Becoming Artists: The Beatles' Rubber Soul
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Becoming Artists - Bruce Muckala
Copyright © 2018 by Bruce Muckala
ISBN: 978-1-54-394011-4
Table of Contents
Forward
Chapter 1: Artistic Prelude
Chapter 2: Songwriters
Chapter 3: The Studio
Chapter 4: Sessions
Chapter 5: Songs
Chapter 6: Aftermath
Epilogue
Track Listing
Instruments
Bibliography
Notes
About the Author
Notes
Forward
I was 11 years old when my older brother Steve gave me the Rubber Soul LP for Christmas in 1965. It was the first record I had ever owned. I remember the TO:
inscription on the wrapping was filled with multiple mock pejoratives, which I knew was the way he communicated that he liked me. He didn’t have to give me a present.
Many fans struggled initially with Rubber Soul. Elvis Costello said in an interview for Ron Howard’s 2016 film The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years that he didn’t like it on his first listen. This group I liked kind of changed so much. There’s a big jump from ‘I wanna hold your hand’ to ‘was she told when she was young that pain would lead to pleasure.’ I didn’t understand it at all when I first heard it, and I didn’t think it was any good and then six weeks later [I] couldn’t live without the record. And that’s good when you trust the people that make music to take you somewhere you hadn’t been before.
I had heard the Beatles before at various friends’ houses and enjoyed their music but paid little attention to it. Though Rubber Soul has been seen as a line in the sand between their early, formative years as a band and their subsequent maturation and experimentation, that meant nothing to me. In fact, I was never really that drawn to their music during the band’s early mania days. I was the rare baby-boomer who did not see their Ed Sullivan appearance in 1964, but I played Rubber Soul so much that eventually I had worn out two copies before purchasing a third by the late Seventies. I had later missed out on the Revolver album, although I had the Eleanor Rigby
/ Yellow Submarine
single and the Yesterday and Today album. My copy of Rubber Soul was the Capitol release, so I had no idea that a few tracks on Yesterday and Today were also from the original Rubber Soul. My experience was that the album started with the wonderful I’ve Just Seen a Face.
Most of the people concerned with Rubber Soul are dead, or they have already told their stories as they saw fit. After all, this occurred over 50 years ago. Having a personal chat with the surviving Beatles Paul or Ringo is impossible, and anyway, they are regurgitating the same stories. Their memories can be as faulty as our own. They may be close to appearing as the old men who tell war stories that we’ve all heard many times before, but their consolation is that they can do it on television talk shows, documentaries, or personal appearances. People still want to see them, still want to hear the old stories, both true and false—from their own Beatle lips. Therefore, writing a book about the Beatles is now often either a fruitless endeavor, or one has to write their opinions about the Beatle topic being approached. We are none of us Mark Lewisohn, the Beatle scholar who has his mountains of Beatle documentation stored in 6,000,003 giant warehouses guarded by fierce dogs and ninja assassins, but having an opinion and a conclusion is exactly what so-called scholarly work is about. One does research, reaches a conclusion, then presents the arguments for that conclusion. A paper or book is judged by how well those arguments are presented. Calling this a scholarly
work is stretching it, but it includes research, arguments, and conclusions. You may or may not be convinced.
This work is not a hagiography. There are a few clunkers on Rubber Soul that mar its pristine reputation—except in nostalgic anniversary retrospectives—among the album’s tightly written, arranged, and performed compositions that are still relevant today. To paraphrase Robbie Robertson, a song that is going to live on needs to live in its contemporary surroundings whether it be the original or an interpretation. The good ones on Rubber Soul that continue to live on have stood the test of time through pleasure in listening and have also, through deep dissection by competent musicologists, been shown to be musically thoughtful, innovative and daring. Still, the clunkers can be just plain fun.
A problem one can discover doing historical research, and the Beatles are no exception, is that anecdotes that aren’t facts are widely looked upon as facts. It doesn’t really matter how many myths an author tries to correct. Someone else is sure to recycle a spurious or false one and employ it again. Like many authors, I have also probably unknowingly done so here, even after diligent attempts to avoid such transgressions. These bits and pieces of misleading information are recycled over and over. But when doing research, should one discount an author because he/she relates an untrue or spurious anecdote amongst the total work? It is difficult to do that. If we discounted everything a person wrote or said based on one misstatement alone, there would be no history left to read. Only multiple errors and spurious judgement on the situation or subject must determine if a work is unusable. There were numerous books that detailed the Beatles recordings, but they contained information that was eventually relegated to the trash. Even after Lewisohn’s book The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions was released (based on EMI studio documentation) those earlier books still contained valid and accurate information.
Little time is spent here on the band’s lengthy personal and collective history. Their story together and apart has been told numerous times and will be again. An overview of the recording technology is given here to give the untutored an idea of what is being presented when discussing recording. More in-depth studies of the recording equipment and processes have been printed. Recording the Beatles by Kevin Ryan and Brian Kehew and The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions by Mark Lewisohn being two of the best. Paying heed to Walter Everett’s The Beatles as Musicians: The Quarry Men through Rubber Soul and the Notes On… web series by Alan Pollack results in revealing musicological discussions of the individual songs.
Chapter 1: Artistic Prelude
We’d all have lovely peaceful lives but for you encouraging them.
John Lennon’s aunt Mimi to George Harrison’s mother Louise
When John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr signed their first contract with Parlophone Company Ltd in 1962, they were not just a new act for a record label that concentrated on comedy and variety recordings. They were now part of the larger company: Electric and Musical Industries, Limited (EMI). These four scruffs
from Liverpool called the Beatles had become a minor, unknown act on a label owned by an innovative and pioneering company that had begun business in 1929. Besides music, EMI was involved in radar development and television and later developed the first CT scanner. Parlophone was a small label with small budgets when EMI purchased it from its German owners and it had remained so. By 1962 it had gained a somewhat dubious reputation of insignificance at EMI and was used for their lesser acts. It had a few hits but never had sustained chart success. In spite of this, Parlophone was a very eclectic label with a variety of genres and the freedom to make choices in what it produced.
