When The Rubber Meets The Road

"Rubber Soul" semi-review plus meditation on incrementalism

I’ve written a little about the Beatles before—here and here, in a rough two-part bit on the White Album and some funny internet discourse—and here, where I compared the evolution of the Beatles to the organic growth of a city.

I can do something in between: this is sort of an informal review, but also a further exploration of the incremental growth of the Beatles from album to album, and how there’s a kind of uncanny magic to incremental growth—how a thing changes but remains what it is.

It’s fascinating to me how you can see this magic of incremental evolution in the Beatles’ discography. How you can hear it. I had always thought, like a lot of commentary suggests, that you could kind of divide the Beatles into “early” Beatles (up to and possibly including Help), “transitional” or “middle” Beatles (Rubber Soul and Revolver, and possibly beginning with Help), and “late” or “weird” Beatles (Sgt. Pepper through to Abbey Road).

This is a useful framework because there are, obviously, distinct things going on in these three phases, and it’s not wrong to view them as three stylistic eras or periods. This is the case if you were to listen to the albums separately, and it is particularly the case if you pull random songs off of albums from different eras. (Of course “I Want to Hold Your Hand” sounds nothing like “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!”, and “Helter Skelter” sounds nothing like “Drive My Car.”) Presented in that manner, the differences are stark.

However, I’ve noticed that when listening to the albums in sequence, they actually seem less dramatically different from each other. The continuities stand out more listening back to back. You start to sense the meta-aspect of how the albums are put together, how in some way they’re all increasingly sophisticated attempts at the same basic endeavor.

One continuity, for part of the Beatles’ run anyway: the “sitar songs.” They’re all pretty different, and the latter two are “Indian” while the first, “Norwegian Wood,” is not.¹ If you think of the “sitar song” as a “slot” to fill, then it’s a loose three-part series running from Rubber Soul through to Sgt. Pepper (“Within You Without You”). And of course, there are little hints of the Indian musical influence in many other songs, too.

You start to notice the “Ringo song” as a category/type. Going back to Help, Ringo’s song is typically a novelty song of sorts, and often (“Act Naturally,” “What Goes On,” “Don’t Pass Me By”) a country number, but not always (“Yellow Submarine,” “Octopus’s Garden,” “Good Night”).

If you listen through the discography, instead of each of those songs seeming like a slightly out-of-place standalone work, they start to seem like entries in a very loose series. The particular criticisms that some of them come in for—“What Goes On” being “too country” for the Beatles, “Yellow Submarine” being too silly for Revolver, etc.—make less sense when you think of all of them as various incarnations of or attempts at “Ringo’s novelty number.”²

Another thing I notice in terms of continuity is Paul’s ballads. Beginning with “Yesterday,” there’s typically a Paul ballad on an album. “Michelle” is Rubber Soul’s entry. Revolver has two songs for me that roughly serve as entries in that loose genre: “Here, There and Everywhere,” and “For No One.” “She’s Leaving Home” on Sgt. Pepper fits that “Paul ballad” slot for me, even though it’s very different.

It has the same Paul vocal, the same complex Paul melody that you wince at, thinking he’s going to forget where it’s going and lose it in the middle before he brings it back around. In other words, this pretty original song on a very original album clearly stands out as an incremental evolution of a familiar type.

There’s more continuity here. The “Paul ballad” is often even around the same point in the album! “Michelle” is song 7; “Here, There and Everywhere” is 5; “She’s Leaving Home” is 6.

And what follows the Paul ballad is also consistent in that three-album run! All three are followed by novelty songs of a sort, two of them Ringo songs. “Michelle” is followed by “What Goes On”; “Here, There and Everywhere” is followed by “Yellow Submarine”; and “She’s Leaving Home” is followed by “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!”

The closers tend to hew to a slightly nuts high-energy sound, from Help (“Dizzy Miss Lizzy”) to Rubber Soul (“Run For Your Life”) to Revolver (“Tomorrow Never Knows”) to Sgt. Pepper (“A Day in the Life”) to the out-of-left-field ending sequence of the White Album with the penultimate “Revolution 9.”

In other words, while these songs are totally different—an old rock and roll cover, a sardonic murder ballad, two psychedelic masterpieces, and a weird sound collage followed by a lullaby—the rough “slot” they fit into, the general role they play in the overall album, and the mood they set/way they play off the other songs feels almost weirdly consistent, in a way that isn’t discernible if you just listen to each song or even each album as a standalone work.

There are other subtle continuities you notice, like (more obviously) similar-sounding harmonies or little bits of sounds or tunes that resemble earlier ones. Listening to the albums in sequence unveils a lot of the workshopping and playing around, a lot of the meta-structure, how there’s a little bit of the preceding album in every next album, despite the overall sound massively transforming over time.