RUBBER SOUL - The Album That CHANGED The BEATLES

the beatles released rubber soul on december 3rd 1965. heavily influenced by the us folk rock scene it was an album which saw the group come of age and break free from their lovable mop top image it also began their transformation from a singles to an album band and paved the way for the remarkable experimentation which would follow i'm andrew from polygram auctions and in this video i'll be taking an in-depth look at the album's production and sound quality and also find out why the us version is one of the most respected and best loved capital albums i'll also be comparing and ranking all of the original uk mono pressings to find out once and for all if the loud cut is a myth or reality [Music] between the end of their us tour on august 31st and the start of the sessions for the album at abbey road the beatles had just six weeks to write rubber soul although brimming with new ideas and inspiration picked up during that tour time was tight and they were under enormous pressure to get the album finished for the all-important christmas market in response they resurrected the backing track for the song wait which have been left over from the help sessions and also revived one of lenin's earliest compositions what goes on although what goes on ranks today amongst fans least favorite tracks it was one which john was fond of and valued highly enough to resurrect for the album written back in quarrymen times it was presented by john to george martin as a serious contender for their third single at a session back in march 1963. however martin was not impressed and even chose one after 909 over it as the final song to record at that session which is the version you hear on anthology 1. the original demo of that song has a similar chorus to the version which ended up on the album but the lyrics for the verses were completely different so with the basic chorus left intact paul with a little help from ringo finished it off and it was recorded four days later george martin drew up the album's running order and on the 16th the master tape was banded ready for harry moss to cut the production lacquers apart from closing side one with a slow number the running order stuck pretty much to the same format as help even down to the ringo vocal on track 1 on site 2. however as we saw in our recent video about the beatles us releases capital and more specifically dave dexter jr had his own ideas about how the album should look and sound back on august 29th at the capitol tower in hollywood the beatles were presented with gold discs for the help album and interestingly there's a shot taken during that ceremony of john closely scrutinizing his award it's possible that this was the first time he'd seen the help album cover close up and he was not impressed and passed on his displeasure to brian epstein who in turn expressed them in his own polite way to capital president alan livingston in a meeting the following day evidence of this comes from a memo written after that meeting by livingston to dave dexter in which he writes that in the meeting epstein had quote express the very strong hope that we would consider using the same artwork for our beatles album covers as england uses in a memo a few days later on september 2nd capital's creative executive voyal gilmore responded to livingston's memo by agreeing with epstein's proposal by saying this would be a good idea also adding that he would like to have the songs in the albums identical and released simultaneously dexter was furious with this idea and came out swinging in a memo to livingston later that same day in which he strongly defended his work on the beatles albums in it he lays down the law and points out that no capital lp is ever identical in repertoire to the british lp he also points out that because emi persists in the 14 track package we will never ever be in a position to release with them simultaneously as i explained in the last video for financial reasons the capital albums contain 12 tracks because in the us the song publishers are paid a mechanical license fee for every song which appeared on an album whereas in england publishers receive a share of the total royalties paid on each album sold dexter also argued that we can sit out our artwork in virtually every case superior to the english front cover art artistically as well as commercially ours is slanted more to the merchandising end we also use more color than emi he elaborates on this further by pointing out the fact that their type on the front cover is smaller underplayed in some cases at the side or bottom of the cover instead of at the top as we must do he was also bemused by the fact that epstein sold as one colour transparency for a front cover beetle 65 which was never used on an emi cover evidence that the help cover had started all this comes in the next paragraph as dexter defends his design by saying that emi emitted most of the united artists billing which we were required to reproduce on front not the back thus theirs is a bit cleaner looking but ours has more grab more sales appeal we think and i agree the us help cover is vastly more entertaining than the uk one finally dexter makes the point that when japan emi and numerous other affiliates issue beatles albums they more often than not use the capital front covers and dexter ends by saying if we have to wait around for british covers in future it will compound our problems with beetle's product even more than now the beatles comments about the covers had clearly touched a nerve with dexter and although he followed orders and used the same front cover image for rubber soul he felt with some justification that he knew the american market better than the beatles and that the uk version of the album needed changing whatever they said the uk version of rabisol was very much in the tradition of the day as far as pop albums went pop music in the uk at least were still very much a singles game and contributed to the majority of sales and record company profits albums were little more than collections of tracks which weren't deemed good enough for singles or were songs which went down well on stage there were no time for grand artistic statements emi wanted simply to get the album into the shops for christmas knowing he had to lose two tracks