Lew: The Beatles’ sixth album, Rubber Soul, is a standout, even among a body of work as strong as that of the Beatles. Released in December of 1965, the album is one of the most striking examples of the progression that The Beatles made between Please Please Me, and their later, more experimental work. If Beatles For Sale represented the beginning of The Beatles’ move away from straightforward pop, Rubber Soul can be seen as a full realization of that move. While The Beatles have yet to move into the full-scale psychedelia of Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s, they have certainly abandoned overt reference to many of the more traditional pop influences to which they were indebted early on, both compositionally and sonically. Among other notable innovations, Rubber Soul is generally thought to contain the first instance of a rock band incorporating sitar into an arrangement (on “Norwegian Wood”).
While the notion of selecting “lesser known” tracks becomes increasingly problematic on albums as well-loved as Rubber Soul, we’ve decided to adhere to it as closely as possible. We’ll be talking about the track “You Won’t See Me,” which is credited to Lennon/McCartney, but generally acknowledged to be a Paul song. At the time that Rubber Soul was released, “You Won’t See Me” was the longest track that The Beatles had recorded, clocking in at the epic length of 3:22!
Aaron, I’m curious about how you hear this song, in terms of its place in The Beatles body of work. Do you think this song would have sounded out of place on an earlier album?
Aaron: I guess Rubber Soul brings us to a place of interesting confluence in The Beatles’ career – they’re getting tired of touring (I think they’ve got one big tour left in them), their compositional strategies are developing (as you mention), and studio conditions are improving. Furthermore, their access to space at Abbey Road studios has become a rock band’s dream – it was around this time that the band were given free, unlimited access to the studio. Rubber Soul was still something of a rushed project, as they only had about three months to write and record it in time for a Christmas push, but it was their first album recorded as an album, over one block of sessions, and not as a song here or there between tours and other appearances.
“You Won’t See Me” has never been one of my favorite Beatles’ tunes, but there’s no question it’s easily recognizable as “different” from their earlier output. The production alone marks it as a departure – the mix is so nice and clean, with each separate part both discernable and yet well-integrated in the overall mix (you can hear the bass drum!). The double-tracked vocals, the high-hat fills – the sound of all this marks it as what I’ve often thought of as a sort of second-wave of rock recording. The older Beatles stuff sort of comes at the tale end of the first wave – two-track and primitive four-track recording, basic arrangements, a narrow range of instrumentation, etc. I don’t at all mean to say the sound of early rock was bad, only different. By the mid-sixties, however, all that was changing. I think we’ve done a pretty good job throughout this series of tracing The Beatles’ role at the forefront of that innovation, and “You Won’t See Me” is a fine example – I guess that’s what I mean by a confluence: it wasn’t only the band that was going through a metamorphosis by this point, but both the concept of what a pop song could be and the methods by which it was produced. Looking back on this response, I realize I’ve taken the long way around of avoiding talking about the song itself – so I’ll throw it back to you for that, Lew. What about “You Won’t See Me” appeals to you?
Lew: I guess there are a few ways that I could answer that question, but the thing that I think is probably most significant about the song is that it, along with some other songs on Rubber Soul, seems to be an early example of what I think people mean when they say that something sounds “Beatlesque.” The chord progression in "You Won't See Me" is much simpler than what they had been commonly using in their earlier material, and the song in general seems to contain fewer allusions to the rock music that preceded it (much less jazz). To go back to some of the things that we were talking about in our early discussions, "You Won't See Me" seems like less of an amalgamation of earlier styles that they're recontextualizing. In some ways, that makes it debatably more deliberate sounding.
At the same time, they're able to do more with vocal arrangements by this point than they had previously, and the backup part at the end of the bridge ("no I wouldn't, no I wouldn't") is a great example of the more "psychedelic" direction that they'd be headed in. The backing vocal part isn't clearly defined at first listen, and its effect is to create a wash of sound – momentary chaos, one might say – that then resolves back into a statement of the verse melody. It's very effective in that respect.
Aaron: You’re certainly right about the vocal arrangement, which builds to such a finely layered mix of voices that I’d hardly paid much attention to it before. Also on listening again, I’ve realized how the bass really leads the song, and it’s a very melodic bass line (headphones really help bring things out in the mono mix). The bass line is a force here, so clean and seeming to wander all around the melody, while the piano and rhythm guitar almost seem to be comping it in a big-band jazz sort of way.
