FEATURE:
The Word
The Beatles’ Rubber Soul at Sixty
__________
ONE of The Beatles’…
greatest albums turns sixty on 3rd December. It is my favourite from the band. That is Rubber Soul. Even though it is not a perfect album – the closing track, Run for Your Life, is misogynistic and a bad song -, it is a very special album to me. One I heard as a child and love to this day. You can read about when the tracks were recorded and who played on what. In the first of two anniversary features, I am going to explore its background and why it was a step forward for the band. Arriving a few months after Help!, it was a step forward for the band. That album is tremendous, though Rubber Soul is perhaps their most fascinating and different album. In the sense that it was not a selection of short and shep Pop songs. More acoustic elements. Indian influences and a broader range of sounds. I am going to start with a feature from The Beatles Bible and how this was a more mature step from the band. Still fresh in their careers, their work rate and sense of progression was peerless and stunning:
“The Beatles’ sixth UK album and 11th US long-player, Rubber Soul showed the group maturing from their earlier pop performances, exploring different styles of songwriting and instrumentation, and pushing boundaries inside the studio.
In October 1965, we started to record the album. Things were changing. The direction was moving away from the poppy stuff like ‘Thank You Girl’, ‘From Me To You’ and ‘She Loves You’. The early material was directly relating to our fans, saying, ‘Please buy this record,’ but now we’d come to a point where we thought, ‘We’ve done that. Now we can branch out into songs that are more surreal, a little more entertaining.’ And other people were starting to arrive on the scene who were influential. Dylan was influencing us quite heavily at that point.
Rubber Soul furthered the group from the straightforward love songs that had characterised their early recordings, and continued the exploration of wider themes that had begun in songs such as ‘Help!’ and ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’.
John Lennon, in particular, was enjoying a songwriting peak, creating some of his best work such as ‘Girl’, ‘In My Life’, and ‘Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)’.
In ‘Nowhere Man’, Lennon detailed his lack of confidence and feelings of insecurity, and ‘Norwegian Wood’ dealt obliquely with an affair he was having, yet didn’t want his wife to discover.
‘In My Life’, meanwhile, began as a nostalgic set of memories of Liverpool. In 1980 Lennon described it as “my first real major piece of work”,
I think ‘In My Life’ was the first song that I wrote that was really, consciously about my life, and it was sparked by a remark a journalist and writer in England made after In His Own Write came out. I think ‘In My Life’ was after In His Own Write… But he said to me, ‘Why don’t you put some of the way you write in the book, as it were, in the songs? Or why don’t you put something about your childhood into the songs?’ Which came out later as ‘Penny Lane’ from Paul – although it was actually me who lived in Penny Lane – and ‘Strawberry Fields’.
John Lennon
All We Are Saying, David Sheff
I am going to move to an article from The Guardian from 2015. Marking fifty years of Rubber Soul, the 1965-released work of genius was so ahead of its time. No matter how many times you play the album through, it loses none of its brilliance. If I was introducing someone to The Beatles, then I would play them Rubber Soul. It boasts some of the best songwriting from the band – especially Paul McCartney and John Lennon:
“Interviewed in Melody Maker in late 1965, the Beatles revealed that “comedy songs” were their new direction. As there had always been a streak of humour running through their songs, this isn’t immediately apparent, but the biggest clue is on the opening Drive My Car, which even has a punchline. Michelle is frankly hilarious, a baguette-and-beret pastiche which McCartney had written years earlier without any actual French words, just French noises. I especially like the droll “I want you, I want you, I wa-a-ant you … I think you know by now.” Another song with a mock continental sound was the Weimar-esque Girl, a downer take on the Third Man theme, though lyrically it wasn’t very funny at all. Girl is a rich girl put-down, similar to Mike D’Abo’s Handbags and Gladrags but, instead of finger wagging, it opts for an entirely exhausted approach. Lennon sounds desperate, caught in a game with an unfamiliar set of rules. Clearly, they weren’t hanging out with the girls from the Cavern or Iron Door any more. You’re minded of the likes of Maureen Cleave, Edie Sedgwick or Pauline Boty on songs like Girl, George Harrison’s cool but fierce Think for Yourself, and Norwegian Wood; on the latter the group find Scandinavian furniture frightfully exotic, and this is reflected by a wry vocal delivery and Harrison’s quite foreign sitar line. The exoticism of Rubber Soul is subtle, still grounded by Merseyside.
The Beatles were, by 1965, regulars at the soirees of pre-rock singer Alma Cogan’s home on Kensington High Street. Lennon nicknamed Cogan “Sara Sequin” and, according to her sister, had a fling with her; McCartney wrote the beginnings of Yesterday on her piano. It was quite the salon; the Beatles could have been rubbing shoulders with Cary Grant, Princess Margaret, Audrey Hepburn, Sammy Davis and Noël Coward. This was a new world for the moptops (which were by now a little shaggier, creeping over the tops of their black roll-neck jumpers, over the collars of their suede jackets – did they ever look better?) and on Rubber Soul they mirrored it with cheek and a little distance, but never with cynicism.