anyway dexter decided to go further and replace another two from the uk running order firstly he removed nowhere man and if i needed someone then in some say a stroke of genius he took off drive my car from side one and what goes on from side two and replaced them with i've just seen a face and it's only love which have both been buried on side two of the uk help album and were yet to be released in the us spearheaded by dylan and the birds folk rock was a big deal in the us in 1965 and dexter said later that it was his intention to create a folk album true or not it was a very smart move i've just seen a face with its mellow vibe works superbly as an opener and its only love is for me one of lenin's best vocals and melodies it's tainted only by the fact that john himself called it a lousy song with abysmal lyrics which he hated rubber soul turned out to be the final beatles album dexter managed a nowhere man and if i needed someone were eventually released on yesterday and today in june 1966 but that's a story for another day the uk edition is a strong and enjoyable album and was the way the beatles themselves intended it to be heard but there's no denying that the us version was influential as an artistic statement brian wilson is often quoted as saying that rubber soul was the inspiration for pet sounds and he was talking about the us version and not the uk one now let's do some comparisons first the cover despite its clever image distortion it's never been one of my favorites the front panel image even on uk first pressings is very soft and has an odd green orange hue and lacks overall sharpness and detail the us cover on the other hand has a much sharper front panel image which is especially noticeable on the hair and faces and the use of that earthy shade of brown works much better for me this copy still has its shrink on it so it hasn't suffered as most u.s copies have with ring or storage wear something which isn't really an issue with the laminated front panels of the uk covers now what about the sound quality how does that compare well for this analysis i've decided just to use mono pressings i've never been a big fan of the stereo mix of this album the switch back to the hard left right vocal instrumental separation was a disappointing choice and overall i think this album works better in mono the only reason i can see to get a stereo pressing is to hear the false start when i'm looking through you on the us pressing which is absent from the mono apart from one all tracks on the us version of rubber sole have the same mono mixes as the uk version the exception was that the capital album has the november 9th mix of michelle as opposed to the slightly later november 15th mix used on the uk one there are quite a few myths and legends which have built up over the years about the sound on this album one of the biggest being the term loud cut which has been applied to uk first pressings mainly by enterprising ebay sellers emi cutting engineer harry moss cut the master lacquer of this album at abbey road on the 17th of november 1965. this dash 1-1 cutting was then sent for pressing at emi's haze factory the dash 1 pressing a rubber sole was a typical mid-sixties emi cutting loud and hot in order that it would sound good on the dancer reproducers the costly players of their day which nearly all british teenagers had at the time harry moss himself said later quote we made records so that they could be played on a dance set and we used to argue that instead of making our records inferior to suit an inferior machine we should tell dan set to make better players or just go out of business oddly the original tape box shows that he also cut dash 2 and 3 sub-masters over the following two days which were never used creating sub-masters was common practice on beatles albums as it enabled the factory to increase production remember with the beatles was recut several times up to seven however it was his colleague hazel yarwood who on the 23rd of november cut the dash 4 which was to replace the dash 1 which was now for some reason being phased out and all this before the album had even hit the stores and in fact you can even find copies with dash 1 on one side and dash 4 on the other amongst the dansette's many weak points was their playing arm its tracking force was crudely adjusted by setting the length of a spring in a clip beneath the arm itself this made correct adjustment extremely difficult and made it very easy to set it up badly but most people didn't bother at all back then and left it at the factory setting which was way too light and as a result made the stylist jump all too easily then you had two choices tape a coin to the head shell or take it back to the store it seems that as far as this album was concerned a lot of people chose the latter and after just a few weeks in the stores emi began to receive reports from retailers the customers were complaining that their copies of rubber sole were jumping whether this was the fault of the dash 1 or the dash 4 is not known but hazel yarwood was tasked with cutting it again hazel yarwood is a name you might not be familiar with she was emi's first female cutting engineer which in the male dominated world of studio engineering back then was very unusual she worked at emi from 1947 to 1985 cutting mainly classical titles and was considered a legend in a field and master of her craft even emi's german arm sent all of their disc mastering engineers to abbey road to take lessons from her she was that good it's a measure of respect she had amongst her peers that she was given numerous obituaries in the uk national press when she passed away aged 89 in june 2013 something which sadly eluded harry moss a memo reproduced in the book in the beatles mono box set shows a note addressed to hazel yarwood dated january 28 1966 instructing her to cut a dash 5 submaster of the mono album and refers to another memo about customer complaints her dash 5 cutting she made that day lasted until the end of mono production in 1969 but was resurrected for the mini mono revival pressings in 1981 although side one was re-cut as dash six by harry moss early on in production of those pressings but how do all of these cuttings compare sound quality wise to find out let's have a look at the waveforms and spectrographs on this rx