitol version ain't that album...but despite some particularly strong songs being AWOL, it's still chock full of so much of the same groundbreaking Fabness.
The album also sports my favorite cover. Its story:
Rubber Soul was the group's first album not to feature their name on the cover, an omission that reflected the level of control they had over their releases and the extent of their international fame. The cover photo of the Beatles was taken by photographer Robert Freeman in the garden at Lennon's house.The idea for the "stretched" effect of the image came about by accident when Freeman was projecting the photo onto an LP-size piece of cardboard for the Beatles' benefit, and the board fell slightly backwards, elongating the projected image. McCartney recalled the band's reaction: "That's it, Rubber So-o-oul, hey hey! Can you do it like that?"
I can't help noting with a bit of skepticism, however, that the Byrds album from earlier in the year that had obviously attracted the Beatles' attention had sported a stylistically similar fisheye lens photo on its cover.
The rounded letters used on the sleeve established a style that became ubiquitous in psychedelic designs and, according to journalist Lisa Bachelor, "a staple of poster art for the flower power generation".
Anyroad...on to the music!
Paul's "I've Just Seen a Face" (#58 on
Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Beatles Songs) is one of the stronger songs from side 2 of the UK
Help! album, but what's it doing here? "Drive My Car" is the first song on
Rubber Soul!
Ah, but the second song is the same--"Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" (#83 on
Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time; #12 on
Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Beatles Songs)...my favorite Beatles song...enchantingly beautiful.
Among its other virtues, it features one of my favorite lyrics:
She told me she worked in the morning and started to laugh
I told her I didn't and crawled off to sleep in the bath
The song's most distinctive feature is George picking out notes on the sitar like it's a guitar, before he took lessons with Ravi Shankar and learned how the instrument was actually played. George's choice to use the instrument here was highly influential in that it kicked off the era's Western interest in Indian music and culture.
Paul's
"You Won't See Me" (#94 on
Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Beatles Songs) isn't an especially strong song by
Rubber Soul standards, but it's everything that works so well about the Beatles...the subject matter is actually downbeat, but you wouldn't know it from the music, which has such a positive, uplifting sound. The "ooh, la la la" backing vocals sort of epitomize the album for me.
George's
"Think for Yourself" (#75 on
Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Beatles Songs) has a really groovy sound, especially the three-part harmonies, which are the Beatles' sound at its best (and are also my favorite part of George's "If I Needed Someone," which is sorely missed on this version of the album), and the fuzzy bass. Transitioning from "You Won't See Me" to this sounded natural enough...but where's "Nowhere Man"!?! Well, Capitol may have held it back to use on the last of their butcher albums, but at least they had the good sense to also release it as a single!
John's
"The Word" could have been a laughably bad song in anyone else's hands, but the Beatles sell it with such earnestness, that you actually buy into it (as Peter, Paul & Mary allude to in "I Dig Rock and Roll Music")! The instrumentation is great...I could listen to just the instrumental track(s) from this and enjoy it just as much...especially the bass line and the twangy guitar.
Before the recording sessions, McCartney was given a new bass guitar, a solid-body Rickenbacker 4001, which produced a fuller sound than his hollow-body Hofner. The Rickenbacker's design allowed for greater melodic precision, a characteristic that led McCartney to contribute more intricate bass lines.
During the sessions, the Beatles also made use of harmonium, marking that instrument's introduction into rock music.
The first side of both versions of the album closes with Paul's "Michelle"...really, this whole album is full of songs that could easily have been hits if they'd been released as singles, but none more so than this one. This is one of those Beatles songs that's just so well known that when you're first getting into the group, you're surprised to learn that it wasn't a single. But that didn't stop it from becoming one of the Beatles' most-covered songs, or from winning the 1967 Grammy for Song of the Year!
I'm a bit surprised that this one didn't even make the
Rolling Stone Beatles list. As Paul songs go, they thought that "You Won't See Me" was stronger than "Michelle"?
Really?
The song has an incongruously cute origin...the tune was originally conceived as a piece that Paul used to play at parties back in the band's early, pre-fame days, mumbling nonsense in a mock-French accent. When they were looking for song ideas during the sessions, John asked Paul about "that French thing" that he used to do. So Paul consulted an acquaintance who was a French teacher (the wife of Ivan Vaughan, the early Quarryman who introduced Paul to John) in coming up with some real lyrics for it.
I have to say...side two opening with John's
"It's Only Love" doesn't make me miss "What Goes On"--sorry, Ringo! On first listen, it didn't even occur to me that this was one of the songs from the UK version of
Help! The substitution, combined with the later exclusion of a George track, does contribute to the second side of the US version of
Rubber Soul being a wee bit John-heavy, though.
Not that I'm complaining that the next song is still "Girl" (#62 on
Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Beatles Songs). Absolutely gorgeous. 'Nuff said.
