John – lead
vocals, acoustic guitar
Paul – harmony vocals, bass
George – harmony vocals, lead guitar
Ringo – drums, possibly tambourine
The last track on Rubber Soul was the first to be recorded for the album. The session followed a six-week break the group had taken after their second American tour, which included their record-breaking concert at Shea Stadium in New York. For the third year running, the Beatles were required to bring out two albums and three singles within a year, and John and Paul had needed the time off to come up with tracks for the new album. But it is odd that this first recording should turn out to be one of the weakest tracks on the album, and one that shows most clearly the pressures of writing to schedule. (By contrast, the second track for the album, taped later the same day, was ‘Norwegian Wood’.) John would occasionally let the influences (however covert) on his compositions show – ‘Do You Want To Know A Secret’ is from Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs, ‘You Can’t Do That’ is clearly Atlantic R&B. Similarly, the first line of ‘Run For Your Life’ is unashamedly lifted from an early Elvis Presley song ‘Baby Let’s Play House’. And not just lyrically (“Listen to me baby,” sings Elvis, “try to understand / I’d rather see you dead, little girl / Than to be with another man”), but also George’s lead guitar break is clearly based on Scotty Moore’s guitar in Elvis’s song. To mitigate or compound the theft, depending on your point of view, ‘Baby Let’s Play House’, which got to number five on the Billboard US Country charts making it the first Elvis song to break the top 50 on a national chart, was heavily based on Eddy Arnold’s 1951 hit ‘I Wanna Play House With You’.
John later expressed vehement dislike for the song (“‘Run For Your Life’ I always hated … it was phoney”), and it is easy to see why. The lyrics, when seen outside the context of the sixties and in the context of the subsequent development of feminism, are horrendous. The violence engendered by even the title is astonishing, and almost every line of the first verse and chorus is leaden with threats. This is definitely John pre-Yoko, and written at the end of a period when he considered that “women should be obscene and not heard”, which may be clever word-play, but reflects the highly dubious morality of the times. Seven years later, John released ‘Woman Is The Nigger Of The World’ –
Woman is the slave to the slaves
We insult her every day on TV
And wonder why she has no guts or confidence
When she’s young we kill her will to be free
While telling her not to be so smart we put her down for being so dumb
The offhand subjugation expressed by ‘Run For Your Life’, or the violence in ‘Norwegian Wood’, were the last gasps of John’s traditional, unthinking attitude towards women, which had been hardened by years of increasingly unacceptable behaviour towards the groupies. His laying down the law in songs such as ‘You Can’t Do That’ was being replaced by a softer, more empathetic side, which can just be glimpsed in ‘Girl’ (although this was apparently an indirect reference to a different subject). Although he seems not to understand women (or “girls”), he can now at least begin to hazard a guess about what goes on in their minds.
Apart from the obnoxious lyrics, it is a curious choice with which to close the album. The driving acoustic guitar, jaunty tambourine and catchy guitar licks from George are appealing enough, but they belong to songs from 1963 and not from December 1965. Now that the Beatles’ musical development was really starting to take off, there is stark contrast between this last track of Rubber Soul and the last track of the next album. ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ (interestingly, also the first track to be recorded for Revolver) points a clear way forward to 1967, to ‘Revolution 9’ and to the music of JohnandYoko. ‘Run For Your Life’ merely seems to glance backwards to outdated music and lyrics and puts the cap on the three relatively disappointing tracks that close the album. Apart from the tight and abrasive three-part vocal harmonies, the song is musically, as lyrically, rather derivative. The verse is a straightforward D–Bm (I–vi) shuffle, with chorus and bridge only adding a couple of less than earth-shattering alternatives, namely E (II), the briefest of modulations to B minor with G–F#7–Bm (VI–V7–i), and a G–D–A–D (IV–I–V–I) to finish. The idiosyncratic diction – “that’s the end-ah” – adds something to the song’s harmonically most interesting line.
In recording the song, things went relatively smoothly on their first day back at Abbey Road. After four breakdowns, they got the song’s rhythm track, complete with John’s guide vocal, right on the fifth take, and then overdubbed guitars and vocals. The song illustrates well how the vocals were overdubbed without headphones, as there is significant leakage of the backing track, which is being played back on the White Elephant studio speaker, into the vocal microphone. This can be clearly heard in the right channel of the stereo mix, as the faders are raised just before John’s vocal starts. Despite appearing on the basic rhythm track along with the drums, the tambourine is usually attributed to Ringo – although he had already demonstrated that playing drums and tambourine simultaneously was not beyond him. The only other real candidate for tackling the tambourine would have been George Martin, but he can be heard announcing the take from the control room.
