Rubber Soul
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 release, issued by Capitol Records, contains ten of the fourteen songs and two tracks withheld from the band's Help! album. Rubber Soul was described as an important artistic achievement by the band, meeting a highly favourable critical response and topping sales charts in Britain and the United States for several weeks.
This article is about the 1965 album. For other uses, see Rubber Soul (disambiguation).Rubber Soul
The recording sessions took place in London over a four-week period beginning in October 1965. For the first time in their career, the Beatles 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 (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 (1966) and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967). The four songs omitted by Capitol, including the February 1966 single "Nowhere Man", later appeared on the North American release Yesterday and Today.
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. Among its many appearances on critics' best-album lists, Rolling Stone ranked it fifth on the magazine's 2012 list "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time". In 2000, it was voted at number 34 in the third edition of Colin Larkin's book All Time Top 1000 Albums. The album was certified 6× platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in 1997, indicating shipments of at least six million copies in the US. In 2013, Rubber Soul was certified platinum by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) for UK sales since 1994.
Songs[edit]
Overview[edit]
Pop historian Andrew Grant Jackson describes Rubber Soul as a "synthesis of folk, rock, soul, baroque, proto-psychedelia, and the sitar".[99] According to author Joe Harrington, the album contained the Beatles' first "psychedelic experiments", heralding the transformational effect of LSD on many of the original British Invasion acts.[100] Author Bernard Gendron dismisses the commonly held view that Rubber Soul is a folk rock album; he cites its incorporation of baroque and Eastern sounds as examples of the Beatles' "nascent experimentalism and eclectic power of appropriation", aspects that he says suggest an artistic approach that transcends the genre.[101][nb 6] According to The Encyclopedia of Country Music, building on the Beatles' 1964 track "I Don't Want to Spoil the Party", the album can be seen in retrospect as an early example of country rock, anticipating the Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo album.[102]
Further to Lennon's more introspective outlook in 1964, particularly on Beatles for Sale, the lyrics on Rubber Soul represent a pronounced development in sophistication, thoughtfulness and ambiguity.[103] According to music critic Greil Marcus, "the Beatles were still writing about love, but this was a new kind of love: contingent, scary and vital", and so, while the music was "seduction, not assault", the "emotional touch" was tougher than before.[104] Author James Decker considers it significant that Rubber Soul "took its narrative cues more from folk crossovers such as Bob Dylan and the Byrds than from the Beatles' pop cohorts".[105] In particular, the relationships between the sexes moved from simpler boy-girl love songs to more nuanced and negative portrayals.[106] In this way, Lennon and McCartney offered candid insights into their personal lives.[107]
Title and artwork[edit]
The album title was intended as a pun combining the falseness intrinsic to pop music and rubber-soled shoes.[42] Lennon said the title was McCartney's idea and referred to "English soul".[30] In a 1966 press conference, Starr said they called the album Rubber Soul to acknowledge that, in comparison to American soul artists, "we are white and haven't got what they've got", and he added that this was true of all the British acts who attempted to play soul music.[211] McCartney recalled that he conceived the title after overhearing an American musician describing Mick Jagger's singing style as "plastic soul".[30][nb 13] In Phillip Norman's view, the title served as "a sly dig at their archrivals (and private best mates) the Rolling Stones", with the added implication that the Beatles' "variety" of soul music "at least was stamped out by a good strong northern [English] Wellington boot".[214]
Rubber Soul was the group's first album not to feature their name on the cover,[215][216] an omission that reflected the level of control they had over their releases and the extent of their international fame.[217][218][nb 14] The cover photo of the Beatles was taken by photographer Robert Freeman in the garden at Lennon's house.[193] 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.[88][221][nb 15] Harrison said the effect was appropriate since it allowed the group to lose "the 'little innocents' tag, the naivety" and it was in keeping with their emergence as "fully fledged potheads".[222] Author Peter Doggett highlights the cover as an example of the Beatles, like Dylan and the Stones, "continu[ing] to test the limits of the portrait" in their LP designs.[223]
