The Beatles - Rubber Soul (CD 1988)

I love the Beatles and fancied buying the c.d version,i have all the Beatles on vinyl so dont want to spend lots of money buying them again...so cheap 2nd hand c.ds are a great buy on E-Bay..

This was bought to replace my old vinyl album of the same title. This is one of my favorite Beatles albums

Decided to buy it because I used to have this on vinyl years ago. Nostalgia!! Brings back some great memories. Really pleased to have it on CD now and it sounds just as good, if not better, now as it did then.

As the cacophonous crescendo of Beatlemania continued to rise, ’65 was a busy year for the lads: World tours, the film “Help”, its accompanying album, a shed-load of singles… and it was still only September. EMI wanted another album for the Christmas market (how times change – these days, with5 albums behind them, they’d have 2 Greatest Hits packages out by now!), so they squeezed in some studio time, odd days here and there totalling about 4 weeks, to work on the ideas that where filling their heads. What they produced was the first major shift away from the lovable Moptop image in what was to become a neck-snapping gallop of quantum leaps that helped shape the musical map of the Sixties, drawing up the blueprints for Rock music as we know it.
Now, that’s not to say it was all their innovation, as some folk would have you believe. Sure, “Rubber Soul” was hugely influential on both sides of the Atlantic, but it was arguably their most eclectically “influenced” album to date. And the catalyst for all this? Two legends that rose from the ashes of American music in the wake of the British Invasion, to scale the dizzy heights of Rock & Roll Cool and achieve true deity status: Bob Dylan and The Byrds.
Dylan's influence is all over the album, particularly in Lennon's songs, not to mention the band's shift in drug use. After years of reckless amphetamine abuse, caning the weed was now the order of the day. After chilling out with The Byrds, as their trans-Atlantic paths crossed, the message was reinforced even further. Lennon’s metamorphosis into “serious songwriter” had been hinted at in “Help” (an odd message for a pop star with the world at his feet), but now it was in full flight. After Macca’s raucous opener, “Norwegian Wood” was a dark, subtle vignette that is ironic and self-deprecating in a way that had not been previously explored. Based on Lennon’s experience in girl’s flats in Swinging London, it was also one of the first pop song to feature a sitar, George’s new infatuation, which he picked up on the set of “Help!” and had been shown by The Byrds’ David Crosby. Harrison was, of course, to become immersed in all things Indian. Fair play to the lad, the closest most of us ever get to embracing the Indian culture is having a cold Cobra with our madras. “Nowhere Man” may have a sugary melody, but you don’t need to scratch too deep beneath the icing to reveal the soft, white underbelly of world-weary bitterness and rumbling paranoia. Nice and jangly, mind. Elsewhere, Macca serves up his usual blend of Tin Pan Alley songsmithery and the odd perfect pop nugget (“Michelle”), but even he puts a more downbeat , complex twist on things on “I’m looking through you”. Track 11, though, is one of those stand-out Beatles tracks – “In My Life”. Written by Lennon as a reflection on his childhood (a vain he mined further in “Strawberry Fields” and Macca in “Penny Lane”), he could also have, chillingly, written it as his own epitaph. I always remember the song being played in full over the closing credits of “Not The 9 O’ Clock News”, on the show that aired in the week of his death in 1980. It was also played at the memorial for Kurt Cobain. The Byrds influence is most obvious on George's "If I Needed Someone", a track that could easily have found a home on "Turn, Turn, Turn" - supremely janglesome!
So there you have it: one of the finest Beatles albums, a piece of Rock history, the precursor to "Revolver" and the end of the begining...