By the time the Beatles entered the EMI studios in October of 1965 to record their sixth album, the album that was to become Rubber Soul, much had changed since that 1962 contract was signed. Their youthful smiles and good looks combined with their ear-catching songs of young love had captured the hearts of teenagers in Britain, especially the girls. Between their first two albums they held the number one spot on the British charts for 51 weeks. The hit records along with the pandemonium of adoring crowds of these teenagers in Britain were followed by their subsequent success on the charts in the United States. Among a number of other labels, EMI also owned the U.S. company Capitol Records. Brian Epstein, the band’s manager, had begun a publicity campaign in the United States in late 1963, lobbying Capitol heavily, and by January 1964 their single I Want To Hold Your Hand
had become a number one hit.1 After having previously refused to release the Beatle’s music in America, Capitol now invested heavily in publicity and launched what Beatle recordings they had and did so as fast as they were able.2 It was probably the fact that the group had been booked on the American Ed Sullivan television show that Capitol agreed to promote the single. Initially, they saw the group as a fad that would soon pass from American culture. Three other American labels, Tollie, Swan and Vee Jay, had previously released the band’s earlier singles with no success and now reissued them. Capitol was late to the show but was fortunate via business contacts to wrest control of the earlier songs they had rejected back into their own pockets. As time would tell, they didn’t completely understand what they had in this new group.
The Beatles physically appeared on the American landscape in February 1964, landing at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport and were met by a crowd estimated at 3,000. Two days later they appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, watched by approximately 73 million viewers, or 34 per cent of the American population, the largest audience ever recorded for an American television program.
3 4 After two concert performances and a return to the Sullivan show, Beatlemania erupted across America. By April, after their brief initial stay in the states, the group held the top five slots on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart and had seven lower spots as well. A Hard Day’s Night, a mock-documentary film (which many kids thought was a real documentary) portraying the Beatlemania
that had overcome teenagers was an international success that summer, leading to more hit songs and skyrocketing record sales.5 The album A Hard Day’s Night contained all original material, the group’s first to do so, and the lion’s-share of the songs were written mainly by Lennon. Following the release of the film in August, after touring parts of Europe and Australia, the band played 30 concerts in 23 days in the U.S. It was perfect timing and the mania only increased.
McCartney had acquired a copy of Bob Dylan’s album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan from a French DJ during a 1964 stay in Paris. None of the group had heard Dylan’s music before but had heard about him. We all went potty for Dylan,
Lennon recalled. He said of his own writing after that, Instead of projecting myself into a situation, I would try to express what I felt about myself… I think it was Dylan who helped me realize that—not by any discussion or anything, but by hearing his work.
This exposure to Dylan’s music later created a noticeable shift in the lyrical content of all three songwriters in the band. One of the most memorable things of the trip [to Paris] for me,
Harrison said, "was that we had a copy of Bob Dylan’s Freewheelin’ album, which we played constantly."
It was during the ’64 U.S. tour when the group met Dylan who promptly introduced them to cannabis, something they soon took to whole-heartedly. The meeting in New York at the Delmonico hotel ultimately led to something like a cross-pollination as Dylan soon forsook his complete folky musical style and incorporated electric instruments and rock stylings into his arrangements. Dylan was gathering fame in America but nothing near like what the Beatles had just amassed. Because of his folk and protest-music past, he encountered much more resistance than nearly anyone who would dare to change their musical style or focus. Johnny Cash, an avid Dylan fan, had played an electric guitar at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival with not an eyebrow raised. When Dylan slung an electric guitar over his shoulder in 1965 he was castigated as a sell-out. Probably because Cash was singing someone else’s songs (Dylan’s) he couldn’t be derided for the song’s topics as Dylan soon was. After the August release of his album Another Side of Bob Dylan, shortly before meeting the Beatles, the lyrical change of direction in his songs was notable and signaled a transition from a focus on topicality to poetic introspection. In an open letter to Dylan in the November 1964 issue of Sing Out! magazine, Irwin Silber charged Dylan with turning his back on his audience due to the inner-directed, inner-probing, self-conscious
nature of his songs. Not only that, but he also issued claims that Dylan had lost contact
with people, by which he meant himself and others who had been lauding the social commentator, voice of a generation
Dylan.6 Dylan later acknowledged the resistance, but blamed it all on the album’s title. The Beatles had no such issues to deal with. Al Aronowitz, who was there at the time, referred to the New York meeting with marked hyperbole, claiming, That meeting didn’t just change pop music—it changed the times.
Any change wasn’t instant. Dylan and the Beatles had kept an eye on each other previously and each party had something the other desired. There were no epiphanies. No one there was thinking a momentous transmogrification was about to happen. As Andrew Harrison wrote, the idea of this moment plays to the pop fan’s weakness for a version of the ‘great man’ theory of history—the notion that everything depends on this one decision or that single conjunction—and connects to the lure of the counterfactual.
7
By the end of 1964 the Beatles no longer catered their songwriting completely to the source of their initial success; the kids in school, the teeny-boppers
who were devoted to the pop culture the Beatles engendered. As Jonathan Gould wrote, the group’s audience was showing signs of growing up.
8 When the band began their next album, Beatles For Sale, they were exhausted. There were few new songs available to record. McCartney considered the album as the beginning of a more mature phase for the band although it seems clear that songs such as Every Little Thing
and Eight Days A Week
were aimed at their current teenage market and