With Rubber Soul, the Beatles proved their durability as a band capable of growth and change, thereby cementing their position as one of the most(if not the most) consequential acts of the remaining Sixties. It was a significant achievement because they’d burst upon the scene and rode the waves for a couple of years. However, such exuberance(or mania) could not be sustained. Sprinters don’t run the mile, and even the biggest explosions fade away.
Not that their first impression was limited to teenybopper pandemonium, though it seemed so at the time when many adults(and Rock n Roll purists) dismissed the whole thing as more fad than fab. Beatlemania was so over-the-top and unprecedented — not even the hysterics surrounding Elvis Presley came close — , so delirious and bordering on deranged, that many just assumed that sober minds would ultimately prevail and the Beatles would be seen for what they truly are, a passing fashion(or flu season).
On some level, Beatles must have sensed it as well. Ringo once said his long-term plan was to cash in on what he expected to be short-lived stardom and open up a string of hair salons. And even though John, Paul, and George were elated by their sudden rise to fame, they couldn’t help but notice the fans came to the concerts not so much to hear the music but themselves scream, leading Beatles to play in a ever more perfunctory manner on the assumption that no one, the band included, could hear the music amidst the cicada-like shrieking of young girls(and some boys) — later, when the Beatles played to a somewhat subdued audience in Japan and actually heard themselves play, they realized how much their performance quality had slipped. Still, despite the noise of the crowd, Beatlemania happened in the first place because Lennon and McCartney invented a new kind of sound that refined the Rock n Roll into something faster yet mellower. The result was louder but more pleasant, more about revelry than rebellion. It rolled like thunder and coddled like a lullaby. They’d arrived at the Coca-Cola of Pop. Sharp and soothing.
But the sudden success posed a problem. Wouldn’t such a rave act exhaust the fuel sooner than later, or to put it in a more vulgar way, didn’t it blow the wad too early? It was as if they began atop the climax, the highest peak of any rollercoaster, but what would happen at the bottom rail? Would they just be replaced by new idols as the detractors predicted or would they somehow defy the odds and keep the momentum going? As the title of one of their albums implied, the secret to survival was to offer ‘something new’ at every turn, in a way a pop cultural reflection of Western Progress’s precept of ‘evolve or go extinct’, which non-Western civilizations found out the hard way in confrontation with the ever advancing West in the fields of science, technology, and organization.
Irrelevance and extinction would indeed be the fate of most of the British Invasion acts, even some first-rate ones like, for example, the Dave Clark Five. DC5 were almost as fabulous as the Beatles in their initial outing. If anything, they could be even more rambunctious, and their best songs had a similar mix of melody and madness. The difference was DC5 had nothing to go on but the original formula and faded once the fashions and attitudes changed.
When the teenyboppers of 1963/1964 later turned onto Rock as personal expression or even art, Dave Clark Five was just a blur in the rearview mirror, a reminder of their younger days. (Besides, the new batch of teenyboppers had the Monkees and the like.) As remarkable as the Beatles were from 1962(when they hit upon the magic formula with “Please Please Me”) to 1964, their later fate might have been like the Herman’s Hermits’ but for the fact that they demonstrated, decisively and resolutely, with Rubber Soul that they were capable of change and growth, and determined to lead.
From late 1963 all throughout 1964, Beatles were such a dominant force that the future direction of pop music was up in the air. The attention was focused on the Now, as Beatlemania seemed the biggest phenom in pop culture history. Just about the only competition, in quality and inspiration, comprised the Beach Boys and Motown. The Rolling Stones hadn’t yet made their mark. Bob Dylan was still a folkie, and the notion of Folk Rock would have been ludicrous, as Dylan discovered the hard way soon enough when the Folkies clung to the Culture War formulation of Folk vs Rock. And many of the great acts of the late 60s had yet to emerge or take shape.
