Apple Corps lets loose a big box of Beatles around this time every year, and for every year since 2023, I've been prefacing my reviews of those sets with a little reminder that that year's box was not the one most Beatlemaniacs have been screaming for since the Revolver Special Edition in 2022: a similarly super deluxe set devoted to Rubber Soul. As much as I liked the sets released during those years, I am relieved to say that I will no longer have to remind fans that they're not getting a Rubber Soul Special Edition this year. Why? Because they're getting a Rubber Soul Special Edition this year.
Was it worth the wait? That depends on your expectations and what you most desire from these super deluxe editions. I mainly come to them for the unique outtakes, preferably those with vocals. The Revolver set had these by the barrelful. The Revolver sessions were The Beatles' first fully experimental, exploratory ones, as the guys spent nearly three months running their strange assortment of new songs through a plethora of permutations. Rubber Soul only took a month to record at a time before The Beatles started partying with tape loops, backward tapes, horn arrangements, string octets, guest French horn players, and guest tabla players. Sure, it's the album on which George Harrison first took a crack at his sitar, but otherwise Rubber Soul consisted of guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards and songs that mostly didn't go through radical rearrangements. The two that changed most, "Norwegian Wood" and "I'm Looking Through You", had already been released in their most different forms on Anthology 2 thirty years ago.
So the two LPs of "sessions" included in the latest super deluxe set consist of a lot of instrumental backing tracks and very slight variations. Those fairly different takes of "Norwegian Wood" and "I'm Looking Through You" are allowed a victory lap too, but "Norwegian Wood" is in a less complete mix than the one on Anthology 2, lacking sitar and vocal overdubs. Otherwise there are some very brief takes that break down quickly, a rehearsal of the guitar riff in "Michelle", seven minutes of Beatle babble from the "Think For Yourself" vocal overdubbing session (some fifteen minutes of this stuff has been available on bootleg for decades, though a little goes a long way), a take of "I'm Looking Through You" with a more conventional backbeat that is different from either the Anthology or official versions, a 40-second extract of "In My Life" with an organ solo instead of producer George Martin's sped-up piano, and a psychedelic early take of "Norwegian Wood" that is easily the best previously unissued track on the sessions discs. It would have sounded right at home on Revolver.
The other big selling point of The Beatles' super deluxe sets is the remixed core album. Until now we've gotten all of their major albums from 1966 through 1970 remixed courtesy of George Martin's son Giles. The quality of those remixes has varied wildly, and the songs are all from the period in which Giles's dad had gotten a pretty good handle on stereo mixing. Rubber Soul was in greater need of a remix because the 1965 stereo mix committed a crime that a lot of pre-1966 Beatles stereo mixes committed: vocals in one channel, instruments in the other. The only worse thing to do when mixing in stereo is to do what Dave Hessinger did to the Stones' "Mother's Little Helper", which I'm mainly mentioning here because I will never pass up an opportunity to express how much I loathe that mix.
The senior Martin didn't have a lot of mixing choices because of the way The Beatles recorded. Giles had a lot more options because he had the assistance of Machine Assisted Learning music mixing technology to "demix" the tracks, which is the only use of AI that doesn't fill me with rage and existential terror. That MAL shit is able to pull apart all the elements originally recorded onto a single track so that a human can pan them hither and yon. So now we have a "Nowhere Man" on which the guys' massed harmonies are spread across the stereo spectrum, an "In My Life" in which the entire rhythm section isn't huddled in the left channel, an "If I Needed Someone" with its jangly guitars featured in both speakers, and a "Drive My Car" that expands Ringo's kit across channels a bit too. This is easily the most balanced Rubber Soul has ever sounded in stereo. Of course, it was clear that this would be the case since 2023 when half of these remixes appeared on the anniversary edition of Beatles 1962-1966.
There do seem to be one or two minor tweaks to the 2023 mixes, which are at least noticeable in "Nowhere Man". The vocals of the '23 mix were very dry and now they're treated with a little bit of reverb. An undetectably slight misalignment of the song's hi-hat has had certain audiophile freaks flipping their wigs for the past three years; according to these people, that off-time hi-hat has now been corrected. I can't really hear a difference.