Which brings me to your description of this song as “Beatlesque,” which I think is probably accurate. It would be great if you could describe, a bit, what that actually means in terms of chord selection and so on. But returning to an issue that’s been coming up more recently, one thing I find interesting is how this song represents some of the changing dynamics of the group and what that means for their sound. Let’s say the term “Beatlesque” can be said to have three phases – the early career “She Loves You, Yeah Yeah Yeah” vibe, the mid-career blending of more advanced harmonies, folk forays, and early psychedelia of Rubber Soul and Revolver, and the late career, post-Pepper breaking apart of one discernible sound into more distinct, overlapping sounds of the individual songwriters (please let me know if this classification doesn’t work for you). A lot of things are going on in that transition – Paul is becoming a master of melody and harmony, so that he can write a beautiful sounding song almost effortlessly. He’s also becoming more demanding of himself and the band in the studio. John is starting to care less about those things, but is pushing experimentation (along with Paul and the others) and also pushing both the personal and political aspects of his lyrics. Superficially, it could be argued that Paul is becoming more concerned with how the music sounds whereas John is becoming more concerned with what it says (again, aware of the superficial nature of this contention). And George is becoming a more expansive songwriter in his own right. At the same time, the band is just becoming tighter and tighter, better at their individual instruments and also better at playing with and off each other.
“You Won’t See Me” crystallizes that mid-era sound, which comes from each of the boys playing their specific part to perfection, however diminished - John only sings on the song and doesn’t play any instruments, George plays a simple rhythm with no solo, and aside from the harmony vocals, it’s really only Paul and Ringo who bust out here. Yet it all works together to make one of those effortless McCartney numbers that I mentioned. Which, I guess, leads back to what you said about the song being less a recontextualization and more an example of The Beatles coming into their own as creators and producers of their own sound. Listened to in that context, the song becomes a lot more interesting to me.
Lew: Right off the bat, I want to say that I agree about the bass line. “You Won't See Me” provides a great example of Paul's bass playing, and a lesson in exactly how underrated he is as a bass player. In this instance, he does a great job of hitting chord tones in a very melodic way, and also does some nice chromatic movement to navigate the chords in the pre-chorus (“it’s been so long, girl, since you've been gone,” etc). Possibly even more importantly, he maintains a rhythmic motif that permeates the entire song – it’s so present during the verses and chorus that anytime he deviates from the rhythmic feel, it has the effect of really changing the vibe of the song for that space of time. A particularly effective aspect is his almost always landing on the “and” of 2 in the measure. In any case, the bass line is busy enough that the piano and guitar parts being almost completely confined to playing on 2 & 4 works completely.
The question about specifically what musical moves constitute the “Beatlesque” sound is an interesting one. In a lot of respects, the texture of the vocal arrangement is a big part of it. Having said that, I think that it’s a certain tension that comes from using a fairly obvious group of chords, but making a lot of those chords dominant 7ths (in places where a dominant chord usually wouldn’t be used), and also occasionally including a chord that’s very effective, but deviates from the key signature that has been established up to that point. A great example in “You Won't See Me” happens in the pre-chorus (if you can call it that) under the lines “we have lost the time that was so hard to find.” Under the word “time,” they play a D major chord, but switch to a D minor by “was.” That, to my mind, really captures the Beatlesque sound, and it’s something that you see popping up at all stages of their career, even as the more cosmetic elements of their music were experiencing dramatic changes.
Aaron: That’s a great technical breakdown of “Beatlesque” as a descriptor, both of their music and the music they influenced. When you put it in musical terms like that (which I’d never be able to do), it makes it much clearer to me how the existence of a Beatlesque sound can permeate their entire career. If they were interested in such chord experiments and key deviations from their early days, it would make sense that, as they improved as a band and then as a studio unit, and then began to break apart, their exploration of such sonic possibilities would expand and improve as well. It will definitely be worth revisiting as we enter the middle portion of their career when they were, arguably, at their most Beatlesque. But before we wind down, do you think it might be worth looking back to a couple other specific examples from earlier in their career in which they were investigating and pushing such sonic divergences? Just for a little context?
Lew: It's definitely worthwhile to look at an older Beatles track to get a look at the genesis of the Beatlesque sound. I thought of “I Feel Fine” first, and it’s an intriguing one, not least because of the feedback at the beginning (which I think you may have mentioned recently). It’s also a great example of the way The Beatles were able to push typical melodies in new directions by playing a straight I IV V chord progression as dominant 7ths across the board. In the line “I’m in love with her and I feel fine,” the word “her” is a minor third from the tonic (G major in this case) – typically, you’d expect the vocal to hit the major 3rd there (B), but instead the vocal sings a Bb, which is included in the C7 (C, E, G, Bb) that’s happening underneath the vocal at the time. Ordinarily, that C chord would not have contained a Bb. It’s hard to say where that comes from – whether they just played 7th chords underneath everything because those were the chords that they knew, or whether they heard the melodies that way and arranged the chords to match. Anyway, it's a great example of the slightly skewed simplicity of the Beatles' sound.
Aaron: “Slightly skewed” is a fine way to put it. One thing I’m really getting out of this series is a greater appreciation of how that skewed sensibility was not only integral to the band’s success, but also seems to have been an organic part of their development. The question of how much of it was “natural” and how much “planned,” still lingers, I guess, and it’s something we’ll take up (along with a further exploration just what “Beatlesque” means) in our next entry. Until then, I’d love to hear what our readers think about “You Won’t See Me” or any of the other points we’ve raised.
Coming Next: We extend our discussion of the Beatlesque sound as Peter Fonda freaks out John Lennon and the band moves fully into their mature phase on Revolver.
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