The Beatles were young adults. The lyrics are now more about sex than hand-holding – Drive My Car is a single entendre, and there are lines like “it’s time for bed”. Rubber Soul also contains the first elements of true darkness in the Beatle sound. I know Lennon’s cry for Help! had been real enough, but it’s still quite a shock to find death crops up on three of his Rubber Soul songs – Girl, Run For Your Life and In My Life. Alma Cogan would die in 1966, and Brian Epstein a year later; there’s an odd feeling of foreshadowing.
It has faults, of course – a few of the songs are a verse and bridge too long (noticeably Nowhere Man), and most of them audibly slow down, which may have been something to do with the smoky studio atmosphere. The humour borders on the puerile (“tit tit tit”), on the otherwise affecting Girl. And what’s with the gargled backing vocals on You Won’t See Me?”.
Before getting to a review of the album, this feature from Ultimate Classic Rock outlined how Rubber Soul was a departure for The Beatles. Even though their sixth album is perhaps less energised and exuberant than their previous work, I think it is a deeper and more interesting album. One that inspired their ambitions for 1966’s Revolver. The band becoming more curious about the studio. Maybe recording music that they could not tour. Tiring of the excess and demands, their music was not aimed at fans’ adulation and creating songs like they used to. Maybe that alienated and annoyed some fans. However, if The Beatles continued as they did, then I feel like they would have regretted it:
“The exuberance found on the Beatles' first three albums had been gradually disappearing. Beatles for Sale suggested the whirlwind pace of the previous two years was getting the best of them, and Help! showed the influence of Bob Dylan. The group's willingness to experiment with musical ideas outside of rock 'n’ roll, which began with “Yesterday,” continued with a song recorded at the album's first session.
“I went and bought a sitar from a little shop at the top of Oxford Street called Indiacraft,” George Harrison recalled. “It was a real crummy-quality one, actually, but I bought it and mucked about with it a bit. Anyway, we were at the point where we’d recorded the ‘Norwegian Wood’ backing track and it needed something. … I picked the sitar up — it was just lying around. I hadn’t really figured out what to do with it. It was quite spontaneous. I found the notes that played the lick. It fitted and it worked.”
“We were all open to anything,” Ringo Starr continued. “You could walk in with an elephant, as long as it was going to make a musical note. Anything was viable. Our whole attitude was changing. We’d grown up a little, I think.”
This was also reflected in the lyrics. Gone were the expressions of puppy love found in their earlier work, replaced by more adult ideas, particularly in John Lennon’s songs. “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” was his admission that he’d had an affair, “Nowhere Man” continued the introspection of Help! and the last verse of “Girl” was a comment on Christianity.
But the biggest leap of all took place in a song that ranks among Lennon’s best. “‘In My Life’ was, I think, my first real, major piece of work,” Lennon said. “Up until then, it had all been glib and throwaway. … It was the first song that I wrote that was really, consciously, about my life. … It started out as a bus journey from my house on 251 Menlove Avenue to town. I had a complete set of lyrics, naming every site. It became ‘In My Life,’ a remembrance of friends and lovers of the past.”
After setting it to the music, Lennon felt "In My Life" needed something beyond the group’s musical limitations. So, he asked Martin to play a Baroque-style piano solo. The part Martin wrote was a bit too complex for his own skill, however, and the solution was to slow down the tape and play the solo at half-speed. The Beatles were so intrigued by the harpsichord-like sound the piano took on that they began experimenting with tape speeds regularly to change the texture of instruments and voices.
Lennon wasn’t the only Beatle who was changing. Paul McCartney was quickly expanding his musical horizons, too, adding jazzy chords to “Michelle” and fuzz bass to Harrison’s “Think for Yourself.” And despite its sweet melody, “I’m Looking Through You” includes the most deliciously nasty lyric he’s ever written.
The willingness to take chances even extended to the way they played around with Robert Freeman’s cover photo, which McCartney called “one of those little exciting random things that happen.”
As he explained, they were looking through the results of a photo shoot with Freeman. “He had a piece of cardboard that was the album-cover size and he was projecting the photographs exactly onto it so we could see how it would look as an album cover," McCartney recalled. "We had just chosen the photograph when the card that the picture was projected onto fell backwards a little, elongating the photograph. It was stretched and we went, ‘That’s it, Rubber So-o-oul, hey hey! Can you do it like that?”
And the title? Apparently it was derived from “plastic soul,” which McCartney had heard was a term blues musicians had coined to refer to Mick Jagger”.