It was in 1965, possibly the greatest year in Rock/Pop, that music culture finally began to materialize into something of significance and meaning to the Boomers, as it was transformed from entertainment to the artform of the generation. The Beatles of 62-64, unique and fresh as they were, still embodied the iron rule of popular music, the primacy of pleasing the fans. Their first #1 hit “Please Please Me” said as much. It’s about pleasing the other to be pleased in turn. Beatle-Mania was a back-and-forth dynamic between the band so eager to please the crowd(to orgasmic raptures) and the crowd so happy to please the Beatles in turn. For all their talent and inspiration, Lennon and McCartney knew the Mania was the hungry dragon that had to constantly fed. And in concerts, the roar of mania drowned out the music. So, all said and done, the mop-top version of the Beatles constituted feeders of popular appetites, the biggest fast-food franchise in pop music, rather than artists in the truest sense. Initially, they strode atop the mania, but it soon engulfed them, sometimes in terrifying ways, like in Philippines when the hysteria turned from love to hate. Despite their frozen smiles on the tour, they came to resent the mania(and its manipulators) and, incredibly for a band that came to fame with frenzied fans, quit the concert circuit altogether in 1966. Beatles may have been bigger than Jesus, but the Mania became bigger than the Beatles, and it’s no wonder Lennon jumped at the opportunity to withdraw into his acid trips. And McCartney’s perfectionist vanity grew tired of the amateurism on concerts and favored the studio where his skills could be honed as instrumentalist and arranger alongside George Martin.
Anyway, 1965 was when, in the cooling climate of the post-Beatles-Big-Bang, a new star cluster of music began to coalesce, generating a new kind of heat, one that the Beatles couldn’t help but notice, if only to remain in the game. In that year, Stones staked their claim to the throne with “Satisfaction” and “Get Off Of My Cloud”, setting off the great Rock rivalry with the Beatles. Bob Dylan ‘went electric’ and dropped “Like a Rolling Stone” like a bomb, Byrds perfected Folk Rock with their rendition of “Mr. Tambourine Man”, The Who radicalized Rock with “My Generation”, Paul Simon came into his own with “Sounds of Silence”, Brian Wilson unveiled a new sophistication with “California Girls”, and Motown got even better. Henceforth, one had a pretty good sense of where the music was headed for the rest of the decade. It was going to be a fierce(but also friendly)contest of wills, egos, and personalities. By 1965, the promising acts, formed or on the verge of forming, had a strong sense of what they were and were capable of. But not in 1964 when Pop Music was still reverberating around Beatlemania, the only question being, when will it end and then what?
Even in 1964, however, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, sensing their immense potential, were eager to move in new directions. (As different as the duo were from Bob Dylan, what they all had in common was the conviction of having ‘it’, something that set them apart from the others, a sense of destiny.) But how would ‘it’ be manifest? Among the early signs was McCartney’s pensive “Things We Said Today”. Now, let it be said that the Beatles weren’t about meaning, and nothing they did, even at their most artful, had much in the way of depth, true of 99% of Rock music. The difference was in the thunderous power on the one hand(owing to blues roots & electricity) and the poetry of emotions on the other(especially by way of folk idioms and pop techniques). Even Dylan’s sophisticated use of lyrics was more to paint moods and impressions than to convey meaning, something that went over the heads of folkie-centric fans who demanded sermons and instructions.
As the decade progressed, musicians found ways to rock harder, culminating in Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin, before Heavy Metal turned it into a cartoon. But, there was also a motion toward interiority, songs adrift in private dreams than pandering to familiar boy-meets-girl sentiments. Generic pop emotions of love and heartache gave way to something akin to monologues of unresolved feelings and unrequited dreams. Most songs either addressed the object of one’s love interest or the third person, the collective mind of the listeners, but the new sensibility had the singer musing to himself, often forlorn and oblivious to the world. Consider “Sad Memory” by Buffalo Springfield or “Everybody’s Been Burned” by the Byrds. Or “Fotheringay” by Fairport Convention and “Ruby Tuesday” by Rolling Stone. Or “Fool on the Hill” by the Beatles.
The art of ballad is about the fine-tuning of moods, like the craft of turning a diamond in the rough into a brilliant gem. With songs like “Things We Said Today”(and partly “All My Loving” prior), McCartney strove for something subtler though within the perimeters of a pop song. (When McCartney later actually tried to SAY something in “She’s Leaving Home”, he fell flat on his face. All he needed was the ingenuity of peeling away another layer of emotions to reveal something fine and as yet unseen.) Even the loud Beatles songs began to develop in structure, like “When I Get Home” and “Anytime At All”.
Fairly or not, Lennon got the credit for initiating the change in direction, in part under the influence of Bob Dylan. “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” and especially “I’m a Loser”(on UK release Beatles for Sale and US release Beatles 65) have been lauded as Lennon’s early attempts to evolve as a song-writer. Dylan’s introduction of marijuana surely contributed to the altered approach to music: Less twist-and-shout and more think-and-doubt.