The "tit tit tit tit" backing vocals were a deliberate "getting away with something naughty" touch on the part of our mischievous Liverpool lads.
"I'm Looking Through You"...I can do without the false starts on the US version, though I'm sure they're an endearing feature to listeners who originally heard it that way. This one always felt like a close companion to "You Won't See Me"...being another Paul song that technically isn't one of his strongest, but it's so gosh-darn enjoyable that you don't even notice the negative nature of the lyrics. And Ringo's Hammond organ bits are endearing to me. The song is also the source of a memorable bit of lyric-misunderstanding on my part. I originally thought Paul was singing something like "Love hasn't asked me yet, but I'm disappearing overnight"...it was years before I learned that the lyric was "Love has a nasty habit of disappearing overnight," which makes a lot more sense.
"In My Life" (#23 on
Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time; #5 on
Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Beatles Songs)...now here the words and music are in perfect harmony. This is one of John's absolute best, and that's saying quite a lot.
The piano recorded at half-speed to sound like a harpsichord when played back at regular speed is one of George Martin's best studio tricks.
In this way, the Beatles used the recording studio as a musical instrument, an approach that they and Martin developed further with Revolver.
"Wait" actually feels a bit more at home on this version of the album, as it was an unfinished leftover from the
Help! sessions. I particularly like the synergy of separate John and Paul lyrics, serving as a sort of stylistic counterpoint to one another.
This version of the album is missing my favorite George song, "If I Needed Someone". But both versions of the album close with
"Run for Your Life," which was based on a line from Elvis's early Sun Records single
"Baby Let's Play House". John himself later disavowed "Run for Your Life" for its mysogynist lyrics, but if you don't take them too literally/seriously, it's a darkly fun song. The countryish flavoring works better here for me than on the missing "What Goes On".
Rubber Soul was highly influential on the Beatles' peers, leading to a widespread focus away from singles and onto creating albums of consistently high-quality songs. It has been recognised by music critics as an album that opened up the possibilities of pop music in terms of lyrical and musical scope, and as a key work in the creation of styles such as psychedelia and progressive rock.
Music historian Bill Martin says that the release of Rubber Soul was a "turning point" for pop music, in that for the first time "the album rather than the song became the basic unit of artistic production." In author David Howard's description, "pop's stakes had been raised into the stratosphere" by Rubber Soul, resulting in a shift in focus from singles to creating albums without the usual filler tracks. The release marked the start of a period when other artists, in an attempt to emulate the Beatles' achievement, sought to create albums as works of artistic merit and with increasingly novel sounds.
Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys described Rubber Soul as "the first album I listened to where every song was a gas" and planned his band's next project, Pet Sounds, as an attempt to surpass it. Rubber Soul similarly inspired Pete Townshend of the Who and the Kinks' Ray Davies, as well as Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, who issued their first album of all-original material, Aftermath, in April 1966. John Cale recalled that Rubber Soul was an inspiration as he and Lou Reed developed their band the Velvet Underground.
Author George Case, writing in his book Out of Our Heads, identifies Rubber Soul as "the authentic beginning of the psychedelic era". Music journalist Mark Ellen similarly credits the album with having "sow[ed] the seeds of psychedelia", while [Robert] Christgau says that "psychedelia starts here." Writing in The Sydney Morning Herald in July 1966, Lillian Roxon reported on the new trend for psychedelia-themed clubs and events in the US and said that Rubber Soul was "the classic psychedelic album now played at all the psychedelic discotheques". She attributed pop's recent embrace of psychedelia and "many of the strange new sounds now in records" to the LP's influence.
Recalling the album's popularity in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, where Jefferson Airplane were based, journalist Charles Perry said: "You could party hop all night and hear nothing but Rubber Soul."
The album was certified 6× platinum by the RIAA in 1997, indicating shipments of at least six million copies in the US. In 2013, Rubber Soul was certified platinum by the BPI for UK sales since 1994.
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The song that sounded more like the Beatles than the Beatles did.
Yeah...no. A one-hit knockoff doesn't touch the talent that produced the album covered above. And when it comes to contemporaneous emulation of the Beatles, the Knickerbockers weren't playing in the same league as the Byrds.
I did, and it's pretty good. The familiarity and Christmas vibe kind of compensates for the lack of lyrics, and it's pretty wild how you can play music in the style of other music.
It's the same thing that makes the Fab Four (studio tribute band) Christmas albums so fun...doing Christmas standards in the style of specific Beatles songs...usually combining elements of more than one Beatles song. It's sometimes downright demented.
I remember Uncle Mike telling me that it was a popular saying at the time.
Which one? And was that before or after the song?
Now there's an instrumental that I like. But, of course, theme music gets a pass because it's theme music.
And it's both gorgeous and uncharacteristically subtle for holiday music...but I should save it for the review.
And you said that in
your Roger Moore voice.
Only if he was imitating a gangster or something.