In 2009, Pitchfork awarded Rubber Soul a perfect ten. They observed how it was their most Folk-influenced and quiet album. One where you can hear the influence of peers like The Byrds and Bob Dylan. These artists in turn influenced by The Beatles. I think that Rubber Soul is the band’s first masterpiece. A sentiment that is echoed by Pitchfork:
“To modern ears, Rubber Soul and its pre-psychedelic era mix of 1960s pop, soul, and folk could seem tame, even quaint on a cursory listen. But it's arguably the most important artistic leap in the Beatles' career-- the signpost that signaled a shift away from Beatlemania and the heavy demands of teen pop, toward more introspective, adult subject matter. It's also the record that started them on their path toward the valuation of creating studio records over live performance. If nothing else, it's the record on which their desire for artistic rather than commercial ambition took center stage-- a radical idea at a time when the success of popular music was measured in sales and quantity rather than quality.
Indeed, at the time the Beatles did need a new direction: Odd as it seems today, the lifespan of a pop band's career in the early 60s could often be measured in months, sometimes in years, rarely in three-year increments. And by 1965, the Beatles were in danger of seeming lightweight compared to their new peers: The Who's sloganeering, confrontational singles were far more ferocious; the Rolling Stones' "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" was a much more raucous, anti-ennui cry than the Beatles' "Help!"; and the Kinks beat the Beatles to both satirical, character songs and the influence of Indian music. By comparison, most of the Beatles music to date was either rock'n'roll covers or originals offering a (mostly) wholesome, positive take on boy-girl relationships.
Above all, Bob Dylan's lyrical acumen and the Byrds' confident, jangly guitar were primary influences on John Lennon and George Harrison, respectively (and the Byrds had been influenced by the Beatles, too-- Roger McGuinn first picked up a Rickenbacker 12-string after seeing A Hard Day's Night). Dylan and the Byrds' fingerprints had been left on Help!-- Lennon, the group's biggest Dylan acolyte, played an acoustic rather than electric guitar throughout most of that record. Even Paul McCartney's "Yesterday" found him strumming an acoustic. (All this at a time when Dylan was beginning to move in the other direction and fully enter his electric period.) Harrison was growing more serious on the political "Think for Yourself", while "If I Needed Someone"-- his other contribution to Rubber Soul-- is practically a Byrds pastiche and his chiming, sure-footed solo on "Nowhere Man" also displays a debt to that band. His deft touch is all over the record in subtle ways-- appropriate for an album full of finesse and small wonders (the ping at the end of the "Nowhere Man" solo, Lennon's exhalation in the chorus of "Girl", the "tit-tit-tit" of the backing vocalists in the same song, the burbling guitar in "Michelle").
The most lasting influences of Dylan and the Byrds on the Beatles, however, were likely their roles in introducing the group to recreational drugs: Dylan shepherded the quartet through their first experience with pot, while the Byrds were with three-fourths of the Beatles when they first purposefully took LSD. (McCartney sat that one out, avoiding the drug for another year, while Harrison and Lennon had each had a previous accidental dosage.)
Marijuana's effect on the group is most heavily audible on Rubber Soul. (By the time of their next album, Revolver, three-fourths of the group had been turned on to LSD, and their music was headed somewhere else entirely.) With its patient pace and languid tones, Rubber Soul is an altogether much more mellow record than anything the Beatles had done before, or would do again. It's a fitting product from a quartet just beginning to explore their inner selves on record.
Lennon, in particular, continued his more introspective and often critical songwriting, penning songs of romance gone wrong or personal doubt and taking a major step forward as a lyricist. Besting his self-critical "I'm a Loser" with "Nowhere Man" was an accomplishment, and the faraway, dreamy "Girl" was arguably his most musically mature song to date. Lennon's strides were most evident, however, on "Norwegian Wood", an economical and ambiguous story-song highlighted by Harrison's first dabbling with the Indian sitar, and the mature, almost fatalistic heart-tug of "In My Life", which displayed a remarkably calm and peaceful attitude toward not only one's past and present, but their future and the inevitability of death.
Considering Harrison's contributions and Lennon's sharp growth, McCartney-- fresh from the success of "Yesterday"-- oddly comes off third-string on Rubber Soul. His most lasting contributions-- the Gallic "Michelle" (which began life as a piss-take, and went on to inspire the Teutonic swing and sway of Lennon's "Girl"), the gentle rocker "I'm Looking Through You", and the grinning "Drive My Car" are relatively minor compared to Lennon's masterstrokes. McCartney did join his bandmate in embracing relationship songs about miscommunication, not seeing eye-to-eye, and heartbreak, but it wouldn't be until 1966 that he took his next great artistic leap, doing so as both a storyteller and, even more so, a composer”.
On 3rd December, Rubber Soul turns sixty. Among my favourite albums ever, I am interested to see how journalists approach The Beatles’ masterpiece on its anniversary. It is such a stunning work that has so much richness. In terms of the compositional textures. The band taking a different direction and thinking more about the studio than the stage. It was revolutionary! Sixty years after its release and Rubber Soul inspires artists. It is an album whose influence will…
LIVE forever.