With the release of Beatles for Sale(and its US variation Beatles 65), the high-strung energy was still there but under a cloud. It sounded more desperate than confident. The early spontaneity was missing, and the forays in new directions were hesitant and halfcocked(more trepidation than experimentation), though “I Feel Fine” was a real breakthrough. The Beatles were offering more of what had made them popular in the first place but stuffed with half-hearted imperative for change. So, “No Reply” and “I’ll Be Back” are denser in their emotions, bitter or yearning. As such, the Beatles at this moment sounded like a Janus-like hybrid band facing backward and forward.
Same was true of their next album Help!, though the Beatles clearly jumped the hurdle with an undeniable knack for reconstruing the basic elements of their sound into amazing new melodies. In one respect, Help! is their best album, that is if judged by the number of great songs. Many great albums hardly contain a great song, and their high estimation rests on a string of very good songs. Or they have one or two great songs and some very good ones. Incredibly, Help! has three great instant classics: The title song, Yesterday(which will last forever), and Ticket to Ride, maybe their greatest rocker. Arguably, the Beatles that recorded Help! embodied the perfect balance between the earlier spontaneity and the new mastery, and the three aforementioned songs are amazing in every way. Also, the other songs on Help! range from good to very good, especially “Another Girl”, “You’re Going to Lose that Girl”, and “Night Before”. I also like George Harrison’s “I Need You”. (Of course, we mean the British version as the U.S. version lacks “Yesterday” and few other songs, replaced with a bunch of instrumentals from the movie.)
On the other hand, Help! sounds like a random collection of songs rather than an album in the organic sense, as the format came to be valued in Rock Culture. Rock Album is akin to a photo album. The songs are best threaded together by a theme, attitude, or vision(or ‘concept’ in more ambitious projects). Photo albums tend to be categorized similarly: The wedding album, school trip album, family album, friend album, nature hike album, and etc. Help!, outstanding as it is, comes across as a jumble of songs packaged for a movie soundtrack. As such, it lacked the resonance that their next album Rubber Soul delivered in spades. (One thing for sure, Sixties popular music would have been profoundly different had the Beatles never existed, but it would progressed more or less the same had the Beatles perished in a plane crash after Rubber Soul.)
With Rubber Soul, it was as if the Beatles wanted to prove they had something more than youthful inspiration, a genuine musical talent independent of stardom, i.e. they were more than a cultural phenomenon whose success relied solely on fan mania. Thus, it is sort of like the Beatles Unplugged, as if to say, “We’re in a silent room and the electricity is off. Just listen to what we can do with the basic elements of music.” Not something to dance to or scream about but to sit down and listen to. While electric guitar is used at times, most of the songs are acoustic(and even the electric ones could do nearly as well without). As a chamber piece, it was an album to ponder than pound in the ears.
There was bound to be some confusion because of the album’s title and the two versions of some significant difference. The title implies the Beatles as the players of white soul, a plastic version of the real thing. But, while the Beatles drew inspiration from rhythm-and-blues and Rock-n-Roll(and black Girl Groups and Motown), most of the songs on Rubber Soul belong in another category. Only “Drive My Car”(missing on the U.S. version) and “The Word” have anything soulful about them, and the rest are ballads or standard pop melodies.
The bigger issue is the question as to which version is more authoritative(and better), the British version or the U.S. version? Quantitatively, the British version has more songs, especially “Drive My Car”(never my favorite but a very good song) and “Nowhere Man” that rings with Lennon’s customary brilliance. It also has George Harrison’s “If I Needed Someone”, a pretty good song. Those songs(and the lackluster “What Goes On”) are missing on the U.S. version that instead has “I’ve Just Seen a Face” and “It’s Only Love”, originally on the British version of Help! Most people would agree “Drive My Car” and “Nowhere Man” are superior to “I’ve Just Seen a Face” and “It’s Only Love”, and it would have hurt the U.S. version none to include “If I Needed Someone”.
Yet, from the consideration of the Rock Album as an organic unity, the U.S. version works better. “I’ve Just Seen a Face” and “It’s Only Love” are perfect fits with the other songs on the U.S. version of Rubber Soul, indeed far more so than on the album Help! It’s as if they found their real home on the subsequent American album. In contrast, “Drive My Car” sticks out like a sore thumb and would have done better on an earlier album. “Nowhere Man” would have been better suited for the next album Revolver with songs like “Tax Man” and “Yellow Submarine”.
