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 "We Can Work It Out" / "Day Tripper". 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.
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, 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.
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 of 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 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 for UK sales since 1994.
Background
Most of the songs on Rubber Soul were composed soon after the Beatles' return to London following their August 1965 North American tour. The album reflects the influence of their month in America.Lewisohn, Mark. "High Times". In:. They set a new attendance record when they played to over 55,000 at Shea Stadium on 15 August, met Bob Dylan in New York and their longtime hero Elvis Presley in Los Angeles. Although the Beatles had released their album Help! that same month, the requirement for a new album in time for Christmas was in keeping with the schedule established with EMI in 1963 by Brian Epstein, the group's manager, and George Martin, their record producer.In their new songs, the Beatles drew inspiration from soul music acts signed to the Motown and Stax record labels, particularly the singles they heard on US radio that summer, and from the contemporary folk rock of Dylan and the Byrds. Author Robert Rodriguez highlights the Byrds as having achieved "special notice as an American act that had taken something from the Brits, added to it, then sent it back". In doing so, Rodriguez continues, the Byrds had joined the Beatles and Dylan in "a common pool of influence exchange, where each act gave and took from the other in equal measure". According to music critic Tim Riley, Rubber Soul served as a "step toward a greater synthesis" of all the elements that throughout 1965 represented a "major rock 'n' roll explosion", rather than just the emergence of folk rock. Citing Dylan and the Rolling Stones as the Beatles' artistic peers during this period, he says that on Rubber Soul these two acts "inspire rather than influence their sound".
Two years after the start of Beatlemania, the band were open to exploring new themes in their music through a combination of their tiring of playing to audiences full of screaming fans, their commercial power, a shared curiosity gained through literature and experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs, and their interest in the potential of the recording studio. According to Ringo Starr, Rubber Soul was the Beatles' "departure record", written and recorded during a period when, largely through the influence of marijuana, "We were expanding in all areas of our lives, opening up to a lot of different attitudes." The album was especially reflective of John Lennon's maturation as a songwriter, as he was encouraged to address wider-ranging issues than before through Dylan's example. George Harrison's outlook had been transformed by his and Lennon's experiences with the hallucinogenic drug LSD; he said the drug had revealed to him the futility of the band's widespread fame by "open up this whole other consciousness".
Author Mark Prendergast recognises Rubber Soul as "the first Beatles record which was noticeably drug-influenced". Lennon called it "the pot album". Marijuana appealed to the band's bohemian ideal. Paul McCartney, who was the only Beatle still living in central London, said it was typical of a move away from alcohol and into "more of a beatnik scene, like jazz".
Production
Recording history
Recording for Rubber Soul began on 12 October 1965 at EMI Studios in London; final production and mix down took place on 15 November. During the sessions, the Beatles typically focused on fine-tuning the musical arrangement for each song, an approach that reflected the growing division between the band as a live act and their ambitions as recording artists. The album was one of the first projects that Martin undertook after leaving EMI's staff and co-founding Associated Independent Recording. Martin later described Rubber Soul as "the first album to present a new, growing Beatles to the world", adding: "For the first time we began to think of albums as art on their own, as complete entities." It was the final Beatles album that recording engineer Norman Smith worked on before being promoted by EMI to record producer. The sessions were held over thirteen days and totalled 113 hours, with a further seventeen hours allowed for mixing.File:Buckingham Palace, London - April 2009.jpg|thumb|upright=1.2|The Beatles interrupted the intensive recording for the album to receive their MBEs at Buckingham Palace.
The band were forced to work to a tight deadline to ensure the album was completed in time for a pre-Christmas release. They were nevertheless in the unfamiliar position of being able to dedicate themselves solely to a recording project, free of touring, filming and radio engagements. The Beatles ceded to two interruptions during this time. They received their MBEs at Buckingham Palace on 26 October, from Queen Elizabeth II, and on 1–2 November, the band filmed their segments for The Music of Lennon & McCartney, a Granada Television tribute to the Lennon–McCartney songwriting partnership. According to author Christopher Bray, this intensive recording made Rubber Soul not just unusual in the Beatles' career but "emphatically unlike those LPs made by other bands". From 4 November – by which point only around half the required number of songs were near completion – the Beatles' sessions were routinely booked to finish at 3 am each day.
