Retro Album of the Week 1 - Rubber Soul

1965, one of my favourite Beatles albums.

 

The lyrics were disastrous and I knew it. Often you just block songs out and words just come into your mind and when they do it's hard to get rid of them. You often quote other songs too and you know you've got to get rid of them, but sometimes it's very difficult to find a more suitable phrase than the one that has insinuated itself into your consciousness. This is one of the songs where John and I came nearest to having a dry session. The lyrics I brought in were something to do with golden rings, which are always fatal. 'Rings' is fatal anyway, 'rings' always rhymes with things and I knew it was a bad idea. I came in and I said, 'These aren't good lyrics but it's a good tune.' Well, we tried, and John couldn't think of anything, and we tried, and eventually it was, 'Oh let's leave it, let's get off this one.' 'No, no. We can do it, we can do it.' So we had a break ... then we came back to it, and somehow it became 'drive-my-car' instead of 'gol-den-rings,' and then it was wonderful because this nice tongue-in-cheek idea came and suddenly there was a girl there, the heroine of the story, and the story developed and had a little sting in the tail like 'Norwegian Wood' had, which was 'I actually haven't got a car, but when I get one you'll be a terrific chauffeur.' So to me it was LA chicks, 'You can be my chauffeur', and it also meant 'you can be my lover.' 'Drive my car' was an old blues euphemism for sex, so in the end all is revealed. ... So that was my idea and John and I wrote the words, so I'd go 70-30 on that to me. Paul McCartney, Many Years From Now by Barry Miles, p 269-70, 1994

 

George had just got the sitar, and I said, 'Can you play this piece?' We went through many different sorts of versions of the song, but it was never right, and I was getting angry about it. It wasn't coming out like I said. They said, 'We'll just do it how you want to do it.' And I said, 'Well, I just want to do it like this.' They let me go and I did the guitar very loudly into the mike and sang it at the same time. John Lennon, The Beatles Off The Record, p 190, 2000

 

'The Word' could be a Salvation Army song. The word is 'love' but it could be 'Jesus' (It isn't, mind you, but it could be.) Paul McCartney, The Beatles Anthology, 2000