Looking back, it’s incredible how The Fab Four matured over two years from their first album to Rubber Soul. One can argue that all Beatle albums are sophisticated, but Rubber Soul feels like a band that had looked back and marked their present by adjusting their sound and perhaps a reflection of the Beatle-mania surrounding them. And we’re not talking about years, but months, that they have had changed somewhere in that time frame. The only crisis I’m aware of is the intense fame that surrounded them, which must have affected their well-being or how they dealt with the outside world after being in a cushioned existence of ‘them vs. everyone else.’ I don’t think I could mentally take that in if I were them or their age. But then again, I’m not The Beatles; therefore, they may be something superhuman about their existence. At this point in their presence, were they sharing rooms when they toured? Did they have a separate life outside of The Beatles’ bubble? Some were married or had serious relationships, but how can that match their workload and schedule?
Rubber Soul strikes me as a pause, a few moments of reflection on what was happening in their inner world. Due to the acoustic guitars, there is an intimacy between the musicians. When I first heard this album when I was ten, I imagined the Fab Four sitting around a campfire, playing sad songs to each other. Why I had this Roy Rogers-like picture of my head of them in the wilderness is odd, but something exotic appealed to my senses. When one plays an acoustic instrument, that means to me that it’s a profound moment or sharing an intimacy of a lost love or one that got away. Michelle doesn’t have the emotional pull as when I was younger, but at that age, this was the uber-romantic song of all time for me. There was a girl at school who I was in love with, and even though I was a child, the intensity of having feelings for another was intense. I didn’t understand why I felt this way, but Paul somehow expressed the romantic aspect of a feeling that is difficult to define. Yet he managed to articulate his consistency in this song; therefore, it was my favorite of this album.
And there were other songs, You Won’t See Me, I’m Looking Through You, but especially the Lennon song In My Life, which still causes a chill to run through my body. It seemed at the time that the song was attached to a memory, and even as a youngster, I have been deeply moved by my memories, especially regarding weather and locations. I had deep feelings for specific structures and the rain. The overcast and slightly cool afternoons always made me feel melancholic, and if nothing else, Rubber Soul represented that mood as I listened to these songs in Beverly Glen. At the time, I only had this album for a few weeks because our house was destroyed in a mudslide right after Christmas. Rubber Soul represented a presence of either death or a radical change, and at that time, once the album went missing in the mud, I felt as if someone had taken something I loved deeply away from me. Both the music, as well as the object of this album, had a profound sense of loss. And now, I have the British version, as I had the American copy, which is not the same.
My favorite Beatles album.
I love how your childhood imagination took off from these songs. Poor George, he gets a sticker over his face.