The first copy that I ever got of the Beatles Rubber Soul was a cassette tape, with the image of their faces imposed upon a plain brown background. I thought it strange - and still do to some extent - that the actual album cover image featured the band in a late autumn or winter time scene in the woods.
It would be a little strange for me to say something about how amazing it is that it has been 50 years since the release of Rubber Soul, which was always one of my favorite Beatles albums. That is because I was born years after the Beatles broke up, and every album that I listened to of them already seemed like old rock, or classic rock, or whatever label people threw on them by then.
That is one of the things that Rubber Soul and Revolver, in particular, remind me of still to this day. They remind me of my childhood, probably more than any other Beatles albums, with the exception of Abbey Road, which reminds me of my French family's hometown of Marly-le-Roi. That is because when my brother and I spent a week there with our late aunt, she only had that one rock album that I was interested in, and I played that to death, just over and over again.
Revolver reminds me of Liberty, New York, where my grandparents lived, and where my brother and I spent a decent portion of our childhood, including the entire first year in the United States after we moved out of France, back in the very late 1970's, when I was still a very young child. Revolver was one of the few rock records (and they only had a record player for those first few years of the eighties there) which my brother and I listened to, probably endlessly.
But Rubber Soul actually reminds me of a town that I never spent much time in: Lake George. When my grandparents took my us up to Montreal, Canada, for a short trip back in 1983, we stopped at Lake George, and that was where I purchased my cassette copy of Rubber Soul. It looks different than either the LP cover or the cd cover, because the stretched faces of the Beatles are imposed on a brown background, and not with the backdrop of late autumn or winter trees.
It occurs to me that this kind of made me a little bit different than the other kids. While I liked toys, even probably loved them back then, I also invested much of the small money that I had back then on rock albums - particularly the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Back then, they were my two favorites.
Rubber Soul is an interesting album, as far as Beatles albums are concerned. It is one of their relatively early albums, and they still had the famous mop top haircuts that everyone associated (and still associates) with the Beatles. However, this was the album where they began to experiment and expand their horizons. It is just a hint, mostly, and does not go too far - yet. But the beginning of a whole new era of a very different Beatles sound was here!
Here is the link to an article honoring Rubber Soul:
Rubber Soul: 40 Albums That Defined 1965
No comments:
Post a Comment