Rubber Soul: How the Beatles Plastic Soul Album Changed Music

Daniel Holland
8 hours ago
15 min read

Four men in suits stand against a vibrant orange and pink "Rubber Soul" backdrop. Text reads: "Rubber Soul: How the Beatles Plastic Soul Album Changed Music."

Paul McCartney was in London, somewhere between the chaos of tours and the pressure of delivering yet another Christmas album, when he heard a remark that stuck. A man in the United States had described Mick Jagger and The Rolling Stones as “good, but plastic soul.” McCartney liked the phrase. He later called it “the germ of Rubber Soul.” It was a self aware little joke. The Beatles were white lads from Liverpool drawing heavily on African American soul and rhythm and blues. “Plastic soul” was a way of admitting that what they did was their own imitation of an art form they revered but could never truly claim as their own.

Out of that self deprecating phrase came one of the most important records of the 1960s. Rubber Soul was not just another Beatles album to keep the machine running. It was the point where the group began to turn inward, to treat the studio as an instrument, and to think of an album as a single artistic statement rather than a set of potential hit singles padded with filler. In the process, they helped change how rock music worked for everyone else.

Rubber Soul at the turning point of 1965

By the time the Beatles began work on Rubber Soul in October 1965, they were in an unusual position. They were at the peak of global fame yet oddly at risk of feeling out of date. Pop careers in the early 1960s were often short. In that context, a band that had been dominant since 1963 could easily start to look tired.

Around them, other British groups were hardening the sound and pushing the subject matter. The Who were issuing loud, slogan driven singles that sounded far more aggressive than anything the Beatles had done. The Rolling Stones had just released “I Cant Get No Satisfaction,” a snarling complaint that made “Help!” sound almost polite by comparison. The Kinks were already writing satirical character songs and flirting with Indian influenced sounds.

The Beatles catalogue, rich as it was, still revolved largely around energetic covers and relatively straightforward boy girl love songs. 1965 changed that landscape.

On tour in North America that summer, the Beatles played the famous Shea Stadium concert to more than 50,000 people. In the same period they met Bob Dylan again, heard the Byrds take folk and Beatles style jangle into new territory, and finally met their early hero Elvis Presley. They also watched American soul and Motown acts up close, paying attention to the records from labels like Stax and Motown that dominated US radio.

Those encounters fed into their writing as soon as they returned to London. Rubber Soul is the sound of that influence being digested and reimagined. It draws from folk, soul, pop and early psychedelia without belonging neatly to any single category. Critic Tim Riley later suggested that rather than being simply a folk rock album, it represents a step toward a broader synthesis of everything that made 1965 such an explosive year in rock and roll. It was, in other words, the moment the Beatles stopped reacting and began redefining the field again.

From “plastic soul” to Rubber Soul

The phrase that became the album title came directly from McCartney. After hearing Jagger described as “plastic soul,” he adapted it with a typically dry Beatles twist. The band knew perfectly well that when they attempted soul music, they did so from outside the tradition. Ringo Starr later put it simply in a press conference, saying they and other British acts “have not got what they have got” compared to the American soul singers they loved.

Calling the record Rubber Soul was a way of acknowledging this with a mixture of humour and ambition. Rubber suggested flexibility and stretch, maybe even something a little distorted. Soul pointed to the music that inspired them. The title could be read as an admission of inauthenticity, but it also implied that whatever they were creating was their own variant of soul music stamped out in Liverpool rather than Memphis or Detroit.

Fittingly, Rubber Soul also became their first album where the name “The Beatles” did not appear on the front cover. By late 1965 the four faces themselves were brand enough, and their control over their image was strong enough, that a title and a slightly strange photograph were all that was needed.

Recording Rubber Soul in four dense weeks

Recording began at EMI Studios in London on the 12th of October, 1965 and wrapped up by mid November. For the first time in their career, the Beatles were able to work on an album without having to squeeze sessions between film shoots or intensive radio schedules. They still faced a tight deadline to have a new record ready for the Christmas market, but crucially they were freed from many of the other demands that had defined their early years.

