Half A Century Of Rubber Soul

Still Great Listening After All These Years

A Brief One from Doug Draper, Niagara At Large

December 28^th, 2015

Fifty years ago this December 2015, I did what we all sometimes do around Christmas time.

I went out and bought a gift for myself that I knew my parents wouldn’t get for me because it was a record by a rock group. And to them, all that rock groups produced was electronic noise and a fear in their hearts that I might spend less time doing school work and more time with a guitar, making some electronic noise of my own.

The group was The Beatles and the album was Rubber Soul which to this day, alongside handful of other albums like Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, released the same year with Like a Rolling Stone as its first track, remains one of the most influential pop records of all time.

Rubber Soul, with its cover of John, Paul, George and Ringo looking down into a fisheye lens that distorted their images, and (for the first time for them or any other group) no mention of the group’s name on it, introduced a collection of songs that, as the music critics at Rolling Stone magazine put it, “achieved a new musical sophistication and a greater thematic depth without sacrificing a whit of pop appeal.”

Indeed, songs like “In My Life,” “Norwegian Wood.” “Girl”, “I’m Looking Through You” and “Michelle” – not to mention “Nowhere Man” that was also released as the A Side of one of my favourite Beatles singles – saw the Fab Four evolving well beyond the ‘yeah, yeah, yeahs’ that brought them sscreaming from their native Britian to North America less than two years earlier.

Rubber Soul was the record that had Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys getting to work on his 1966 masterpiece Pet Sounds, an album that, in turn, inspired The Beatles to produce Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

It was also the album that had elits in the world of music finally acknowledging what top-of-the-drawer composers and conductors Leonard Bernstein and Boston Pops’ Arthur Fiedler declared a year earlier then The Beatles penned the soundtrack music to their film A Hard Day’s Night – that these guys had a gift for crafting great tunes.

And it was the album that had countless musical lesser like me scrambling to learn songs with more than three or four guitar chords in them.

Fifty years later, Rubber Soul still stands as one of the greatest pop albums by the greatest rock band of all time.

Hail The Bealtes!

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