It’s possible that after the day’s recording of the song, it was felt that more overdubs were needed, as it was left unmixed for almost a month. All other tracks on the album were mixed within a few days – a week at most – of completion, but mixing of this first-recorded track was left until recording of the LP was almost complete. When remixing the track for the CD release in 1987, George Martin took the opportunity to remove a noticeable thump in the guitar solo, possibly the result of someone knocking a microphone. (The sound is also absent on the 2009 mono and stereo remasters.)
This first Rubber Soul session was also a new beginning for George Martin. For some years he had been dissatisfied with his treatment by EMI, and his success with the Beatles had stretched his patience with the company to breaking point.
After three years at the Guildhall School of Music, George Martin’s career began with a short stint at the BBC Music Library, during which he was offered a job at Abbey Road by Oscar Preuss, head of Parlophone records, to be his assistant. Many of the label’s top performers had recently been moved to a sister label, Columbia, and Preuss was attempting to build his label up again. At the time, records were made of shellac and turned at 78 rpm, with classical music on 12-inch and popular music on 10-inch discs. George Martin was “very twelve-inch”. An early opportunity to stretch his talents came in 1952, when he recorded ‘Mock Mozart’ with Peter Ustinov, using tape-to-tape dubbing to produce a four-part Ustinov-sung ensemble. When Preuss retired in 1955, George Martin was the natural choice to take over – at 29, the youngest-ever head of an EMI label. But his relationship with EMI was never completely comfortable. He was frustrated at the company’s reluctance to take embrace long-playing records, a decision that eventually caused EMI to lose entire catalogues of recording artists in the American market, and their refusal to back rising and established artists such as Ron Goodwin and Kenneth McKellar, again causing them to desert EMI.
“EMI was considering shutting the label because it was never very successful, so I knew that I had to make a mark in some way.” In his early years as head of Parlophone, George Martin developed the label as a source of comedy acts, including Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, Flanders and Swann and Bernard Cribbins. He was also achieving success with the Temperance Seven and the skiffle group the Vipers. But of course the fortunes of Parlophone, EMI, and popular music the world over changed after his meeting with Brian Epstein on 13 February 1962.
In 1963, the profit made for EMI by George Martin’s records was reported to be £2.2 million, but because his own salary had just exceeded a watershed of £3,000, he was not entitled to the Christmas bonus of an extra four days’ pay that year. This was the last straw, and in 1964, after fourteen years with the company, he gave them the one year’s notice his contract required. When asked by an executive why he was leaving, he replied, “It’s very simple. I’ve had EMI right up to here.”
Along with three other former A&R men, Peter Sullivan from Decca, and John Burgess and Ron Richards from EMI, he set up a partnership, to be run along the lines of a commune, called AIR, or Associated Independent Recording. The impressive coterie of artists produced by the four included Adam Faith, Manfred Mann, Peter and Gordon, PJ Proby and the Hollies, as well as George Martin’s stable of the Beatles, Cilla Black, Billy J Kramer and Gerry and the Pacemakers. George Martin did feel he was taking a tremendous risk in setting up his independent company, as it was not clear that the Beatles, who were signed to EMI, would be prepared to follow him to AIR, or that EMI would let them. He didn’t consult the Beatles in making his decision, but it seems very unlikely that the group would have broken the phenomenally successful partnership by wanting a different producer. But EMI was not compelled to give him any work at all, and in light of his snubbing of the company, it was conceivable that they would try to foist another producer on the Beatles and leave him out in the cold. Fortunately, common sense prevailed even at EMI (who no doubt realised that the Beatles would not countenance a replacement), and Rubber Soul was recorded by the Beatles at EMI’s Abbey Road studios, with George Martin producing. Except of course that the company had to pay handsomely for his freelance services. “I suppose now I am earning more than the managing director of EMI records,” he told Hunter Davies in 1968. But more important to him, the George Martin–Beatles bond remained more or less intact for the remaining four years of the group’s life.