That short window led to 13 days of sessions totalling more than one hundred hours of recording, plus additional days of mixing. George Martin, no longer a direct EMI staff producer after co founding Associated Independent Recording, returned to oversee the project. Engineer Norman Smith handled the technical side for the last time on a Beatles album before moving on to become a producer in his own right.

The sessions were intense enough that the band were recording into the early hours most nights. They interrupted the process only for two public obligations. On the 26th of October they travelled to Buckingham Palace to receive MBEs from Queen Elizabeth the Second, and in early November they filmed their parts for a television special, The Music of Lennon and McCartney. The rest of the time they lived in the studio, writing and arranging on the fly.

The group were determined that the album would consist entirely of original material, as they had already managed with A Hard Days Night. When a session had to be cancelled because Lennon and McCartney did not yet have enough new songs, Martin rejected the idea of padding the record with outside compositions. They dug back into the Help sessions to rescue “Wait,” and even put down an instrumental jam, “Twelve Bar Original,” which stayed in the vaults until the 1990s.

They also recorded “Day Tripper” and “We Can Work It Out” during these sessions, intending them as a single to sit alongside the album. To avoid endless television promotion, the group filmed promotional clips for both songs, an early example of what would later become the promotional video or pop video standard.

Drugs, Dylan and the move inward

By 1965 the Beatles were no longer drinking their way through the touring circuit. Marijuana had become a central part of their lives and creative process. Lennon would later call Rubber Soul “the pot album.” Ringo Starr observed that during this period “we were expanding in all areas of our lives, opening up to a lot of different attitudes.” The relaxed pacing and reflective tone of much of the record mirrors that shift.

Bob Dylan had already nudged Lennon toward more introspective, ambiguous writing. On Rubber Soul, that influence becomes fully visible in songs like “Nowhere Man,” “Girl” and particularly “Norwegian Wood,” which frames an extra marital encounter as a small, wry, slightly unsettling short story. The Byrds also played a significant role. Their twelve string Rickenbacker sound, inspired in the first place by Harrison in the A Hard Days Night era, came back across the Atlantic and fed into George Harrison’s playing on “If I Needed Someone” and his melodic solo on “Nowhere Man.”

Another drug was beginning to reshape perspectives too. Harrison and Lennon had both taken LSD by this point, initially by accident, and later by choice. The drug made a strong impression on Harrisons outlook. He later said it had opened up “this whole other consciousness” and made the circus of fame seem strangely empty. Paul McCartney, living in central London and closer to art and literary circles than to the suburban domesticity of his bandmates, held back from LSD for another year, which created a slight distance between him and the others for a time.

Taking control of the studio

Musically, Rubber Soul marked a new sense of control in the studio. Lennon later recalled that it was the first record where they felt able to demand particular sounds rather than simply accept standard practice. They attended mixing sessions, experimented with instruments and tape, and worked closely with George Martin to blur the line between song writing and sound design.

Paul McCartney switched from his familiar Höfner bass to a solid body Rickenbacker, which allowed more precise, melodic bass lines and a deeper tone. George Harrison brought a Fender Stratocaster into the sessions, notably for the chiming lead line on “Nowhere Man.” Guitars were capoed, layered and recorded with heavy high frequency emphasis to create fresh textures.

The group also began using unfamiliar instruments. Harrison had encountered the sitar while filming the Help movie. His curiosity grew during the summer tour, helped along by conversations with Roger McGuinn and David Crosby of the Byrds. On “Norwegian Wood” he used the sitar not as decoration but as a central melodic voice, setting off what Ravi Shankar later called “the great sitar explosion” in Western pop.

Elsewhere, the band introduced a harmonium, most clearly heard on “The Word,” which may be one of the first uses of the instrument in a rock context. McCartney added a fuzz bass part on Harrisons song “Think for Yourself,” creating a snarling counterline under the vocal. For “In My Life,” Lennon asked Martin to play something “like Bach.” Martin recorded a piano solo with the tape running slow, then played it back at normal speed, generating a bright, harpsichord like sound that became one of the albums most distinctive touches.

