Review: The Beatles' 'Rubber Soul' Special Edition Vinyl Box Set

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.

Review: Paul McCartney's 'Man on the Run (Music from the Motion Picture Soundtrack)'

It seems like it was only four months ago that a big, comprehensive Paul McCartney and Wings compilation hit the market. That's probably because it was. The wide release of Morgan Neville's documentary Man on the Run late last month has necessitated the release of yet another compilation with all due haste. Unlike three LPs worth of Wings, Man on the Run (Music from the Motion Picture Soundtrack) is an austere single LP collection. It might have been an opportunity to sweep up the major McCartney numbers that got shut out of Wings because they technically weren't Wings songs, essentials such as "Maybe I'm Amazed", "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey", and "Another Day". Perhaps those songs weren't in the documentary. I don't know because I don't throw my business at the fascism-supporting streaming service that's hosting it. 

Review: 'SMiLE: The Rise, Fall, & Resurrection of Brian Wilson'

For nearly forty years, Brian Wilson's SMiLE existed more as a myth than a piece of music you could actually listen to. Sure, there were scores of bootlegs, but the average Beach Boys fan doesn't go that very, very naughty route. So, aside from a handful of songs that skittered out officially here or there, the SMiLE story was one that existed more on the page than emanating from speakers. While it was covered in any Beach Boys bio worth its salt, the biggest dose of SMiLE lore was Domenic Priore's Look! Listen! Vibrate! SMiLE! a truly wonderful, zine-like anthology of period press clippings and new essays first published in 1988. 

Review: The Beatles' 'The Anthology Collection'

And so we come to that time of the year when Camp-Beatles releases its annual big vinyl box. For those who have been (im)patiently waiting for that long-rumored Super Deluxe Edition of Rubber Soul, 'tis once again the season for frustrations. 

I'm not one of those though. The remixes of half of Rubber Soul's tracks on 2023's revised edition of 1962-1966 scratched whatever itch I had to hear anything from that album remixed. It has also long been my understanding that there isn't a ton of supplementary recordings from the month-long Rubber Soul sessions. The tastiest items were a fairly different first take of "Norwegian Wood" and a very different one of "I'm Looking Through You", and both of those had already been released three decades ago on The Beatles Anthology 2. 

Review: 'Wings'

The band Wings was an entity distinct from Paul McCartney the solo artist, but a lot of retrospective stuff released under the guise of Wings wasn't too dogmatic about that. 1978's Wings Greatest included a couple of singles released before Paul and Linda started playing with Denny Laine, the only other consistent member of the group. 2001's Wingspan included songs from before and after the actual Wings era. Even the recent Wings oral history plays loose with that distinction. 

Review: 'George Harrison: Behind the Locked Door'

John may have been the one who sang "I got a chip on my shoulder that's bigger than my feet," but that line could have just as easily applied to George. Why was he so sour? George Harrison hadn't tragically lost a parent at an impressionable age, as John Lennon and the far more affable Paul McCartney had. He did not spend his childhood fatherless and ill, as Ringo Starr had. Little George was loved by a doting family. He was not well-to-do, but he did not want either. He was a healthy, happy kid, and one who genuinely seemed to look up to his future bandmates John and Paul.

Review: 'Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run'

As I recently noted, 2000's The Beatles Anthology did a very good job of imparting the story of John, Paul, George, and Ringo from the personal, not necessarily historically reliable, perspectives of John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Of course, the guys' stories did not end there, and for those who want to know what came next for Paul, at least, might justifiably expect the new oral history Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run to be a sort of unofficial sequel to The Beatles Anthology. After all, it is credited to Paul McCartney, just as the 2000 book was credited to Paul and the rest of his ex-bandmates, even though that book included the occasional comment from other players in The Beatles' story. 

Review: 'The Beatles Anthology' 25th Anniversary Reprint

The Beatles never really went away after their epochal breakup in 1970, but they continued to assert themselves with extra splashiness when the Beatles Anthology project landed. It began in 1995 with a three-part, six-hour documentary series on ABC and the first volume of a three-part, double-CD series of outtakes compilations. It continued the following year with the next two installments of the CD series.

