Best Album Covers: Rubber Soul
This is the next entry in Best Album Covers, a series begun right here. The first successful long-playing microgroove record for the phonograph was introduced by Columbia Records back in June of 1948. Yet, album covers (the paper board packaging that held them) didn’t come into their own graphically till decades later. Eventually becoming the cultural stamp on the music of the time. Catching the eyes of potential record-buyers and later their ears and minds. Melding the musical experience with the artist into a unique visual form.
Why Compact Disc versions of album art don’t exactly raise the same reaction these days was looked at in this post. Although, music label artistry continues to be noticed and discussed among the material published today. The bits and bytes are looking over their shoulder, though, because vinyl hasn’t entirely gone the way of the dinosaur. Online or at the record shops still out there. Cover art hasn’t lost purpose, either for old and new. Mostly, it’s my contention while digital reigns supreme, its vigor among fans lacks the tactile passion of the past LPs.
Hence the reason for this series. Some register more with me musically than others, though. Yet, the artwork will always take center stage, at least here. Let’s continue shall we?
While this LP is set to reach its 58th anniversary this year, seemed like a good time to follow the iconic album previously talked about in this series. Especially, since I mentioned it in that same post:
“No doubt, the band rarely, if ever, repeated itself musically for what they had stamped on to vinyl. Especially from 1965’s Rubber Soul on through to their final album.”
Gone were the song covers of American R&B artists1, replaced with original content meant to jettison much of the material that had tied The Lads to the Bubblegum Pop genre2. This album meant to be a more personal and varied work by The Lads as they began to take over their studio recording sessions and apply their own spin. Stephen Thomas expressed why the sixth UK studio LP marked a milestone for the group in his Allmusic review:
“While the Beatles still largely stuck to love songs on Rubber Soul, the lyrics represented a quantum leap in terms of thoughtfulness, maturity, and complex ambiguities. Musically, too, it was a substantial leap forward, with intricate folk-rock arrangements that reflected the increasing influence of Dylan and the Byrds. The group and George Martin were also beginning to expand the conventional instrumental parameters of the rock group, using a sitar on “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown),”Greek-like guitar lines on “Michelle” and “Girl,” fuzz bass on “Think for Yourself,” and a piano made to sound like a harpsichord on the instrumental break of “In My Life.””
Similar could be said for this LP cover, as the group began to stretch beyond just the four-lads-pictured-on-a-cover designs that marked their first five albums (though clever as they were).
“The Beatles Rubber Soul album would be the first of theirs to not display the name of the group on its cover.”
Illustrator Charles Front created the distinctive lettering for the album’s title. And in fashioning the globular font (visually tapping into a rubber tree the inspiration). the rounded letters established a style that became ubiquitous in psychedelic designs from then on, and according to journalist Lisa Bachelor, “a staple of poster art for the flower power generation”.
That purposeful omission reflected their fame and new level of control they now had over their releases3. Taking photographer Robert Freeman‘s album photo4, the first where the group didn’t eye the camera (except for John5), and having it skewed and extended at an oblique angle. The additional effect, like Dutch angles used in cinematography, meant to be stirring while also altering the perspective of the viewer. In this case, mirroring what The Beatles were starting to do, musically.
No matter that their next LP would blow everything out of the water, in music and in artwork, Rubber Soul started something that couldn’t be held back.
Artist: The Beatles
Title: Rubber Soul
Date: 1965
Label: Parlophone and Capitol
Track Listing (and yes, turn those records over):
Side one
- Drive My Car
- Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown
- You Won’t See Me
- Nowhere Man
- Think For Yourself
- The Word
- Michelle
Side two
- What Goes On
- Girl
- I’m Looking Through You
- In My Life
- Wait
- If I Needed Someone
- Run For Your Life
The entire series can be found here.
- Rubber Soul‘s “…album title was intended as a pun combining the falseness intrinsic to pop music and rubber-soled shoes.” “Starr said they called the album Rubber Soul to acknowledge that, in comparison to American soul artists, “we are white and haven’t got what they’ve got”, and he added that this was true of all the British acts who attempted to play soul music.” ~ Wikipedia ↩
- Previously, only A Hard Day’s Night had entirely original content. ↩
- Author Peter Doggett [yes, the same guy who chronicled the almost biblical breakup of the group in his book] highlights the cover as an example of the Beatles, like Dylan and the Stones, “continu[ing] to test the limits of the portrait” in their LP designs. ~ Wikipedia ↩
- Taken in the garden at John Lennon’s house; the original photo can be found here. ↩
- John being “cheeky”, no doubt. And as much as I loved his songs on this album, Rubber Soul‘s last cut was his (and mine) least favorite: Run For Your Life. ↩
It Rains... You Get Wet 
2 Responses to “Best Album Covers: Rubber Soul”
A great post for a brilliant album….and that cover is certainly iconic as well….George found a bit of a voice with “If I Needed Someone” – no doubt thanks to John and Paul – and some much darker lyrics: “you better run for your life if you can little girl, hide yourself in the sand little girl, catch you with another man that’s the end, little girl”…it was actually based on a line from an Elvis Presley song…I found this quote from John later about the song: I never liked ‘Run For Your Life’, because it was a song I just knocked off. It was inspired from – this is a very vague connection – from ‘Baby, Let’s Play House’. There was a line on it – I used to like specific lines from songs – ‘I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man’ – so I wrote it around that but I didn’t think it was that important.
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Thanks for adding that, John. And yeah, that has to be the darkest set lyrics ever written by John Lennon. And indeed, it is a brilliant album that gets lost in the shuffle sometimes due to Revolver coming mere months later. 🙂
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