Three part harmonies were sharpened and stretched. On songs like “Nowhere Man,” Lennon, McCartney and Harrison arranged their voices in tight, bright chords that owed as much to the Byrds as to their own early work. The production emphasised separation left and right in the stereo image, allowing listeners to notice individual musical details instead of a single blur of sound.

Not everything in the studio felt comfortable. Engineer Norman Smith later remarked that something had changed between the Help and Rubber Soul sessions, that the old family atmosphere was beginning to thin as the band demanded more from each track. The tension was sometimes creative, driving them to refine ideas rather than rush them, but it also signalled the first faint cracks between Lennon and McCartney as writers with slightly different priorities.

John Lennon & George Harrison during the recording of Rubber Soul at EMI Studios in London, England | 3 November 1965

The songs that made Rubber Soul feel different

Rubber Soul opens with the sly funk of “Drive My Car,” a McCartney song with strong input from Lennon and Harrison. The main riff, suggested by Harrison and modelled loosely on Otis Reddings “Respect,” gives the track a playful soul groove. The lyric about an ambitious actress who tells the narrator he can be her driver if she makes it as a star is full of innuendo and role reversal. Critics have seen it as a light satire on the materialism and status chasing that surrounded the band at the time.

“Norwegian Wood” follows, and with it the sitar. Lennon wrote the song about an affair, disguising the details so his wife Cynthia would not recognise them. The lyric is brief and ambiguous. The narrator visits a woman, sits around talking, is invited to sleep in the bath while she goes to bed, and then, in a final act of mayhem he burns down her flat the next day. Musically the track draws on English folk, mixing a droning acoustic pattern with the sitar line and slipping into a slightly different mode in the middle section. It is an oddly calm setting for a story that is emotionally sharp and morally murky.

On “You Wont See Me” and “Im Looking Through You,” McCartney turns his attention to the strains in his relationship with actor Jane Asher. He later described “You Wont See Me” as having a Motown feel, with a bass line inspired by James Jamerson. The lyrics describe a partner who has grown distant and uncommunicative. “Im Looking Through You” returns to similar territory but with a more frustrated edge, contrasting acoustic verses with harsher rhythmic sections.

“Nowhere Man” was, in Lennons words, a song that arrived in his head more or less fully formed after hours of writer block. It was also one of the first Beatles songs to step away completely from the boy girl template. The “nowhere man” of the lyric is a kind of version of Lennon himself, paralysed by indecision and self doubt. By writing in the third person, he managed to express his insecurities and dissatisfaction in a way that felt both intimate and universal. The bright harmonies and crisp guitar lines keep the song from sinking into gloom.

George Harrison had two songs on the album. “Think for Yourself” carries a sharp, almost bitter message to a lover or friend who has been weak or compromised. In spirit it has something in common with Bob Dylans “Positively Fourth Street.” The unusual harmonic choices and the combination of clean bass and fuzz bass give it a slightly unsettled atmosphere. “If I Needed Someone,” written for model Pattie Boyd, works as both a love song and a statement of complicated loyalty, suggesting that if the singer were not already committed, he might have been interested in someone else. Musically, it sits at the crossroads of raga like drone and Byrds style jangle.

Lennons “Girl” is one of the albums most intriguing tracks. He later said he had written it about an idealised woman he had yet to meet, a figure some have linked retrospectively to Yoko Ono. The song blends Greek flavoured melody with a nostalgic European feel. The way Lennon inhales sharply during the chorus was exaggerated in the mix, creating a hissing sound that some listeners have interpreted as a nod to smoking joints. McCartney and Harrison sang a soft “tit tit tit” behind parts of the vocal, a small joke that is a reoccuring theme in a fair amount of their songs (fish finger pie, etc).

