By 1965, rock music had grown up and changed beyond recognition from the sounds that had seduced John in the Fifties. For the manufacturers of guitars it was a boom period, but for singer-songwriters it was better than that. It was a moment of graduation as rock became the dominant popular music form of the Western world.
No one recognised this better than Lennon and McCartney. But the rivalry wasn’t now just between the two of them. There were competitors all around, and, thus challenged, over a four-week autumn period they recorded what many believe were several of their most accomplished songs for the album Rubber Soul.
For John, the first would be ‘Norwegian Wood’, the song he’d begun writing about an affair a year earlier – although in the song the anticipated adultery doesn’t quite happen. All kinds of explanation for the title have been proffered over the years, the most popular being that it might have pointed to the nationality of the lady involved. But, as Paul was also heavily involved in the song’s lyrics and arrangement, it seems just as likely that the title simply referred, as Paul has suggested, to the wooden strips that were used to clad his little studio in his St John’s Wood home.
The last lines of the song, however, are pure John. Having been led on by this flirty young woman, but then told to sleep in the bath, the disappointed suitor then sets fire to her flat. Arson being an unusual subject for a pop song, it was an echo of the black comedy of several of the short stories from In His Own Write.
Everything about the recording was interesting. An old Irish folk song in shape, the adding of a sitar that George Harrison had recently acquired brought a spiky atmosphere to the story, suggesting musically that something exotic but naughty might have been in the offing.
It was always one of John’s favourites, as was ‘Girl’, which had a definite Eastern European Jewish feel to it, and on which he asked the sound engineer to make sure to capture his intake of breath before he sang ‘Girl . . . girl . . .’ All young men understand the feeling that sigh evoked, and John would talk about how the subject was an idealised dream girl, and not based on anyone he knew. It was also the song on which the Beatles sang the disguised words ‘tit . . . tit . . . tit’ in the background to fox the BBC and any other would-be censors.
‘In My Life’ was unblushingly autobiographical. The lyrics had started out one day at Kenwood when John was thinking about the bus journey from his childhood home in Menlove Avenue into the centre of Liverpool, mentioning every place that he could remember. It was before the Beatles had recorded ‘Penny Lane’, but it included ‘Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields and tram sheds,’ he said later. Unfortunately, he added, ‘it was the most boring sort of “What I Did In My Holidays” bus trip song, and it wasn’t working at all. But then, I lay back and the lyrics started coming to me. It was pretty truthful. No psychedelia. No gobbledegook . . .’ – just memories of places and people he’d known and loved.
Paul wrote the middle-eight melody on a little Mellotron organ, which became an instrumental break when George Martin went into the studio early one day before John and Paul got there. Playing it on an electric piano, he then speeded up the tape until it sounded like a harpsichord. In that way a moment of baroque music found its way on to a Beatles album.
And then there was ‘Nowhere Man’, which, as a single, became a big American hit. Usually, and working in an opposite way to Paul, John thought of the lyrics to his songs first, and then searched for the chords to put them to – often writing little pieces of a song before finding a way of joining the fragments together. In the case of ‘Nowhere Man’, he would remember the chain of thoughts as the song came out almost fully formed. With the dates for the session having been set, ‘I was sitting trying to think of a song, and I thought of myself sitting there, doing nothing, getting nowhere . . . Then I thought of myself as Nowhere Man, sitting in his nowhere land . . .’
It could have applied to anyone, but for John it was about him, and the ennui he was increasingly feeling. ‘Isn’t he a bit like you and me,’ went the lyrics. Living out there in a rich, pleasant estate in Surrey he was a nowhere suburban man, with a pleasant suburban wife, and surrounded by, as he saw them, nowhere suburban neighbours.
Obviously, by this stage the Beatles were no longer expected to record an album in a day, or a single in a three-hour session. So grateful were EMI for the worldwide income that was accruing to the company from the sales of Beatles records they had been virtually given the freedom of Abbey Road studios as their playground. Always experimenting when they were there, they would discover abandoned instruments left behind in the band room and wonder how they could be incorporated into their songs.
Meanwhile, they soaked up George Martin’s musical and technical expertise. He’d once been their boss. Now he was their colleague and their teacher. The roles hadn’t been reversed. It was still his job to get the recordings fit for release, and his influence on those recordings was massive. He wrote music himself, but although he didn’t have the gift for original composition that John and Paul had, he could show them how to best express their gift. Until the recording of ‘Yesterday’ the previous summer, Martin had been limited mainly to helping them inside the basic rock formula. But with Rubber Soul, he, as much as the Beatles, could see that the musical possibilities were, if not infinite, certainly far wider than any of them had previously imagined.