Now, the U.S. version of Rubber Soul has only one great song(possibly two, with “In My Life”). It is “Norwegian Wood” where John Lennon, calm and reflective, recalls a chance affair that lingered in memory for reasons he can’t quite fathom. Perhaps, it was his answer to McCartney’s “Yesterday”. Or maybe he quit being consciously Dylanesque and just let go, waiting for an inner voice that, under the right mood and turn of mind, would emerge of its own accord.
Its narrative seems to intimate the creative process of the song itself, i.e. he stumbled upon unfamiliar feelings, which became the basis of the song that emerged from a mysterious place. A song he couldn’t have found by looking but one that had to find its way to him. In the tale, he entered a woman’s adobe, they did whatever they were supposed to do, but in the morning, she had to ‘work’, and he to vacate the room and sleep in the bathtub(while the bedroom was taken up with another man perhaps, which makes us wonder what her line of ‘work’ is). He woke up later to find her gone, and he found himself alone and placed a log in the fireplace. Who is this woman, and why does she affect him so? And, is the protagonist meant to be John Lennon himself or a fictional character in a mini-story? If meant to be Lennon himself, perhaps what he noticed most was her independence, a life according to her own rules(in proto-Swinging-London style). John Lennon was a Beatle at whose feet so many girls would have prostrated themselves. And his wife Cynthia was ever so tame and loyal. But, the song describes a woman who was indifferent to his fame and fortune. He was just another acquaintance, lover, or client. And she’s such a carefree busybody that she exited the place with him still sleeping in the bath. It’s not the woman per se but something about her that his mind can’t quite let grasp. Perhaps, an easygoing egotism to match his. He could have any bird in the world, but this one bird had flown. Thus, it is a rather odd love song if it indeed one. Whereas “Yesterday” is clearly about a man thinking of a woman, “Norwegian Wood” is about feelings evoked by a woman despite the lack of any real bond between them. About what might have been(and never will be) than what once was. It’s not about the feelings for a woman but the responses stirred by her qualities, both easy and elusive, indeed elusive precisely because so accessible, to any man of her choosing. The man in the song isn’t in love with the woman and could just walk away. And she does her own thing and isn’t bound to him or anyone. Is she a free spirit or a self-centered bitch? Either way, she has her own wings, coming and going as she pleases, rather like him. Could they be kindred spirits… except, if the man is really meant to be John himself, he is bound to Cynthia Lennon, a woman he never cared for and married only out of a sense of duty(as she became pregnant with his child). Perhaps, the song offers a clue as to why Lennon was so taken with Yoko Ono later. She had a mind and will all her own.
In “Norwegian Wood”, gone is the self-pitying strain of “I’m a Loser” and the ingratiating vibes of “You’ve Got to Hide Your Away”(as if to prove he can do something more than boy-love-girl songs). It’s as if Lennon finally tapped into the inner poet as guide to his next phase of creativity.
It is perhaps Lennon’s finest ballad, equaled only by “Watching the Wheels” on his last album Double Fantasy. It has the delicacy of “Yesterday” but with a shade of perversity. McCartney’s song is about the pain of something had but lost, whereas Lennon’s song is about the haze of something not worth having but beguiling just the same; you can have her body but not her spirit. It is one of Lennon’s handful of sublime achievements.
Among Lennon’s other songs on the album, “In My Life” is exceptionally good, and its nostalgia would later come to bloom with “Strawberry Fields Forever”. As for “The Word”, “It’s Only Love”, “Girl”, and “Run for Your Life”, they’re all solid tunes and add to album’s consistency. George Harrison’s lone contribution on the U.S. album, “Think for Yourself”, is one of his best. Though harder-edged than the other songs, it shares their sense of interiority, i.e. the song is more like an angst-ridden monologue of feelings tied up in knots. While none of McCartney’s songs counts as great, they are first-rate across the board, sustaining a high level of creativity and craftsmanship. Especially notable are “You Won’t See Me” and “I’m Looking Through You”. (Of course, it needs to be said a lot of Beatles songs got attention, sometimes undue, simply because they were by the Fab Four. “Michelle” is good but far inferior to any number of French chansons that inspired it. And while “Girl” is nice with its Greek touch, why not go for the real Greek stuff that has more flavor?)