“In My Life” sits close to the emotional centre of the record. Lennon wrote the lyric after being prodded by journalist Kenneth Allsop to write something more personal, something that reflected the imagination and honesty of his prose in the book In His Own Write. The result is a compact reflection on childhood friends, lost places and the way present love can coexist with past affection. Lennon later called it his “first real major piece of work.” McCartney has said he composed much of the melody at a piano, taking some inspiration from Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. Whether one takes Lennons version or Pauls, the collaboration produced one of the finest Beatles songs.

Not every track is progressive in the same way. “What Goes On,” revived from an older Lennon idea and completed quickly, gave Ringo Starr a chance to sing in his familiar country style and earned him his first co writing credit. “Run for Your Life,” based partly on a line from an Elvis Presley song, is a darker piece in which the narrator threatens his partner with violence if she is seen with another man. Lennon later expressed regret about the lyric, which sits oddly alongside the more reflective and less possessive songs on the record.

Paul McCartney had one of his biggest early ballad successes in “Michelle,” a tune he had been playing around with since the late nineteen fifties. For Rubber Soul he and Lennon completed it, adding a middle section that Lennon partly lifted from a Nina Simone treatment of “I Put a Spell on You.” The half serious, half comic use of French phrases gave the song a distinctive flavour and helped it become one of the most covered Lennon McCartney compositions.

Across these songs runs a common thread. Relationships are no longer simple or idealised. Communication breaks down. People disappoint each other. Nostalgia is tempered with an awareness of change and mortality. This was still pop music, tuneful and concise, but the emotional palette had deepened noticeably.

Two versions one album

In Britain, Rubber Soul appeared on Parlophone on the 3rd of December, 1965 with fourteen tracks, all original. In North America, Capitol Records reconfigured the album as it had done with previous Beatles releases. Four songs “Drive My Car,” “Nowhere Man,” “What Goes On” and “If I Needed Someone” were removed and held back for the compilation Yesterday and Today. In their place Capitol added “I Have Just Seen a Face” and “Its Only Love” from the British version of Help.

Sequenced this way, the American Rubber Soul tilted even more strongly toward acoustic textures.

Capitol opened the record with “I Have Just Seen a Face,” giving it a pronounced folk feel. Many listeners and later commentators have therefore remembered the US record as a definitive folk rock statement, even though the broader British version is more eclectic.

Odd quirks entered the picture. Some stereo pressings of the American album included false starts at the beginning of “Im Looking Through You.” The mix of “The Word” differed too, with extra vocal treatment and a slightly altered balance.

Regardless of configuration, for many fans Rubber Soul felt like a complete work rather than a grab bag of singles and filler. The absence of a big hit single on the album itself, at least in the US market, strengthened that sense. The double A side single “We Can Work It Out” and “Day Tripper” sat alongside the album in late 1965 but not on it, which gave the LP its own distinct identity.

The cover that signalled a new phase

Visually, Rubber Soul looked different from earlier Beatles records. Photographer Robert Freeman shot the group in the garden of Lennons home. When projecting one of the images onto a piece of card to test how it would look as a cover, the card slipped back, stretching the proportions. The group liked the effect. It made their faces longer, slightly distorted, almost as if the image itself had been pulled and moulded.

The original Bob Freeman image for the cover

George Harrison later said the cover helped them lose the “little innocents” label and matched the sense that they were now, in his words, “fully fledged potheads.” The picture, combined with the lack of the band name, signalled a group stepping away from straightforward mop top presentation and into something stranger and more adult.

Illustrator Charles Front created the Rubber Soul lettering. He has said he was inspired by the idea of tapping a rubber tree and watching the globules of latex swell and bulge. The rounded, flowing letters became part of the emerging visual language of the mid nineteen sixties and influenced many later psychedelic poster designs.

Release, reception and chart success

Rubber Soul reached British shops on three December nineteen sixty five, the same day as the “We Can Work It Out” and “Day Tripper” single. Advance orders for the album neared half a million in the United Kingdom alone, a remarkable figure for an LP in that era. In the Record Retailer chart it quickly climbed to number one and stayed there for eight weeks. It lingered in the charts for much of the following year.

