Rubber Soul

You know, until I started writing this review, there was always something that bugged me about Rubber Soul...and I could never work it out. Just now it hit me. You see, I'd always thought of this as a Beatles album, a band album...but most of the time...these are demonstrably solo tracks.

In fact, there's only one song, Wait, which has any semblance of having been created by a group and the sad thing is it's pretty formulaic, most certainly one one of the less memorable songs on the album. Irrespective, what we're left with is an often impressive collection of SOLO tracks. First up, by dint of having written more than any of the others:

Lennon: 

His songs show a developed sense of observation and introspection that picks up where Help left off:

Norwegian Wood...slightly oblique but very adult reporting of a one-night-stand (?) with a modern miss. George's simple sitar gave the song a very Swinging Sixties feel.

"...It was about an affair I was having. I was very careful and paranoid because I didn't want my wife, Cyn, to know that there really was something going on..but I can't remember any specific woman it had to do with..." John Lennon 1980 (see Beatles quotes about Rubber Soul, below)

Nowhere Man...oh boy! The drugs were certainly working...and Lennon delivers big-time with a lyric far in advance of anything in pop music at the time:

"...He's a real Nowhere man...living in his Nowhere land...making all his Nowhere plans for nobody..." 

Yow!

"...I'd spent five hours that morning trying to wite a song that was meaningful and good, and I finally gave up and lay down. Then Nowhere Man came, words and music... the whole damn thing, as I lay down. So letting it go is what the whole game is. You put your finger on it, it slips away, right? You know, you turn the lights on and the cockroaches run away. You can never grasp them..." John Lennon 1980 (see Beatles quotes about Rubber Soul, below)

The Word...a really unusual and interesting pop boogie that's more of a chant than a song with short spoken verses:

"...Have you heard the word? The word is Love!..."

...prototype psychedelia pre-dating The Summer Of Love by a full two years. Wonderful! To be fair, McCartney sounds like he had a lot to do with its writing, too.

Girl...Romantic Lennon...and it works. It's worth noticing the gentle but very audible inhalation during the chorus, making the song that much more intimate.

"...It was John's original idea, but it was very much co-written. I remember writing 'the pain and pleasure,' and 'a man must break his back'.

...It was amusing to see if we could get a naughty word on the record. The Beach Boys had a song out where they'd done 'la la la la' and we loved the innocence of that and wanted to copy it but not use the same phrase. So we were looking around for another phrase - 'dit dit dit dit,' which we decided to change it in our waggishness to 'tit tit tit tit' and it gave us a laugh. It was good to get some light relief in the middle of this real big career that we were forging. If we could put in something that was a little bit subversive then we would. George Martin would say:

'Was that dit-dit or tit-tit you were singing?'

'Oh! 'dit-dit' George, but it does sound a bit like that, doesn't it?'

Then we'd get in the car and break down laughing..." Paul McCartney circa 1994 (see Beatles quotes about Rubber Soul, below)

In My Life...Astonishing that this should be on an album from 1965. Adult, astute and still as good today as it was then, though the arrangement may now appear a little clumsy. My opinion: Few folks have written a better song.

'...In My Life' started out as a bus journey from my house at 250 Menlove Avenue to town, mentioning every place I could remember. I wrote it all down and it was ridiculous... it was the most boring sort of 'What I Did On My Holiday's Bus Trip' song and it wasn't working at all.

But then I laid back and these lyrics started coming to me about the places I remember. Paul helped with the middle-eight. It was, I think, my first real major piece of work. Up till then it had all been sort of glib and throw-away and that was the first time I consciously put my literary part of myself into the lyric..." John Lennon 1980 (see Beatles quotes about Rubber Soul, below)

It's Only Love...Fairly nice sounding Tin Pan Alley love song, which almost sounds as if McCartney wrote it. Incidentally, Bryan Ferry does a considerably better version on his Let's Stick Together album, one of the few instances of a cover bettering The Fab Four.

Run For Your Life...Where's revisionism when you need it? Run For Your Life is a nasty piece of work, a hack-it-out tune with brute (and I mean that in a bad way) lyric that probably was a lot more innocent than it appears today. To be fair, Lennon disowned the song, many times...but it still doesn't deserve to be in this company!  

The famous butcher album cover   The Beatles: Here And Today With the American market crying for Beatle product, more albums were released with different combinations of tracks (pilfered from b-sides of singles, less popular album tracks etc.) to the rest of the world. One such hybrid album was Yesterday And Today, released in June 1966, a few months after Rubber Soul. Its macabre "butcher" sleeve was designed by Australian photographer Robert Whitaker, who, for a while, was The Beatles' staff photographer and toured the world with them. Bob Whitaker: The Unseen Beatles "...As Whitaker explains it, the idea for the photo session came about because they "were all really fed up at taking what one had hoped would be designer-friendly publicity pictures". John Lennon, in an interview shortly before his death in 1980, echoed this sentiment: "...It was inspired by our boredom and resentment at having to do "another" photo session and "another" Beatles thing. We were sick to death of it." Whitaker had intended the session, of which the butcher photo was only one part, to be 'his personal comment on the mass adulation of the group and the illusory nature of stardom'. As he later said: "...I had toured quite a lot of the world with them by then, and I was continually amused by the public adulation of four people..." ...The butcher photos, along with the other pictures from that session, can be seen in Whitaker's book The Unseen Beatles..." eskimo.com   For a thorough look at the whole butcher album episode, visit Rare Beatles