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What is the Beatles’ best album? “The one you’re listening to right now” is always the correct answer, of course, and that could encompass “Meet the Beatles” or “Let It Be” at any given moment. But for most fans who
aren’t just being sentimental about their first point of entry, it’s usually going to come down to a pick among five — “Rubber Soul,” “Revolver,” “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” “The Beatles” and “Abbey Road” — with the first-mentioned there sometimes being the last-cited, because that 1965 transitional LP isn’t as fully ambitious in scope as those that followed. “Rubber Soul” is undoubtedly among the most influential albums ever released, make no mistake. Yet it was arguably the last Beatles record (at least until “Let It Be”) that was tossed off reasonably casually, on deadline, and not consciously aiming at being some kind of tour de force.
Which is partly why I’ve suddenly joined the stubborn minority flank of fans that has always thought of “Rubber Soul” as the best all-around effort. That could change in 15 minutes, naturally, because it happens to be The One I’m Listening To Right Now — in its very expanded form as “Rubber Soul: Special Edition Super Deluxe,” a five-LP or four-CD set that finally reached the world Friday after many years of fans’ wishing and hoping. Or it might be 15 months before I switch sides on this one and go back to the White Album. Because there’s something about “Rubber Soul” in all of its released forms, including the substantially different original U.K. and U.S. versions, that makes for the Fabs’ most consistent listening experience.
It provided — provides — a different kind of joy than the kind of whiplash that the world would get when the screaming guitar of “Taxman” gave way to borrowing the “Psycho” strings to mourn all the lonely people, and other hilariously sharp juxtapositions on “Revolver” going forward. “Rubber Soul,” in contrast, catches the Beatles constantly at the glorious nexus of rocking and mature. (Or folk-rocking, but the force of the electric guitar remains strong.) It’s kind of the last bastion of Carl Perkins’ influence being stronger than the pot’s, but with the looming spectres of Dylan, the Byrds and Simon & Garfunel getting also getting their licks in before the psychedelia, orchestration and music-hall homages seriously creep in.
And it’s the sound of the Beatles almost accidentally catching lightning in a bottle, before they more deliberately put their kites way, way up in the air for just about everything that followed. There’s a shorter way to describe it: perfect.
The boxed set has four distinct components, each of them incredibly necessary, whether new or old: the requisite fresh stereo remix of the U.K. album from Giles Martin and Sam Okell; a collection of studio outtakes; the U.K. track list in mono, revisited; and the American version in stereo. So, in order not just of appearance, but of what you need:
The first thing to know is that the remix is essential… and compared to the boxed set, it can be had for cheap — free, really, in these days of streaming — and so there is little excuse to not give this piece a chance. Not surprisingly, the Beatles’ mass fandom has had mixed, if primarily positive, thoughts about past Martin/Okell full-album remixes, but it’s difficult to imagine there being very many souls out there who will not regard this as a spectacular upgrade, any passing sonic quibbles aside. No Beatles album stood in more need of their touch, arguably. When George Martin previously took a whack at a new mix, he remained largely reverent toward the panning that was done to put “Soul” in stereo in the ’60s. Revisiting that approach in the U.S. stereo reprisal here is still fun, in a quaint way: You are right in the studio with the Beatles — and half of them are on one side of you and half are on the other! But only the most perverse among us would maintain that ultra-separation is how “Rubber Soul” ought to remain forever, much less was intended as an essential part of its conception. The fresh mix is far from radical, but achieves its mission of making the album sound relevant to the ears of 2026 and 2086, while fooling you into thinking it’s just the way you’ve always heard it for years.
Some of us will leap to the cutting-room-floor section, which has 26 unreleased scraps — none of it completely revelatory, all of it a pleasure to listen to for anyone who knows the finsihed recordings by heart. Vocals and instrumental tracks were typically recorded separately at this time, so we get a lot of backing-tracks-in-progress before the lead vox and harmonies were overlaid, but there are a handful of actual demos or early scrub takes that survived being erased. Plus one never-before-reported tune that apparently surfaced only recently, a couple of minutes of a John Lennon demo of “Little Girl,” a modest charmer that probably would have seemed too impossibly old-fashioned for “Rubber Soul,” even fleshed out. It would be lying to say the world was any worse for having been denied this Lennon curio till now. But as the capper to a fairly voluminous amount of more familiar works-in-progress, “Little Girl” is a nice dessert.