In the United States, the Capitol version was released on six December. It topped the Billboard album chart in January nineteen sixty six and remained in the top position for six weeks. Within nine days of release, it is estimated to have sold more than one million copies in America. Those numbers helped demonstrate that rock albums could sell in quantities approaching major singles.

Contemporary reviews were largely enthusiastic, though not unanimously so. New Musical Express praised the recording artistry and sense of adventure. Newsweek, which had earlier treated the Beatles rather dismissively, now hailed them as “the bards of pop,” pointing to the blend of musical styles on the record. American jazz critic Ralph Gleason saw Rubber Soul as evidence that rock was broadening its appeal across age groups and social backgrounds.

Some British pop journalists were more cautious. Writers in Melody Maker and Record Mirror noted that parts of the album felt subdued compared to the groups early explosive singles, and a few complained that the songs lacked the immediate excitement they expected. In hindsight, those reservations have often been read as a sign that critical language and expectations had not yet caught up with the direction in which the Beatles and their peers were heading.

Over the decades, retrospective assessments have been far kinder. Greil Marcus, in an influential essay, called Rubber Soul the best Beatles album, praising the way almost every track felt inspired and necessary. Later critics have frequently described it as the first truly classic Beatles album and the key transitional work between Beatlemania and the more experimental period of Revolver and Sgt Pepper.

Commercially, the albums impact has endured. In the United States it has been certified multiple times platinum, reflecting millions of sales. In the United Kingdom it eventually achieved platinum status under the modern certification system. After its original release, songs such as “Michelle,” “Norwegian Wood,” “Nowhere Man” and “In My Life” became standards in their own right, widely covered by other artists.

Influence and legacy

The importance of Rubber Soul lies partly in what it did for the Beatles themselves and partly in what it did for everyone else. Internally, it gave the group a template for treating the album as an integrated artistic project. George Martin later said that with Rubber Soul they began to think of albums as art on their own, complete entities rather than just collections. The record also confirmed that Lennon, McCartney and Harrison could each bring more varied, personal and formally ambitious material to the band.

Externally, the album helped shift the centre of gravity in popular music. Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys has spoken many times about how hearing Rubber Soul inspired him to make Pet Sounds, an album conceived as an attempt to equal or surpass it in cohesion and emotional depth. Ray Davies of the Kinks, Pete Townshend of the Who, and members of the Rolling Stones all took note, moving toward more crafted and conceptually unified records.

The use of sitar on “Norwegian Wood” sparked a wave of interest in Indian classical instruments and modalities in rock and pop. The baroque keyboard flavour of “In My Life” pointed toward what would later be called baroque pop or baroque rock. The emotionally complex relationship songs, with their shades of doubt and disillusion, opened paths for singer songwriters and rock lyricists to look beyond simple romance.

Perhaps most importantly, Rubber Soul helped convince listeners and critics that popular music could sustain serious attention as art without losing its accessibility. The presence of more reflective lyrics, novel instrumentation and careful sequencing within a very listenable thirty five minutes meant that people who had previously dismissed rock as teenage noise began to argue about it in newspapers, magazines and university classrooms.

Over time, the album has continued to appear near the top of lists of the greatest records. Rolling Stone placed it near the top of its rankings of all time albums, while other critics have stressed its role in opening up the possibilities of progressive rock, psychedelia and sophisticated pop. Even writers who prefer Revolver or the White Album often concede that Rubber Soul was the crucial first step that made those later records possible.

In a later reflection, Paul McCartney said that Rubber Soul felt to him like “the beginning of my adult life.” Lennon remarked bluntly that “you do not know us if you do not know Rubber Soul.” Taken together, those comments capture what the album did for the Beatles. It allowed them to grow up in public, to bring their private doubts and expanding horizons into the songs, and to ask their audience to grow with them.