Review: 'John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs'

Ian Leslie is not a rock writer. His first three books are all psychology texts apparently (I haven't read any of them). So his decision to tell The Beatles' story for his fourth will likely arch a few eyebrows. Why does this story need to be told again? Why is a guy with Leslie's particular credentials the one to tell it?

Leslie's format, in which he uses particular songs as entry points to discuss particular points along the Beatles timeline and beyond it, is not original. Neither is his focus on the relationship between John and Paul. Oddly, it's his background in psychology that makes John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs a compelling new entry in the massive Beatles library. The author didn't perform any new interviews for his book. He did all his research in the pages of other authors' works. But unlike most of those writers, Leslie really manages to make us feel the intimacy of Lennon and McCartney's relationship. 

Review: Vinyl Reissues of John Cale's 'The Academy in Peril' and 'Paris 1919'

As the bringer of shuddering waves of viola and a general avant-garde spirit to the first two Velvet Underground records, John Cale may have seemed like the Velvet least likely to be poised for a solo pop career. Cale almost immediately confounded any such expectations with his debut solo album. Despite its disturbing cover shot of Cale in a clear mask fit only for the least convivial serial killer, Vintage Violence was a tribute to The Band's rustic yet tuneful Americana-as-seen-by-an-outsider slant. His subsequent sometimes lovely, sometimes cacophonous collaboration with experimental composer Terry Riley, The Church of Anthrax, reminded those listening to not get too comfortable. 

Review: Paul McCartney & Wings' 'One Hand Clapping'

After releasing Band on the Run and finally getting a gold star from venomous critics, including the most venomous critic of all (Lennon), Paul McCartney was hot to keep riding that wave of good will. So he rushed into the studio with Wings to follow up with a live-in-the-studio session of covers and songs he'd already recorded and released with his current band, as a solo artist, and with his old band featuring that most venomous critic of all (Lennon).

Review: 'All You Need Is Love: The Beatles In Their Own Words'

According to its press release, Peter Brown and Steven Gaines's All You Need Is Love: The Beatles In Their Own Words is "A LANDMARK ORAL HISTORY ON THE BEATLES" (their caps). 

There are several problems in that last sentence: 

A) Only 20% of All You Need Is Love consists of The Beatles' own words (The Beatles being Paul, George, and Ringo, but not John). The other words are supplied by Yoko Ono, Cynthia Lennon, Pattie Boyd, Maureen Starkey, Derek Taylor, Neil Aspinall, "Magic" Alex Mardas, and twenty or so others in or around The Beatles' circle.

Review: Wings' 'Band on the Run' 50th Anniversary Set

If there's a word that sums up Paul McCartney's work-approach with The Beatles, that word could be "perfectionism." That was one of the things that drove his band-mates up a tree when he insisted on take after take of things like "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" and "Maxwell's Silver Hammer", although the cutesiness of those songs surely rubbed John, George, and Ringo the wrong way too. So it was a shock when McCartney began his solo career by bucking that perfectionism, if not the cutesiness. McCartney was a homemade, one-man-band record full of non-songs and only intermittent flashes of his perfect song craft, "Maybe I'm Amazed" being the most obvious example. If RAM suggested that the perfect old Paul was back, then Macca continued to confound with an album of jams with a new band called Wings, which he then followed with a Whitman's sampler of nutrient-free confectionary experiments he titled Red Rose Speedway.

Review: New Editions of The Beatles' '1962-1966' and '1967-1970'

After the super deluxe edition of Revolver was released this time last year, many Beatlemaniacs believed that the next big holiday release would be a similar set devoted to Rubber Soul. Surprise! Instead we're getting new editions of the two essential Beatles compilations, 1962-1966 and 1967-1970, both of which are celebrating their fiftieth anniversary this year. An odd choice, you may think, but this release is mainly serving one very specific purpose, a job that it wouldn't make sense for a deluxe edition of Rubber Soul to do. 