For the first time, the songs sound detached from and even indifferent to the phenomenon of Beatlemania, as if composed on a sabbatical, far removed from the constant buzz of fandom. And even though most songs involve romance, they’re about women than girls, about feelings borne of experience than adolescent expectation.
With Rubber Soul, the Beatles crossed the hurdle. They had within them something that would last beyond the initial spring of Beatlemania with its mobs of shrieking teenyboppers. Away from the spotlight, with minimal electric input, looking inward than outward, they proved to themselves and the world that they were here to stay, at least as long as they were willing to explore the fuller range of their talent. It was the moment the Beatles decisively diverged from the fate of the Dave Clark Five. For better or worse, it also started the process by which the Beatles would give up touring altogether the following year.
If the Beatles went ‘acoustic’ with Rubber Soul to show that they were more than a Rock n Roll act from Britain, Bob Dylan had something similar to prove, albeit in reverse order, and it would be hugely controversial, dogging him for several years. Whereas the gaggles of Beatlemanical teeny-boppers uncritically accepted the gentler, maturing Beatles(and would themselves grow into new attitudes), the folkie fans of Bob Dylan had an almost messianic attachment to him as the spokesman of his generation, the poet-prophet of the age, the chosen one who would bear the torch passed to him from Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.
So, when Dylan decided to ‘go electric’, it wasn’t regarded merely as a new direction but an outrage, an act of betrayal. It was like Harvey Keitel’s Judas berating Willem Dafoe’s Jesus in THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST for having reneged on his mission on Earth. Indeed, for the next two years, ex-fans would attend his concerts just to boo and jeer him and the Band(led by Robbie Robertson) — the sheer level of derangement has been downplayed over the years by leftist boomers who didn’t want to admit what a priggish and humorless bunch of ideologues they once were.
If the Beatles wanted to prove they could make music without the noise, Dylan wanted to prove he could rock with the rest, and that called for amplification, or Dylan plugged. Folkie purists denigrated Dylan for ‘selling out’ to become a pop star, but they missed the mark. While Dylan clearly craved Rock stardom, he was striving for art than pop in music. Indeed, most Dylan songs that hit the charts(usually as cover versions)were composed during his folkie period: “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” by Peter, Paul, and Mary, “It Ain’t Me Babe” by the Turtles, “All I Really Want to Do” by Sonny & Cher, and the like. Furthermore, the Byrds, the premier interpreters of Dylan songs, mostly covered the songs from his folkie period. And even though “Mr. Tambourine Man” was released on Dylan’s partly electric album Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan’s version was acoustic and within the folkie idiom.
So, the whole Dylan-goes-electric controversy was rather misconstrued by the diehard folkie purists. It was actually less about folk purity vs pop commercialism than about folk dogma vs personal art. Apart from “Like a Rolling Stone”, hardly a song on Highway 61 Revisited had much commercial viability. Songs like “Queen Jane Approximately”, “Just like Tom Thumb’s Blues”, “Ballad of a Thin Man”, and especially “Desolation Row” were unlike anything recorded in Rock and Pop. The surreal songs on Blonde on Blonde were even less suited for Billboard charts, though “Rainy Day Woman #2” became a kind of novelty hit.
In retrospect, Rubber Soul is a remarkable album and a pivotal work for the Beatles, but it was Dylan who really turned the Rock world upside down with his monumental masterpiece(that incredibly was topped by an even greater work the following year). And of course, there was the Stones with “Satisfaction”, though it was only with Aftermath in 1966 that they finally mastered the art of the Rock Album as unified expression. Dylan went electric not to fill up concerts but to use the added charge to break through new avenues of expression. Folkie reins weren’t enough; he needed the electric whip to get his chariot going. And he went so very so far very fast, so much so that he veered from riding off the cliff and pulled back(like the game of ‘chicken’ in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE), withdrawing into family life and releasing the acoustic John Wesley Harding in the final days of 1967. Though acoustic, it has more in common with his two electric predecessors than with his folkie output. It too is defined by artistic aspiration, an egoism that was anathema to folkie purists despite the absence of commercialism. For many leftist folkies with the Popular Front mentality, art should be social and relevant, not dwell on personal life, let alone psychology, which was deemed self-indulgent or ‘bourgeois’.
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