But while it's not what you would call a career change into comedy, it fulfils the notion growing in the culture that an album can be a multifaceted statement from performers who could do the lot. The Beach Boys had already released their Party! album, a set of covers (including Beatle songs) with chatter and laughter flown in during the mix. Drive My Car isn't quite that but it was pointing to something that they had an increasing lean toward: variety. It was a Fabs song, no question, but its "beep beep yeah" ultrapop harmonies were both moderne and showbiz.
Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) changes things immediately with a gentle acoustic strum and a beguiling melody which Lennon then obliges by singing. "I once had a girl or should I say she once had me." I wonder what the contemporary listener made of the strange bright twanging of George Harrison's sitar as it echoed Lennon's vocal lines. The lyric, like the previous one, is a narrative. He wanders home with a woman from a club or a party, they drink wine and chat until the morning but she makes it clear that he's not welcome in her bed. The next morning he burns the fancy wood of the title to burn the place down. It's not quite the joke of Drive My Car and its subtlety is snide. It took a schoolfriend of mine to suggest the meaning of the last line before anything like it occured to me.
You Won't See Me Feels different from anything earlier. The piano and organ are pushed forward and rhythmic and the guitars are small scratchy bites in the distance. A very active bass holds the ballast as the chords go up the stairs, back down and back up with a sturdy forward motion. The song also speeds up as it goes along. It's a Paul song, one of his disgruntled boyfriend numbers (The Night Before, Another Girl etc.) but it moves like a gleaming diary. It's melodic, cool, bright with doowop harmonies but he's telling her to act her age. It's meant as a quirk-of-love number but just comes across as a report by a contractor. It might be softer in texture and more cuddly but really, it's not that far from what Gang of Four made of the same theme.
Nowhere Man starts with three-part harmony. They would die before the admission but it's an approach for more expected of The Hollies (more on them in a bit) with the vocals pressed into glittering light as chords. John's bright lament speaks of a man without purpose or form, a hollow vessel. Lennon claimed this as a self-description but it could easily apply to any of the bright young things they collided with in Swinging London Clubland. He understands this all too well and appends, "isn't he a bit like you and me?" The middle eight sees the vocals bifurcate between Lennon's gentle croon and the others applying more of the doowop goodness. The guitar solo is actually a dual attack, two of the new Stratocasters with as much treble as was permitted by the International Ear Safety Commission as Lennon's and Harrison's guitars, already on the piercing bridge pickups were put through several channels in series to defeat everything under 1khz and advance everything above. I'm guessing about that but if you know the song, you know. The beautiful arpeggiated figure ends on a triplet down to the lowest G and is capped a silver bell like harmonic, one of the gentler innovations by the band. The final repeated line of, "making all his nowhere plans for nobody" is topped by MacCartney way above everyone. Ten years later, Queen would sign their names to this approach.
George had two numbers on Help and he has two here but there's a difference. While the Help songs are fine examples of mid-'60s they pretty much just take their place on their sides. Rubber Soul was already proving to be a major shift and the third songwriter needed more to compete with. His first was this, Think For Yourself. A thick fuzzbass leads chromatically from G to Am. Dm to Bb and so on. George didn't know the rules and just threw the chords together because they sounded good that way. It's why his debut Don't Bother Me is more lively and driven than either of the Help songs which were written more conventionally. Think For Yourself seems to constantly change its footing yet stays solid. The chorus ("do what you wanna do ...") has a James Bond ring to it and punches home the message to do what it says in the title instead of flailing into destruction. If You Won't See Me was coldly bitchy, this is brutal. George's droning solo vocal set in bright harmony backing helps the medicine go down.
The Word is more contemporary funk with a more controlled but still complicated guitar/bass figure than Drive My Car. A falsetto harmony tells us to hear the word that's so fine, it's sunshine, it's the word love. Lennon's solo verses sound like confessions of life before and after knowing the word before the others come in. While I can appreciate the proto hippy message, and the music which is sublime, this always sounds like a commercial to me. I never skip it but I never play it for its own sake.
Michelle rounds off side one with a thick Eurovision croon from Paul that, with his characteristic deft handling of minor chords, has a beguiling dusk by the sea romance to it rather than the IloveYouloveEverybody'sTruelove boy girl songs they made themselves famous with. It features a curly guitar solo with the tone knob all the way to zero for a continental jazzy touch. I'm saying all this but the thing is beautiful.
Side two opens with the Ringo number. As with the cover version of Act Naturally on Help, this original (Lennon, McCartney and Starkey who said he contributed about five words) has a pop country flavour. Big bright harmony choruses with solo vocal verses and a few downmixed asides to help the hoedown gallop. It's ok.
Girl, on the other hand, isn't ok. Musically, it's outstanding: finely honed progressions and light strumming with a slow folk feel as Lennon recounts his tale of unrequited devotion. The middle eight shifts up a few steps with an intense minor passage as the backing vocals sing the word tit rythmically in falsetto. The chorus of, "ah girl," is puctuated with the kind of loud inhalations that would have otherwise been edited from the mix. They sound like long tokes by a broken lover telling his lot. Surprising us with a kind of Greek folk passage at the end of dual guitars plucked like bozoukis that takes us far further in thatn we expected to go before lightening back up for the chorus to fade.