Review: 'Jimi Hendrix Experience: Live At The Hollywood Bowl: August 18, 1967'

Two months to the day after The Jimi Hendrix Experience became an overnight stateside phenomenon at the Monterey Pop Festival, the group freaked out California a little further south at the Hollywood Bowl. The band was simply white hot at this point, still flying from rearranging brains en masse at the beginning of the summer and still so fresh that they hadn't even put out a sophomore LP yet. This material must have still been new enough that Jimi hadn't quite gotten it all down yet, as he kept forgetting to sing lines in "The Wind Cries Mary". But such gaffs are part of the charm of hearing a vintage, unadulterated performance, as you can on the new live disc, Jimi Hendrix Experience: Live At The Hollywood Bowl: August 18, 1967. The power of the band at this stage in their career is what makes it electrifying. 

Review: 'The Lyrics' by Paul McCartney (Updated Eidition)

From August 2015 to August 2020, Paul McCartney talked to poet Paul Muldoon about songs he'd written since 1956, and these talks became the basis of the 2021 book The Lyrics. In his foreword, McCartney explains that he'd been approached several times to write an autobiography, but the idea never interested him much, so this is the closest we'll probably get. In a non-linear way, it does get the job done, because the guy who wrote "Bip-Bop" and "Wild Honey Pie" often doesn't engage much with his lyrics and instead uses the various songs he discusses as pretexts to open up about The Ed Sullivan Show ("All My Loving"), Jane Asher ("And I Love Her"), the Beatles' decision to quit touring ("Honey Pie", of all things), the Rolling Stones ("I Wanna Be Your Man"), his bass playing ("She's a Woman"), his mum ("Let It Be"), his feelings about being on the receiving end of John Lennon's infamous nastiness ("Too Many People)", and quite a lot more. 

Review: 'Fashioning the Beatles: The Looks That Shook the World'

Along with their myriad musical innovations, The Beatles completely changed the way men were allowed to look when the group invaded the globe with their moppy tops and slender suits. They re-popularized facial hair, made the Cuban heel ubiquitous, and made it okay for guys to wear what were traditionally gals' clothes. For fashion-focused folks, these are developments every bit as earth-quaking as the tape loops of "Tomorrow Never Knows" or the orchestral crescendos of "A Day in the Life". To them, Deirdre Kelly's new book Fashioning the Beatles: The Looks That Shook the World will be what Revolution in the Head is to people who enjoy the group's music.

Review: Paul McCartney and Wings''Red Rose Speedway' RSD Half-Speed Mastered Vinyl

Paul McCartney was the most exacting Beatle, the guy who wrote such classically structured perfections as "Yesterday" and "Martha My Dear" and such imaginative yet insightful lyrics as "Eleanor Rigby" and "You Never Give Me Your Money", and the guy who steered the band's most classically artful production, Sgt. Pepper's. So it was certainly more than a shock when he began his solo career with the utterly offhand McCartney and decided to cut his first album with his new band, Wings, without getting together many actual songs first. 

Review: 'The Inner Light: How India Influenced The Beatles'

The influence of Indian culture on The Beatles' lives and music was far reaching. George Harrison's overwhelming love of Indian classical music drove him to study the sitar seriously, which helped to expand an appreciation for that music-- and his teacher, Ravi Shankar-- throughout the world. His interest in Indian philosophy led him and the rest of The Beatles to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, with whom they studied Transcendental Meditation (TM). The universal love philosophy that has more in common with Indian philosophy than western ideals was integral to The Beatles' psychedelic-era persona. After The Beatles, John Lennon sang about karma and George Harrison's worked to raise awareness of the suffering of India's neighbor Bangladesh. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr continue to stump for David Lynch's TM promoting foundation today.

Review: The Beatles' 'Revolver' Special Edition Vinyl Box Set

From the garage band simplicity of their first couple of albums to the more refined folk rock of their next few, and on to the genuine sophistication of Rubber Soul, the first half of The Beatles' career was a constant succession of progressions.