software in this test i'm going to be using the following 6 mono pressings the uk-1 dash 4 and 5 which are all 1960s pressings the 1981 monopressing and the 2014 monopressing which came in the box set the us copy i'm going to use is a west coast pressing from capitals los angeles factory which has f13 and g10 matrix endings on sites one and two respectively rather than use the entire album to compare i have chosen just one track across all pressings and that is the word not because it's my favorite it's just that it's the most dynamic sounding track i've recorded them directly onto my computer all at the same level and without any normalization at all so what you see is what came directly off the disk on these graphs the blue area is the waveform and the orange color behind it is the spectrogram which represents different frequencies the stronger the orange color the louder the sound is at that frequency the black being silence the frequency range goes from 80 hertz at the bottom to 20 000 or 20k at the top firstly let's have a look at the waveform of the word from a uk first pressing the loud cut as you can see there are a good number of small dynamic peaks but overall the waveform is pretty solid and compressed which is exactly what you would expect from a typical emi pressing from this time the sound is very aggressive especially on those guitar chops and the solo which are really harsh and hard to listen to at volume switching to the spectrograph the strength of the signal from the bottom to the top is very consistent with no steps or cut off however as i switch to the dash 4 cutting you can see a clear roll-off or step at around 14k a characteristic which is present on all other pressings in this test let's go back to the waveform of the dash 1 again and i'll show you what it looks like compared to the dash 4. here the overall volume has been reduced and the peaks have become more separated and overall it sounds less compressed the upper frequencies are a little weaker making it sound slightly duller than the dash 1 but it's not as harsh on the ear the 1966-5 shows a small increase in both volume and dynamics but without sounding harsh or any more compressed it's a really well-rounded and balanced sounding record the 1981 pressing uses that same dash 5 cutting and not surprisingly it sounds virtually identical to the 1966 pressing with the only difference being a minute drop in volume coming more up to date this is the 2014 cutting and right away you can see that the main difference is a reduction in signal volume sean mcgee the cutting engineer for these 2014 monos makes the point in the book accompanying the mono box set that the reason they turned the volume down was because they were getting fuzzy distortion also that because of the higher quality of the vinyl and equipment we have nowadays it just isn't necessary to cut the records as loudly as they did in the 1960s mcgee also stated that the amount of bass on the mono master tape on this album was pretty huge and that when you hear the tape you can understand why the cutting notes are like they are unfortunately we don't get to see those notes but you can bet your bottom dollar that the instructions were to cut off most of the low end the 2014 is an excellent sounding record but is in comparison to the others rather bass heavy which i don't think benefits it i think they added it just because they could one issue which did affect early pressings in the 60s was pre-echo that low-level split-second preview of the sound of the track just before it properly begins it's something which exists on the dash 1 and 4 but is absent from the dash 5. so the loud cut description of the first pressing turns out to be fairly accurate after all turning now to the us mono the waveform as you can see is very tight and compressed the dynamic peaks are there but they're all squashed back making the music sound rather flat and lifeless so to sum up let's rank what i think are the worst to best for sound quality alone in last place i'd put the dash one it's cut way too hot and as a result is notorious for groove wear especially on michelle which never sounds clean on this pressing in fifth place i'm going with the us pressing where its lack of dynamic range and compression lets it down i'm putting the 2014 in fourth place maybe some of you place it higher but it's just too bottom heavy for my liking in third place it's the dash 4 cutting and in second place it's the 1981-5 both very smooth and refined sounding cuts but the top of my list is the 1966-5 cut it's such a refined sounding record unlike all of yarwood's classical work really hits the sweet spot on every level but as you know sound quality isn't everything and i was surprised how much i enjoyed the us pressing this after all is a lot of people's favorite capital album and it's really the only one which is qualified to compare with the parlor phone listening to the capital album was a relatively new experience for me i really enjoyed it and thought it worked really well although not hearing drive my car as the opener was very odd i've just seen a face and it's only love are great tracks but i don't think they're as good as if i needed someone a nowhere man but in the end you usually end up preferring the one you grew up with and that nostalgia can never be taken away i had a lot of fun with these albums and i hope that this video inspires you to check out some different pressings yourself there's a lot of them out there and prices for decent playable ones i.e not mint copies are very affordable i hope you'll also consider subscribing to the channel to see more in the meantime do check out our website pologramauctions.com or consider becoming a channel member to help me keep all of this going but that's all for this one so i'll say bye for now and thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: Parlogram Auctions

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Keywords: beatles, john lennon, paul mccartney, george harrison, ringo starr, capitol records, dave dexter, rare vinyl, vinyl, beatles collectible vinyl, audiophile, 2014 mono box set, abbey road, hazel yarwood, parlophone, emi records, emi, beatles collectibes, parlogram auctions

Id: 9Hp6ediN2Vo

Length: 21min 50sec (1310 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 01 2021