The Beatles were the greatest thing in showbiz in 1965. The Beatles are still the greatest thing in showbiz in 2025. I don’t like being one of those “the Beatles are the best rock band ever” guys, because that’s no fun. But sometimes the correct choice is the easiest one. I didn’t voluntarily listen to any of their records the whole time I was in college. My first trip back to Penny Lane after graduation? I was dumbfounded all over again. Every listen to these guys makes you just as easy and impressionable as you were at 13. Paste just named a discombobulated, noisy, fuck-all collage record made by Mexican siblings one of the best LPs of the year. And yet! The Beatles still whip me into shape, man. Those melodies, those harmonies, those what-were-they-thinking mop-tops: oh, how spectacular it was for me to be born into a world where millions had already found the language to describe it all.
Walmart used to have a CD section. I’m talking rows and rows of jewel cases and digipaks, not the BTS Butter overstock that never runs out. My cornfield eyes used to scour and scour through those rows while Mom filled up the buggy with groceries. Instead of an allowance, every two weeks I got a new CD. The store closest to my house always had two rows of Beatles CDs—the thin cardboard ones that looked like tiny vinyl. Deep in the lunacy of my own Fab Four obsessions, I owned just about every title. I even had the Early Beatles disc, an Americanized, 1965 reshuffling of a then-two years old Please Please Me, which I got especially hooked on. But there it was, waiting for me in the electronics section: Robert Freeman’s photo of the lads in John Lennon’s garden, stretched beneath the cornerly decoration of Charles Front’s orange lettering. Rubber Soul, the last copy. My copy.
And the Beatlemaniacs bought into it 60 years ago too, before John Lennon went and put his band above Jesus Christ: Rubber Soul spent 42 weeks on the Record Retailer LPs chart, went to #1 on Melody Maker’s national chart, topped the Billboard Top LPs chart for six weeks, and, in ten days’ time, sold 1.2 million copies in the United States alone. And on release day, December 3rd, 1965, the Beatles also shared the double A-side single “We Can Work It Out” and “Day Tripper,” the former of which topped the Hot 100 for two weeks after selling 500,000 copies in advance. New Music Express modestly called Rubber Soul a “fine piece of recording artistry and adventure in group sound.” One Record Mirror critic suggested that Manfred Mann’s recently-released Mann Made was a better album. The Brits didn’t quite have the vocabulary for Rubber Soul.
But, I mean… Jesus, does anybody? This wasn’t just rock and roll. This was m-u-s-i-c. Those pretty boys from Help! were real artists now, singing about love but not that boyish, cutesy, forgettable love. This is love as horror, love as life, love as tough and complicated. Love that puts an ulcer in your stomach and a crack in your molar. A self-loathing John Lennon sings about cheating on his wife Cynthia and dreams of other women with clenched teeth. A vain Paul McCartney sings about the collapse of his relationship with Jane Asher and goes full cabaret. An LSD-reliant, dispassionate George Harrison protests conformity and chases his infatuation with Pattie Boyd. Ringo Starr does a country song. It’s thinkin’ music, not dancin’ music: Stratocasters cut through the paranoia and boredom on “Nowhere Man”; a commanding, Otis Redding-hued rhythm ignites the sexual flavor of “Drive My Car”; Strawberry Fields and Menlove Avenue are gentle, unspoken figures in “In My Life.”
At the beginning of Rubber Soul, the Beatles were smoking a lot of dope and emulating Dylan (“Girl” is “Just Like a Woman” but better) and the Byrds (“The Bells of Rhymery” is all over “If I Needed Someone”), singing nascently about meaningful things, luxuriating in the psychedelic glitz of their own eclecticism and baroque curiosities, and making fun of white British acts trying to do American soul in Wellington boots. By the record’s end, to quote the great folkster Roy Harper, “they’d come onto my turf, got there before me, and they were kings of it, overnight. We’d all been outflanked.” And the Fab Four had certainly lost their minds, employing a bric-a-brac of Mixolydian melodies, Holland-Dozier-Holland tomes, dog-barking bass licks, backwards drum fills, suspended harmonium chords, layered singing (“The Word” alone has seven vocal parts), drones, French phrases, 12-bar “chick”-y, 12-bar blues rhythms ripped straight from the M.G.’s, acoustic guitars mimicking Greek bouzoukis, tone-pedal leads, and Indian strings on a mainstream album. Elvis Costello said he “didn’t understand a word” of Rubber Soul but, six weeks later, couldn’t live without it. “That’s when you trust the people who make music to take you somewhere you haven’t been before.” Gone were those brief, head-bobbing times.
