Just shy of 60 years after its original release, the Beatles’ sixth album, Rubber Soul, is heading back to the top of the U.K. charts. The album marked a major turning point for the band, both musically and creatively — and even its iconic cover came about through a happy accident, according to Paul McCartney.
Rubber Soul found the Fab Four pushing the boundaries of the recording studio, while also exploring new sounds and approaches to songwriting. “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” drew on Bob Dylan’s influence, while the song’s use of sitar introduced a sound that had never been heard in rock music before.
As the new Rubber Soul reissue climbs the charts once more, McCartney has recalled how a mistake during the album’s cover shoot produced one of the Beatles’ most recognizable images.
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“Our friendship with the photographer Robert Freeman, who had lived in the same block of flats as John, meant that he was an obvious choice to take the cover photograph,” McCartney tells NME. “We did the session with Robert, and he showed us the results. The method he used in those days was to project the images he had taken on to a white piece of cardboard the shape and size of an album cover.”
The process was a long way from the digital image manipulation we take for granted today. Freeman projected the photographs onto a piece of cardboard so the band could see how they would look as an album cover. Then, while the Beatles were choosing an image, the cardboard slipped.
“While we were choosing a suitable shot, the piece of cardboard slipped backwards, giving the image an elongated shape,” McCartney remembers. “When things like this happened with the Beatles, instead of just thinking it was a mistake, we grabbed hold of the idea and said, ‘That’s perfect. If you print it with this stretched shape it will echo the title of “Rubber Soul.”’
“Robert liked the idea,” he says. “And that is what we did.”
The result was the distinctive, slightly distorted cover we know today, with the band’s elongated faces filling the frame and the Rubber Soul lettering sitting in the open space above them. It was an accident, but one that perfectly suited the album’s title.
The new reissue was first teased with a previously unheard version of “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown),” offering a glimpse at how dramatically the song evolved during the sessions at London’s EMI Studios. The finished recording would also become one of the Beatles’ most significant experiments with the sitar, helping establish the Indian instrument as a new sound in rock music.
George Harrison would go on to make the sitar a major part of his musical identity, with David Crosby taking credit for introducing Harrison to Ravi Shankar. Harrison’s fascination with the instrument would ultimately have a profound effect on his guitar playing, helping cement his reputation as a guitar legend.
Nearly six decades on, Rubber Soul remains a record full of moments when the Beatles tried something new — sometimes deliberately, and sometimes because something simply went wrong.
