Rubber Soul was the album where the moptops grew up. It was also where they were smoking loads of weed, so all through these songs, wild humor and deep emotion go hand in hand, like George Harrison and cowboy hats. (No rock star has ever looked less stupid in a cowboy hat than George on the back cover.) In addition to everything else it is, Rubber Soul is their best sung album. You can have a great time just focusing on the background vocals: Paul McCartney’s harmonies on “Norwegian Wood” are as rugged as John ever sounded, while John’s backup vocals to “Drive My Car” and “You Won’t See Me” prove he could come on as cute as Paul. It will always be my favorite Beatle record — even if Revolver is actually a little better. (I’ve made my peace with that contradiction.)
If there’s a theme, it’s curiosity, the most Beatlesque of emotions, and specifically it’s curiosity about women, the most Beatlesque of mysteries to be curious about. Rubber Soul has the coolest girls of any Beatles record. “Girl,” “I’m Looking Through You,” “If I Needed Someone” — these are complex and baffling females, much like the ones the Beatles ended up with in real life. No happy romantic endings here, with the notable exception of “In My Life” — but even when the girls are way ahead of them, the boys spend the album straining to keep up. Baby, you’ve changed.
Did anyone before Rubber Soul sing about female characters like this? No, they didn’t. For one thing, these women have jobs, and this is 1965. The L.A. scenester who hires Paul as her driver, the independent woman too busy with her career to return his phone calls, the Chelsea girl who gets up early for work in the morning, even though she’s got John sleeping in her bathtub. (You’d think she could call in sick for that.) In late 1965, my mom, an eighth-grade public-school teacher in Massachusetts, got fired for getting pregnant (with me), because that’s how things worked back then. The very idea of women having careers was a social controversy. But for the world’s biggest pop stars, it was nothing to get hung about.
The Rubber Soul woman stays up late drinking wine on her rug after midnight, until it’s time for bed. She speaks languages he can’t translate. (“I love you” in French is just “je t’aime.” It’s not that hard.) She’s not impressed by the Beatle charm — when you say she’s looking good, she acts as if it’s understood. She’s cool. She makes the Rubber Soul man feel like a real nowhere boy. Yet even the sad songs here are funny. (Including the self-parodic machismo of “Run for Your Life,” a song Nancy Sinatra turned into a gangsta classic.) I love the moment in “Wait” when Paul’s girl asks point blank if he’s been faithful on the road. “I’ve been good/As good as I can be” — riiiiiight. “Wait” is the song that totally explains why Paul was Bill Clinton’s favorite Beatle.
Even the American version is a classic — this is the only Beatles album where the shamefully butchered U.S. LP might top the U.K. original, if only because it opens with the magnificent acoustic one-two punch of “I’ve Just Seen A Face” and “Norwegian Wood.” I still can’t decide which Rubber Soul is my favorite, having had a mere lifetime to make up my mind.
Given the album’s impact over the past 50 years, it’s startling to note how fast and frantic the sessions were. The Beatles didn’t go into the studio with a mystic crystal vision to express — they went in with a deadline. They had to supply product for the 1965 Christmas season, which meant crunching it out in four frenzied weeks, from October 12th to November 12th. So they holed up in Abbey Road around the clock, pouring out music as fast as they could, holding nothing back. They were willing to try any idea, whether it turned out brilliantly (the sitar, the harmonium) or not (the six-minute R&B instrumental jam, which they wisely axed). They wrote seven of the songs in one week.
But with their backs against the wall, working under this pressure, the Beatles produced an album that was way ahead of what anyone had done before. Since these guys were riding new levels of musical fluidity and inspiration, firing on so many more cylinders than anybody else had, they stumbled onto discoveries that changed the way music has been made ever since. It was an accidental masterpiece — but one that stunned the Beatles into realizing how far they could go. After that, they went full-time into the masterpiece-making business.
Yet unlike some of their later artistic statements, this one was fun to make, and it shows. As Paul recalled, “Part of the secret collaboration was that we liked each other. We liked singing at each other. He’d sing something and I’d say, ‘Yeah,’ and trade off on that. He’d say, ‘Nowhere land,’ and I’d say, ‘For nobody.’ It was a two-way thing.” From: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/50-years-of-rubber-soul-how-the-beatles-invented-the-future-of-pop-59132/
