The Beatles are on Spotify … but someone uploaded the wrong RUBBER SOUL. I fixed that, though.
Many UK Beatles fans are under the mistaken impression that their version of the world-changing 1965 release RUBBER SOUL is the correct programming of the album. It’s not.
Whether they realized it at the time or not, the Fabs were releasing the first great folk-rock album. It took the suits at Capitol Records to figure that out, and although Capitol screwed up plenty of decisions when they were taking Beatles albums apart and putting them together again for the US market, it so happens that they got this one right.
Although the band did not approve, Capitol’s deletion of four numbers from the UK version, and its addition of two songs held over from the previous UK album, HELP!, created the masterpiece that America fell in love with. And let’s face it, folks. It’s what America thinks, and more specifically what I think, that really counts. That makes this sequence (my personal Spotify playlist of the re-created American album, dubbed THE REAL RUBBER SOUL) the correct one. And the superior album. Because it has the tracks I remember, in the order I remember.
Take a listen yourself and draw your own conclusion. This version is the only one I will ever think of as RUBBER SOUL. It’s one of two Beatles albums I listened to obsessively over eight long years as I wrote my novel. And it kept me sane.
