RUBBER SOUL

I gain satisfaction from the process of deciding what album I'd like to review next for ProgArchives.com. Most recently, I've realized I've only reviewed one of Genesis' albums, "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway." My ostensible choice for my next review was Genesis' "A Trick of the Tail . . . ."

However, knowing "the only permanent thing is change" (Heraclitus, I believe), John Lennon's "The Word" popped in my head as I was fixing my morning coffee, which is Folger's "Black Silk," "Proudly roasted in New Orleans."

"Rubber Soul" is a watershed album for the Beatles. When compact disks made their appearance in the early 1990's, one of my first CD's was "Rubber Soul." Through my 1976, Janszen electrostatic speakers, I, in actuality, heard "Drive My Car" for "the first time." Of course, EMI/Parlophone records' revisiting the original master tapes, rendering an ADD product, assured this potency of sound.

There is a baroque essence to "Rubber Soul." The production of George Martin actualized the imaginative gestures of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr. Indeed, during John Lennon's undying "In My Life," we hear Martin at the piano, performing a legendary harpsichord evocative solo. All of the finished products of Martin's mentorship bear a crisp and poignant presence.

"The Word," "In My Life" and McCartney's slightly later "Penny Lane" are "art songs" in the heritage of "lieder" from Western classical music. One of the enduring characteristics of John Lennon is his status as a quintessential smart- aleck. Famously, during a 1963 performance with the Beatles in front of members of the royal family, Lennon exhorted the regular audience to clap with their hands and those in preferred seating to "rattle their jewelry . . . ." In this vein, Lennon summons up a certain amount of chutzpah in his biblically inspired commentary of "The Word."

Who is this 25 year old Liverpudlian who asserts

Say the word and be like me/Say the word I'm thinking of/Have you heard the word is/love? . . . In the beginning I misunderstood/But now I've got it, the word is good . . . ?

Well, Lennon has good company in his exaltation of love:

And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love (1 Cor 13:13, NRSV).

As part of a milestone album like "Rubber Soul," "The Word" contains adroitly performed music (with George Martin at the harmonium) and perhaps, along with "In My Life," some of Lennon's truly superlative lyrics.

One can only react with incredulity to the age of "Rubber Soul": 58 plus years . . . ?! As Yes would assert a relatively short 15 years later on "Drama," "Tempus Fugit." George Harrison's "Think for Yourself" is forward-looking, not only in the fuzz bass, lead guitar of Paul McCartney, but also in its lyrics:

Although your mind's opaque/Try thinking more if just for your/own sake/The future still looks good/And you've got time to rectify all/the things that you should . . .

In 2024, independence of thought, what a unique concept . . . .