As for the seven songs making their remixed debuts, there's "You Won't See Me" with its instruments and harmonies spread out in much the same way as those of "Nowhere Man", "I'm Looking Through You" with vocals centered and instruments occupying two channels instead of one, and general better balance on "The Word", "What Goes On", and "Run for Your Life". The 1965 stereo mixes of "Think for Yourself" and "Wait" already sounded pretty good, so improvements are less dramatic. I for one think that this is Giles' most essential remix since his first go with Sgt. Pepper's in 2017, and unlike that remix, there is excellent tonal balance throughout without any overbearing bass.
For those who are perfectly happy with the original mono mix that was The Beatles and George Martin's preference, that's included too. It's pressed with the very same plates as the excellent disc included in the 2014 Beatles In Mono set.
The one big surprise in this latest SE is the presence of the album's U.S. iteration, which is a Special Edition first. The Capitol variation of Rubber Soul serves more than a filler position in this set. First of all, it allows an opportunity to include the original 1965 stereo separation of most of the album's tracks for completists without taking the repetition of the UK track-order a bridge too far. Plus the U.S. version boasts a couple of interesting oddities: a completely unique mix of "The Word" with double-tracked lead vocals and "I'm Looking Through You" with false starts. It's also nice to have here because a lot of people really love the U.S. version of this particular album, and some even prefer it to the UK record. I'm on the fence as to whether or not I'm a representative of the latter group, but I'm certainly a representative of the former. Not only was the twelve-track Capitol LP the first version of Rubber Soul I and a lot of other Yanks heard, earning it major nostalgia points, but it's also a more focused folk-rock trip than the UK version because it replaces the rock-soul and monotonous country-and-western tracks that respectively open each side with a couple of very acoustic leftovers from Help! "Nowhere Man" and "If I Needed Someone" fit in just fine with Rubber Soul's smoky, folky mood, so their omission hurts more, but Capitol simply prohibited fourteen-track Beatles albums in those days.
There were actually two versions of Rubber Soul released in the U.S.: one with mostly the same dry stereo mixes as the UK edition and a relatively rare pressing with added reverb, which is most easily noticeable on the tracks with hard vocal-to-the-right/instruments-to-the-left panning. That echoey version is known as the East Coast or "Dexterized" version, in "honor" of Capitol Records' Dave Dexter, Jr., who got ants in his pants whenever the Parlophone tapes sounded too dry for his liking. At least he went much lighter on the reverb with Rubber Soul than he did with Beatles '65 or Help!, because it's the Dexterized disc that is included in this set.
The final element in the vinyl portion of The Rubber Soul SE is a bonus seven-inch featuring the period double-A single "We Can Work It Out" / "Day Tripper". While the single in the Revolver SE included both the original mono mixes and Giles's stereo remixes of "Paperback Writer" and "Rain", this one only makes room for remixes, which had already been included on that 2023 edition of 1962-1966. Oh well.
The vinyl is clean and reasonably flat, although my copy of the Capitol LP does have a slightly pronounced wave, but it does not affect play. That record also sounds a bit blown-out compared to the others. This is probably because Capitol supposedly applied compression to its releases, but my 1978 reissue doesn't really sound like this. The remixed LP sounds really wonderful.
Rounding out this set is the always attractive hardback book, which includes recording notes, a foreword by Paul, and even some posthumously compiled comments about Rubber Soul and its era of creativity from John. Gear!
So I guess I never did answer that question from way back in the second paragraph of this review: Was it worth the wait? Well, the remix made me very happy, but since I wasn't really waiting for this box set as a whole, I'll leave it up to you to answer that question now that you have an idea of what to expect from the Rubber Soul Special Edition. In the meantime, I'll be waiting for the Magical Mystery Tour/Yellow Submarine super deluxe set Beatlemaniacs such as myself are currently trying to will into existence.