Hearing so many isolated instrumental tracks does make for some discoveries that maybe were already obvious to the most attentive Beatles buffs, but might still be surprising to others of us. Like: how much of a borderline-country album “Rubber Soul” was and is. The non-vocal version of “Run for Your Life,” for instance, sounds as much like a Buck Owens track as their cover of “Act Naturally” did on the previous album, and there’s really a good deal of C&W or rockabilly throughout, for a group that was soon to be acid-tripping. You also get a version of “Michelle” with the harmonies turned up so high, it almost sounds like a barbershop-quartet homage. We get to hear “In My Life” without any solo at all, much less the George Martin piano part that was sped up x2 to become a harpichord… but there’s also a short excerpt of a version that tried out an organ solo, recorded by John on a cassette in the control room.
The most fun outtakes might be the early tries we hear of “Day Tripper” (which was never on any version of “Rubber Soul,” but on a single as part of the same era). There’s a kind of hootenanny-style recording, before the signature riff was composed, and then, once things get electric, we get delightful outtake arrangements where they tried ramping up the intensity in certain parts of the song… plus lots and lots more of the Ringo fills you know and love. And a version of “I’m Looking Through You” that goes on for about 45 seconds longer than the release version, so Beatles fans can hear more of a fairly rare example of Paul being a little mean. Part of the reason “I’m Looking Through You” runs longer in the outtake is because the parts of the song where it wants to turn into a rave-up go on for a few bars longer each time, as if they really wanted to work in a little more of the “soul” sound promised in the title. With “Norwegian Wood,” there’s a progression of different degrees of use of the sitar sound, from a take that has too much of George Harrison’s use of the exotic instrument — it sounds like it’s about to turn right into “Within You Without You” — to a version with none at all, before they settle on a mixture that’s just right.
Having both the U.K. and U.S. editions represented here in faithful recreations of how those audiences have long heard the album allows the chance to revive the eternal debate of which track listing was better. Americans may have gotten a better idea, faster, of how strong the folk strains were on the album by it beginning with “I’ve Just Seen a Face” (which had already appeared on “Help!” in Europe), leading right into the one-night-stand reportage of “Norwegian Wood.” But of course if you forever heard it as opening with “Drive My Car,” in the U.K. (and not included at all on the U.S. version), your tendency would have been to remember it as a solid rock ‘n’ roll album. In the end, no one loses either way, but it’s fascinating to think about how these perceptions might have been forged differently by some fairly arbitrary choices at the time. Thankfully, we all have the liberty now to take the 16 songs that were included on either or both sides of the pond, add the double-A-side single “Day Tripper”/”We Can Work It Out” (included as a 7-inch single in the vinyl boxed set), and make “Rubber Soul” what it could have been in a perfect world: an 18-song masterpiece without a duff track anywhere in the mix.
The wild thing is that you can hear all of this for pennies on the dollar through your Spotify or Tidal subscription. What you can’t get is the hardback coffee table book that offers a wealth of annotation on every one of these 18 songs, along with the bigger-picture perspective on where the Beatles were in this culture where they leading the cultural changing of the guard. It’s hard to imagine living without it, for the recording details but also the reminder of, say, where McCartney was at in his relationship with Jane Asher, and how that led to the hopeful “We Can Work It Out” and not-so-hopeful “I’m Looking Through You,” or whether “Drive My Car” counts in the lineage of the group’s “comedy” songs, or whether Lennon meant “Nowhere Man” as an attack on squares or on himself, and the discrepancies between the later accounts of John and Paul — never to be settled, at this late date — over who wrote the melody to “In My Life.”
All wonderful grist for the Beatlemaniac mill, but at the core of it, a singular yet malleable album that had “rubber” in the title but really put in concrete how much the Beatles would mean to us in the years and millennia to come.