Brian Wilson thought every song on Rubber Soul “was a gas” and made Pet Sounds to top it. But here’s the thing: Rubber Soul has got some serious clunkers on it. The record is a masterpiece, don’t get me wrong, but “Think for Yourself,” “The Word,” “Michelle,” and “Run for Your Life” make up some of the Beatles’ least-inspiring material. They’re good songs—well made, undoubtedly—but they do practically nothing for me now that I’ve heard them a billion times (and skipped them just as often). Calling all those songs “a gas” is a wonky appraisal. But when you get to the superb stuff, like “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown),” “Girl,” “In My Life,” and “Wait,” you realize: of course the Beach Boys responded to this by nuking their entire surfer identity and making a record with bicycle horns, banjos, sleigh bells, water jugs, Coke cans, bobby pins, bongos, and live animals. I mean, what else are you supposed to do when a pop album employs a goddamn sitar?
The Beatles made better records than Rubber Soul. In fact, they made four, probably five, perhaps six better records—seven, if you’re me and also adore Help!. Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band rarely rattle around in my noggin now, because I am firmly in the “All I’ve Got to Do” and “No Reply” camps these days, but I do love those LPs. They were revolutionary, earth-shattering releases made quickly at EMI in London. If you’re ever thinking to yourself, “I’m good at what I do,” just remember that four men (five if you count George Martin, which you should) made the greatest rock and roll album ever in two months.
Despite Rubber Soul being my seventh favorite Beatles album, I think it’s the most important rock and roll album ever finished—an altar I’m still worshipping at, though less often now. The Velvet Underground, Stevie Wonder, and the Stones are there, too. Every chord, melody, breath, and idea thought up and spit out before December 3rd, 1965, was nothing but a blob of monochromatic hullabaloo. Dylan got close when “Like a Rolling Stone” hit AM stations on the morning of July 20th, but Rubber Soul was this grand and inviting illustration—a portal to the palatable and forward-thinking brilliance of eld. When my age was in the single digits and I hadn’t yet taken a general history course, I thought the world was black-and-white for a while and then the color just turned on. When I listen to Rubber Soul, I know how correct I was.
And before the Beatles splintered, went solo, made vapid muzak, partly died, got resurrected by artificial intelligence, and won a Grammy semi-posthumously, John, George, Paul, and Ringo arrived at EMI Studios on October 18th, 1965, and made every bit of “In My Life” but the Bach-inspired piano solo that sparkles in the bridge, which George Martin recorded on a tape running at half-speed four days later. I will not cop to this being the “greatest” Beatles song of all time. I have already put it in writing that that ribbon goes to “She’s Leaving Home.” But,”In My Life” may well be the most important pop song we have. Lennon, writing about his dead mum Julia and dead pal Stu Sutcliffe, distills life’s most arbitrary and fleeting emotions about death and nostalgia into a miraculous middle-eight artifact. I’m looking at my Rubber Soul vinyl right now and it’s beat to shit—by me and by the older gentleman I bought it from seven, maybe eight years ago. He heard “in my life, I love you more” and now I get to hear it, too. I tried to resist “In My Life” for so long, when I considered myself to be “above” its sentimentality, but the top comment on one of the thousands of Rubber Soul videos on YouTube is: “‘In My Life’ is my favorite song. I can’t listen to it without crying. I’m old.” There’s still something in this music worth reaching for. What a necessary, uncomplicated magic that is.
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.