After A Hard Day's Night in 1964, Rubber Soul was the second Beatles album to contain only original material. As the band's main writers, Lennon and McCartney struggled to complete enough songs for the project. After a session on 27 October was cancelled due to a lack of new material, Martin told a reporter that he and the group "hope to resume next week" but would not consider recording songs by any other composers. The Beatles completed "Wait" for the album, having taped its rhythm track during the sessions for Help! in June 1965. They also recorded the instrumental "12-Bar Original", a twelve-bar blues in the style of Booker T. & the M.G.'s. Credited to Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr, it remained unreleased until 1996.
The group recorded "Day Tripper" and "We Can Work It Out" during the Rubber Soul sessions for release as a single accompanying the album. To avoid having to promote the single with numerous television appearances, the Beatles chose to produce film clips for the two songs, the first time they had done so for a single. Directed by Joe McGrath, the clips were filmed at Twickenham Film Studios in south-west London on 23 November.
Studio aesthetic and sounds
Lennon recalled that Rubber Soul was the first album over which the Beatles took control in the studio and made demands rather than accept standard recording practices. According to Riley, the album reflects "a new affection for recording" over live performance. Author Philip Norman similarly writes that, with the Beatles increasingly drawn towards EMI's large cache of "exotic" musical instruments, combined with their readiness to incorporate "every possible resource of the studio itself" and Martin's skills as a classical arranger, "Implicitly, from the very start, this was not stuff intended to be played live on stage."According to Barry Miles, a leading figure in the UK underground whom Lennon and McCartney befriended at this time, Rubber Soul and its 1966 follow-up, Revolver, were "when got away from George Martin, and became a creative entity unto themselves". In 1995, Harrison said that Rubber Soul was his favourite Beatles album, adding: "we certainly knew we were making a good album. We did spend more time on it and tried new things. But the most important thing about it was that we were suddenly hearing sounds that we weren't able to hear before."
During the sessions, McCartney played a solid-body Rickenbacker 4001 bass guitar, 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. For the rest of his Beatles career, the Rickenbacker would become McCartney's primary bass for studio work. Harrison used a Fender Stratocaster for the first time, most notably in his lead guitar part on "Nowhere Man". The variety in guitar tones throughout the album was also aided by Harrison and Lennon's use of capos, such as in the high-register parts on "If I Needed Someone" and "Girl".
On Rubber Soul, the Beatles departed from standard rock and roll instrumentation, particularly in Harrison's use of the Indian sitar on "Norwegian Wood". Having been introduced to the string instrument on the set of the 1965 film Help!, Harrison's interest was fuelled by fellow Indian music fans Roger McGuinn and David Crosby of the Byrds, partway through the Beatles' US tour. Music journalist Paul Du Noyer describes the sitar part as "simply a sign of the whole band's hunger for new musical colours", but also "the pivotal moment of Rubber Soul". The Beatles also made use of harmonium during the sessions, marking that instrument's introduction into rock music.
The band's willingness to experiment with sound was further demonstrated in McCartney playing fuzz bass on "Think for Yourself" over his standard bass part, and their employing a piano made to sound like a baroque harpsichord on "In My Life". The latter effect came about when, in response to Lennon suggesting he play something "like Bach", Martin recorded the piano solo with the tape running at half-speed; when played back at normal speed, the sped-up sound gave the illusion of a harpsichord. In this way, the Beatles used the recording studio as a musical instrument, an approach that they and Martin developed further with Revolver. In Prendergast's description, "bright ethnic percussion" was among the other "great sounds" that filled the album.
Lennon, McCartney and Harrison's three-part harmony singing was another musical detail that came to typify the Rubber Soul sound. According to musicologist Walter Everett, some of the vocal arrangements feature the same "pantonal planing of three-part root-position triads" adopted by the Byrds, who had initially based their harmonies on the style used by the Beatles and other British Invasion bands. Riley says that the Beatles softened their music on Rubber Soul, yet by reverting to slower tempos they "draw attention to how much rhythm can do". Wide separation in the stereo image ensured that subtleties in the musical arrangements were heard; in Riley's description, this quality emphasised the "richly textured" arrangements over "everything being stirred together into one high-velocity mass".
McCartney said that as part of their increased involvement in the album's production, the band members attended the mixing sessions rather than let Martin work in their absence. Until late in their career, the "primary" version of the Beatles' albums was always the monophonic mix. According to Beatles historian Bruce Spizer, Martin and the EMI engineers devoted most of their time and attention to the mono mixdowns, and generally regarded stereo as a gimmick. The band were not usually present for the stereo mixing sessions.