I'm Looking Through You is another Paul as aggrieved boyfriend but this time it's a jaunty folksy number that screams into mid-decade pop for the chorus. Ringo reputedly taps on a matchbox for the rhythm. The trebly guitar from most of the rest of the album is back. A middle eight sounds like Paul doing folk the way he did bluegrass in I've Just Seen a Face. It's songs like this, though, that, as they push the band forward through contemporary pop to heights, where it's important to recall that these songs were penned by twenty-somethings whose burgeoning control of their lives could get shirtfronted by their still developing emotions. "And you're down there!" screams Paul.
In My Life is one of the most poignant Beatles songs. So many of the tricks of the trade the writers had so far amassed are here including perfect placement of minor to major juxtapositions so that they just sound natural rather than overly dramatic, judicious use of harmony vocal and double tracked solo lines. For such an aching and gentle song it's suprising to hear only electric guitars and played so sparsely and exactly. George Martin's celebrated faux Elizabethan solo (achieved by playing at one speed and inserting it at another) charms wihout effort and the repeated guitar figure that plays with the translucent thirds is gorgeous. Is this a young person projecting himself into age or just one discovering a premature nostalgia? On the surface it's a love song that lists the treasures of memory as little compared to his current love. This works prefectly well but there's a lurking doubt working. Lennon's final bare falsetto of the refrain can send shivers.
Wait is a leftover from the Help sessions and added as filler. It's fine with a lot of good volume pedal, harmonies and guitar rtones but its stop/start structure still bothers me. It feels like it never quite takes off.
George's second serving, If I Needed Somone, is a shimmering display of harmony and the last whole song 12 string showcase he would present. He happily confessed that he adapted the main riff from The Byrd's Bells of Rhymney but after the opening few notes the two figure diverge. The song is George solo for standout lines but mostly the same kind of tight and bright harmonies we've been getting this outing. Lyrically it's like a nice version of Don't Bother Me, assuring the girl he'll let her know and first if he ever finds himself lonely and miserable. I wouldn't buy that either but it does at least have thering of honesty.
Last and worst is John's Run For Your Life, one of the many from his Beatles catalogue that he largely disowned. You can hear why. An aggressive acoustic strum is joined by the band (including a riff on that wicked Strat bridge pickup). It's a great folk rock groove. But then the words kick in. "I'd rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man..." This line is lifted from the rock standard Baby Let's Play House, recorded by Elvis and Buddy Holly, but the rest of it is Lennon playing around with that notion and just going on. The chorus makes the threat of murder sound like a sea shanty. It even got to me as a fifteen year old when I heard it. My head shot up as its violence rolled on. I made up a persona for the narrator. That helped. It was hard to relate the singer of In My Life with this psycho. Even to the fade and the end of the album where he's riffing on the word now, it's a committed act.
I first heard this courtesy of my sister's boyfriend back in the mid-'70s. Before it, I'd heard all the later albums and had a few compilations of the earlier material. This was the first opportunity to hear all the songs I knew in context with all those I hadn't heard. I listened through headphones while my family were watching the Saturday movie on TV. I looked into the strange warped image of the band on the cover, stretched, a forest behind them and the joke title in big, orange, boopy '60s lettering. The faces are confident, four young blokes on top of the world. That's what the record sounded like, too.
I wondered, if I was ever going to be a rock star if I'd have the opportunity to make a statement like this: I've arrived, take this. The music was a mix of instantly appealing pop with glittering harmonies and arrangements that breathed with jangling electricity and warm timber surfaces. The songs were either about slight things or jokes, or very deep issues with one song after another feeling like a statement. Then a Vox organ stab and fiddly treble guitar lick would come in and it would again just sound like pop from the '60s.
Later, when I had all the initial sequence of studio albums I was able to make a comparison. There is a clear line of development and dare on the timeline. Then when the bigger sounding songs from Help give way to these if feels like all the others were public prototypes. It would be another year or so until I heard its successor (now that I think of it) which immediately won me over. If Rubber Soul is Revolver's younvger, callow self, it yet is a couple of sides of engagement that, heard, are not forgotten. And if Revolver made me think of a dark and alluring movie, Rubber Soul feels like the makers of great pop songs who had more than an hour to spare to do something more with the routine. Of all that came before, this one is the first that seems like a latest album. There were no singles in the U.K. from it but they did bring out the mighty double-A Day Tripper and We Can Work it Out. I have to work hard to imagine what it felt like to hear this and wonder what would follow.
Listening notes: I chose the version on the Mono box set as it sounds the most like the one I first heard and is the mix that the band themselves approved. The sound on the CD is stellar. Also, this brings me to the end of Beatles blogs as I've come full circle, staring with Revolver in 2016, picking up Please Please Me on in 2023. Now I'm here. It's been invigorating considering these records again after letting them get so familiar. I'd reommend it.
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