John – lead
vocals, rhythm guitar, tambourine
Paul – lead and harmony vocals, bass
George – guitar
Ringo – drums, maracas
Back on that historic day in February 1963 when the Beatles recorded all ten new tracks for Please Please Me, an eleventh song was recorded that did not make the final cut and was held over to the next album. That track, ‘Hold Me Tight’, was remade during the With The Beatles sessions later that year. Although an admirable song in its own right, it turned out to be one of the lesser songs on the album, shown up somewhat by the remarkable company it found itself in.
Two years later, the same fate befell ‘Wait’. The track had been the last to be recorded during the Help! sessions on 17 June. Four takes were recorded, although the last was the only one to make it to the end of the song. However, when it came to banding the album, a decision was evidently made to replace ‘Wait’ with one of the tracks recorded specifically for the American market the previous month, ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy’. We can tentatively pinpoint the time this decision was made, as George Martin mixed the outstanding half a dozen tracks for the album on 18 June, mono in the morning and stereo in the afternoon. ‘Wait’ was duly mixed for mono before lunch – but then no stereo mix was made and the song was suddenly out of the running. ‘Wait’ was left off Help!, to be resurrected five months later. Unlike ‘Hold Me Tight’, however, this time there was no time to re-record the song for Rubber Soul. In the early hours of 12 November, once again the last day of recording for the album, the group added vocals, volume pedal guitar, tambourine and maracas to the hapless track, and then quickly moved on to overdubbing vocals onto ‘I’m Looking Through You’.
And again, as with ‘Hold Me Tight’, this is not the most memorable track on the album. With hindsight, it’s easy to dismiss it as a second-rate Help! reject, which would be unfair. But it does serve to highlight the fact that Help!, though often considered one of the group’s weaker albums, has much in common with Rubber Soul, generally considered one of their best. The two albums have a similar proportion of stronger and weaker tracks – compare ‘Ticket To Ride’ and ‘Yesterday’ with ‘Nowhere Man’ and ‘In My Life’ on the one hand, and ‘It’s Only Love’ and ‘Tell Me What You See’ with ‘Wait’ and ‘Run For Your Life’ on the other. If we ignore the unspectacular cover versions of Help! (not, some would say, an injudicious thing to do), that album is by no means separated from Rubber Soul by a searing musical divide, as many commentators would have it.
‘Wait’ is something of a mirror of ‘We Can Work It Out’, which was written and recorded between the two ‘Wait’ sessions. It is fairly obviously a joint composition, although apparently not a blend of two songs. Paul remembers writing it in the Bahamas in front of actor Brandon de Wilde in a break from the filming of Help!, but does not remember John being involved. Nevertheless the lyrics indicate the verse to be Lennon (“Don’t wait, turn me away”) and the bridge to be archetypal McCartney (“And know that you will wait for me”), with the refrain being a bit of both. This is underlined by the harmony – the chromaticism of the verse with its minor key F#m7–F#m6–Bm–F#m (i7–i6–iv–i) descent against the octave leaps within the major key bridge.
Although the song’s verse sounds a little disjointed, the bridge moves along nicely enough, and the reverse drum fill of the cymbal followed by a roll works well. The slowed ending gives the impression of grinding to a halt rather than providing emphasis to “I’ve been alone”, but at least avoids a conventional fade.
The most notable aspect of the production is that the vocals are very dry and were evidently recorded with no echo chamber effects at all. In general, the entire Rubber Soul LP was recorded relatively drily, in marked contrast to the previous albums, Help! included. This was clearly a policy decision, and reflects the increasing influence that the Beatles were having in the control room. Although Norman Smith was not a huge fan of applying echo effects, he would have taken his cue from the group, who would by now be questioning every “rule” that governed the recording process. “That would have been the result of discussion between myself and the boys. They used to request certain things like that to me, and by then George Martin would go along with whatever the boys and I decided to do in terms of reverberation or echo.” The influence of artists such as Bob Dylan, whose LPs, including the recently released Highway 61 Revisited, were recorded without a trace of echo, would also have played a part. The echo chamber would be used much more sparingly in future Beatles recordings.