The distinctive lettering was created by illustrator Charles Front,[224] who recalled that his inspiration was the album's title: "If you tap into a rubber tree then you get a sort of globule, so I started thinking of creating a shape that represented that, starting narrow and filling out."[225] The rounded letters used on the sleeve established a style that became ubiquitous in psychedelic designs[224] and, according to journalist Lisa Bachelor, "a staple of poster art for the flower power generation".[225]
Critical reception[edit]
Contemporary reviews[edit]
Critical response to Rubber Soul was highly favourable.[277] Allen Evans of the NME wrote that the band were "still finding different ways to make us enjoy listening to them" and described the LP as "a fine piece of recording artistry and adventure in group sound".[278][279] While outlining to American readers the differences in the UK-format release, KRLA Beat said Rubber Soul was an "unbelievably sensational" work on which the Beatles were "once again ... setting trends in this world of pop".[280] Newsweek lauded the Beatles as "the Bards of Pop",[281] saying that the album's combination of "gospel, country, baroque counterpoint and even French popular ballads" lent the band a unique style in which their songs were "as brilliantly original as any written today".[282] Like Newsweek, The New York Times had belittled the group when they first performed in America in February 1964, but following the release of Rubber Soul, entertainment critic Jack Gould wrote an effusive tribute in the newspaper's Sunday magazine.[283] In HiFi/Stereo Review, Morgan Ames wrote that, like other supportive professional musicians, he recognised the devices the band employed as "they tromp on the art of music", and while he viewed their formal musicality as limited, he expressed joy at its effectiveness. Having opened the review by saying, "The Beatles sound more and more like music", he concluded of the album: "Their blend is excellent, their performance smooth, and their charm, wit and excitement run high."[284]
The writers of Record Mirror's initial review found the LP lacking some of the variety of the group's previous releases but also said: "one marvels and wonders at the constant stream of melodic ingenuity stemming from the boys, both as performers and composers. Keeping up their pace of creativeness is quite fantastic."[285] By contrast, Richard Green wrote in the same magazine that most of the album "if recorded by anyone but the Beatles, would not be worthy of release", with many of the tracks devoid of "the old Beatles excitement and compulsiveness". Green acknowledged that his was an unpopular opinion, before stating: "Judging LPs strictly on their merits, recent albums from Manfred Mann, the Beach Boys and Jerry Lee Lewis rank high above Rubber Soul."[286]
In another review that Richard Williams later cited as an example of the British pop press not being "quite ready" for the album, Melody Maker found the Beatles' new sound "a little subdued" and said that tracks such as "You Won't See Me" and "Nowhere Man" "almost get monotonous – an un-Beatle-like feature if ever there was one".[287] Author Steve Turner also highlights the comments made by the Melody Maker and Record Mirror reviewers, who were typically aged over 30, as indicative of how UK pop journalists lacked "the critical vocabulary" and "the broad musical perspective" to recognise or engage with progressive music.[288] Turner adds that Rubber Soul "may have perplexed the old guard of entertainment correspondents, but it was a beacon for fledgling rock critics (as they would soon be called)".[252]
In a September 1966 review of Revolver, KRLA Beat said that the title of Rubber Soul had "become a standard phrase used to describe a creation of exceptional excellence in the field of music", such that several highly regarded releases had since earned the description "a 'Rubber Soul in its field'".[289][nb 19] Writing in Esquire in 1967, Robert Christgau called it "an album that for innovation, tightness, and lyrical intelligence was about twice as good as anything they or anyone else (except maybe the Stones) had done previously".[291]
Compact disc reissues[edit]
Rubber Soul was first released on compact disc on 30 April 1987,[366] with the fourteen-song UK track line-up now the international standard.[236] As with Help!, the album featured a contemporary stereo digital remix prepared by George Martin.[116] Martin had expressed concern to EMI over the original 1965 stereo mix, claiming it sounded "very woolly, and not at all what I thought should be a good issue". He went back to the original four-track tapes and remixed them for stereo.[367]
A newly remastered version of Rubber Soul, again using the 1987 Martin remix, was released worldwide as part of the reissue of the entire Beatles catalogue on 9 September 2009. The album was available both as an individual CD release and as part of the Beatles (The Original Studio Recordings) box set. The accompanying Beatles in Mono box set contained two versions of the album: the original mono mix and the 1965 stereo mix.[368][369]
The Capitol version was relaunched in 2006, for the Capitol Albums, Volume 2 box set,[204][370] using original mixes of the Capitol album, and then in 2014, individually and on the box set The U.S. Albums.[371]
According to Mark Lewisohn[372] and Ian MacDonald,[373] except where noted:
The Beatles
Production and additional personnel