At the same Rubber Soul sessions Paul came in with ‘Michelle’, some of the lyrics having been translated into French by the teacher wife of Paul’s school friend Ivan Vaughan – the boy who had introduced Paul to John all those years ago. Then there was ‘I’m Looking Through You’, a curiously angry song about the breakdown of a relationship, which sounds more like a song John might have written, and ‘We Can Work It Out’, which was so good and instantly commercial that it was left off the album and became one side of the Beatles’ next Christmas single.
It was also another occasion when John and Paul came up with different sections of the same song, Paul writing the verse and John the middle eight – a conversation in music that typified its two writers. ‘Paul came to my house,’ John would remember, ‘with the first bit, and then I came up with “Life is very short and there’s no time . . .”’ As John saw it, Paul was the optimist, wanting to work things out, while he was impatient, always in a hurry.
It’s common to think of Lennon and McCartney as a songwriting team, but that doesn’t get near to describing their working relationship. Most music-writing duos, such as George and Ira Gershwin, or Rodgers and Hammerstein, are built on one member being the composer and the other the lyricist. But both John and Paul were complete songwriters in themselves, each often writing both the melody and the lyric to a song, before playing and singing it to the other and inviting suggestions for improvement.
How much Paul contributed to ‘Day Tripper’ is less certain. One of the quickie rock and roll songs that John would come up with when a new single was due, the title was his hint that he was tripping on LSD now. The lyrics were about a girl, any girl, who was a prick-teaser, although, to avoid being banned by radio stations, she became a ‘big teaser’.
When Rubber Soul was released at Christmas 1965 it quickly became known as the Beatles’ ‘pot album’. There’s no doubt marijuana was much around when the songs were being written. It was now a constant companion for the Beatles, except, they said, when they were recording. George Martin had become irritated by the giggling during the Help! sessions so, in deference to him, pot was less in evidence when they were recording Rubber Soul. That being said, the cover of the LP gave the game away, when the Beatles chose a much-distorted image that photographer Robert Freeman had accidentally taken of them. For those who liked clues, and over the following years a virtual academic discipline was invented for the interpretation of possible cryptography in Beatles lyrics, this would be a first no one could miss.
Rubber Soul was a ground-breaking record, but perhaps most importantly it finally ushered in the predominance of the album over the single. In 1963, Beatles fans had been largely teenyboppers. Now the songs were more complicated and the fans were older. Rubber Soul took the Beatles to another level, and in so doing inspired other groups to match them. In America Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys thought: ‘I want to make an album like that.’ It was, he said, ‘like a collection of folk songs. We did Pet Sounds after that . . .’
A new rivalry had begun.
To no one’s surprise, John’s father, Freddie, hadn’t been able to fade back into obscurity after getting into contact with his son again, and one day he turned up at Kenwood. Answering the front door, Cynthia found herself looking ‘at a tiny man with lank grey hair, balding on top . . . He looked as unkempt and down at heel as a tramp . . . but, alarmingly,’ she said, ‘he had John’s face.’ For some reason, John had never told her that he’d met his father again.
Freddie explained that he needed to talk to his son. John was out at the time, but expected home soon, so Cynthia invited Freddie inside where she made him a cup of tea and some cheese on toast. Then, as they waited, the two had an awkward conversation, until Freddie happened to mention that he knew his hair looked a mess. Immediately, Cynthia, who often cut her mother’s hair, offered to reshape it for him, and, getting out a comb and scissors, set about giving her father-in-law a haircut. As often happened, John didn’t come home when expected, and eventually Freddie grew tired of waiting and wandered off again.
When he got back, John was not pleased to learn about the visitor. But he was even angrier when, just before Christmas 1965, Freddie recorded a self-written vaguely autobiographical song, ‘That’s My Life’. It was not a success, but when the tabloid newspapers featured more stories about the singer, John was torn. Whatever he might think of Freddie – and Mimi never softened in her warnings about him – the fellow was, after all, his father.
The past could never be just the past while John was a famous multi-millionaire and his father, living just a few miles away in the Greyhound Pub at Hampton Court, was a usually out-of-work dishwasher.