At its best, the box set manages to put one’s received ideas about this most canonical of albums into flux, calling attention to discrepancies and revealing paths not taken. An instrumental take of “Day Tripper”—a song not included on either original version of Rubber Soul but recorded at the same time and released as a single on the same day—whose instrumental break, led by George’s volume-pedal swells and Ringo’s ecstatic cymbal work, sounds to modern ears like skyward-reaching post-rock. A snippet of interview, excerpted in Kevin Howlett’s expansive and conversational liner notes, in which John seems to forget that Rubber Soul came after Help! and not before, complicating our sense of the album as the band’s unequivocal leap forward. A whole unheard song called “Little Girl” is presented here as a shaky Lennon acoustic demo—rejected from Rubber Soul, one imagines, because the album already had “Girl” and “Run for your life if you can, little girl…,” or because its teenage sentimentality didn’t jibe with the new sophisticated vibe the band was cultivating. (Though it does have a sticky melody and some interesting chord choices.) Taken together, it brings Rubber Soul down from the pantheon and back into human scale: not the inevitable first masterpiece of a band predestined for greatness, but just a really, really good record, made by a group of young men who were working their asses off, under tremendous pressure from industry and audience, and committed to seeing their own vision through.
The set’s greatest pleasures are in the album’s two original versions—a reminder that Rubber Soul has always been in flux, shaped by whims of inspiration and commerce alike, not a single totemic thing. Really, there are more than two. The UK and U.S. each got a stereo and a mono mix, which any major nerd will tell you contain differences that are just as important as the tracklist tweaks. In stereo, each of the arrangements’ small flourishes is presented as a singular and precious object unto itself. The fuzzed-out McCartney bass line on “Think for Yourself” is huge and unruly without ever getting in the way of the three-part vocal harmonies. On “You Won’t See Me,” Ringo’s idiosyncratic drum pattern, all ticking hi-hat and cascading toms, seems to operate in a space of its own, at the action’s kinetic center but separated from the rest by a layer of perfect stillness. Fan wisdom favors the mono version, which is perhaps closer to what the band envisioned as they urged various studio engineers to push their meters into the red. The songs retain their baroque intricacy, but are delivered with jukebox-blasting force rather than careful control. Those “You Won’t See Me” hi-hats, so crisp and mannered in stereo, now share the same cramped frequencies as the sibilance from McCartney’s voice, giving the sense of everyone squeezed into one loud and lively room. Guitars scrape and tangle, vocal layers bleed together as one. Even “Nowhere Man” rips out of the speakers.
