This Day in Rock History (Beatles' “Rubber Soul” Tops Album Chart)

Feb. 26, 1966--The Beatles’ sixth studio LP, Rubber Soul, remained at #1 on Billboard's U.S. album chart, where it had stayed since the start of the year. The LP represented strong evidence of the continuing maturation--indeed, mastery--of the British quartet as songwriters and studio innovators.

American fans of the Fab Four found a somewhat different track listing than the group’s home fans did. Only 10 of the dozen tracks on the U.S. vinyl release also appeared on the British one from December 1965: “I’ve Just Seen a Face” and “It’s Only Love” from the British Help! album substituted for four tracks that would later appear on the American Yesterday…and Today. In fact, U.S. and British releases would not contain the same tracks until the Beatles’ 1967 extravaganza, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

What was the Beatles’ greatest album? Sergeant Pepper’s comes in for the lion’s share of plaudits, but I don’t think Rubber Soul can be excluded from the conversation. At a time when the group were under relentless pressure for more singles, they managed to produce what became a landmark in what would become a staple of what we know now as album-oriented radio, an LP less a collection of singles than songs marked by significant experimentation and fertile collaboration.

Consider, for instance, the role of “the quiet Beatle,” George Harrison. It took another three years, with the release of Abbey Road and its tunes “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun,” before his talents began to be acknowledged in all their dimensions.

But with “Rubber Soul,” Harrison started to move, albeit slowly, into the group songwriting space occupied by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, with “Think for Yourself” and “If I Needed Someone.” His more important contribution at this point might have been simply to shape the group’s sound. “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” gave evidence of Lennon’s sly wit (very sly--he set himself the challenge of writing about an affair without signaling to wife Cynthia that he was doing so!), but listeners were also startled by a new instrument: the sitar, played by Harrison, displaying his growing interest in Indian culture.

For a little more than two years, the group had been living every day at the beck and call of Beatlemania. However much fun it might have been at first, it had become exhausting by now, and Lennon in particular took stock with two songs of self-questioning and self-assessment: “Nowhere Man” and “In My Life.”

McCartney’s craftsmanship, though, provided much of the glue holding the album together. There have been more celebrated instances in pop history of how a romantic breakup produced art (most notably, Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks and Marvin Gaye’s Here, My Dear), but the end of Paul’s relationship with actress-girlfriend Jane Asher produced some of his best work to that point, including the Rubber Soul songs “You Won’t See Me” and “I’m Looking Through You.”