So writes Marc Myers in The Wall Street Journal, and I don't know how old, if anything, Marc Myers was in late 1965, but I was 14, and I'd already lived through a summer of Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" and "Rubber Soul" didn't feel like a surprising, abrupt end to pop songs cheerleading for love. It felt like The Beatles — who'd been looking more and more passé — making a grab to catch up to what had been going on in America.
The 12-song album issued in the U.S. was markedly different from the British version, which featured 14 songs... [T]he U.S. version dropped two songs and replaced two others.... The invisible hand behind the U.S. release belonged to Dave Dexter Jr., the head of Capitol’s international A&R in Los Angeles. Dexter and his team set out to keep the compelling folk narrative running throughout the album.Ah, halfway through his piece, I see that Myers gets around to my point:
But by late 1965 the Beatles had a problem. Bob Dylan’s album “Highway 61 Revisited” and the single “Like a Rolling Stone,” with its socially conscious folk-rock theme, was resonating with draft-age listeners in the States. To remain relevant, the Beatles needed a more mature, acoustic album....I don't remember The Beatles "unsettling" us at this point. They seemed to be trying to fit in with us, while still selling their word "love." The song "The Word" says exactly that, and the incredibly up-beat first song, “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” sets a rosy tone. The song we teenagers fixated on was the last song on the first side, "Michelle," the one were Paul charmingly sang in French. Yes, there was also John, interfering with the overall niceness, but it took a long time to suspect that he was burning the woman's house down in "Norwegian Wood" and threatening murder in "Run for Your Life."
[Dexter] replaced the raucous “Drive My Car” and cornball “What Goes On,” which opened sides 1 and 2, respectively, on the U.K. version. In those critical lead-in slots, he inserted “I’ve Just Seen a Face” and “It’s Only Love”.... Next, he dropped the alienating “Nowhere Man” and mystical “If I Needed Someone”....
What undercut the old Beatles image was not the idea of thinking for yourself, that women are "hypnotic," or that anyone was getting high or actually having sexual intercourse. It was that one of The Beatles outright bragged about taking criminal revenge against a woman who rejected him.
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Not sure I buy mccartney's interpretation of norwegian wood. Lennon wrote it, or most of it. The "burn down the house" interpretation was mccartney's, not lennon's. Mccartney was always striving to seem edgier than he was. Not lennon's style. The simpler interpretation is that he lit a fire in the fireplace after she had gone off to work in the morning. I.e. he was settling in, making himself comfortable in her house while she was away. Fits much better with the rest of the song which is lighthearted.
I didn't become a teen until 1970, when I was buying "old" Beatle albums from the bargain bins. And I got a copy of Yesterday and Today, which had songs from Rubber Soul, Revolver, and singles (like Yesterday) that were not on either album. Looking back, it's a much "poppier," upbeat album than either Rubber Soul or Revolver. I can't find year-by-year sales figures for the Beatle albums, but I wonder what was really popular at the time. (It's only around this time that albums had anything like the popularity of singles - especially with the youth market.) Probably yet another case of rock critic revisionist history that has little to do with how most people actually experienced the music at the time.
"Not sure I buy mccartney's interpretation of norwegian wood. Lennon wrote it, or most of it. The "burn down the house" interpretation was mccartney's, not lennon's."
I hadn't noticed that McCartney said that until just this morning. I arrived at the interpretation simply from hearing the lyrics. I don't see how, once you see that meaning in the words, you can convince yourself that the lyricism didn't mean it. It's a punchline. Don't deprive John of credit for his joke just because Paul stepped on it by explaining it.
And when I say "I arrived at the interpretation simply from hearing the lyrics," I mean 50 years ago, as a teenager.
From the Wikipedia article for Dylan's "4th Time Around" (recorded a few months after the release of "Rubber Soul"):
""4th Time Around" was commonly speculated to be a response to The Beatles' song "Norwegian Wood" - written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney for the 1965 album Rubber Soul - as the two tracks share a reasonably similar melody, lyrical premise, and 3/4 time signature. "Norwegian Wood" was one of the first Beatles tracks where the lyrics are more important than the melody and showed an obvious Dylan-influence. "4th Time Around" has been seen as either a playful homage, or a satirical warning to Lennon about co-opting Dylan's well-known songwriting devices. Lennon expressed a range of opinions on this topic in interviews between 1970 and 1980. He initially felt it to be a somewhat pointed parody of "Norwegian Wood", but later he considered Dylan's effort to be more a playful homage. Still, the last line of "4th Time Around" ("I never asked for your crutch / Now don't ask for mine.") played into Lennon's apparent paranoia about Dylan in 1966-67, when he interpreted this line as a warning not to use Dylan's songs as a "crutch" for Lennon's songwriting."
I think I've blogged about that song before, probably because of the part about gum:
"Her Jamaican rum
And when she did come, I asked her for some
She said, “No, dear”
I said, “Your words aren’t clear
You’d better spit out your gum”"
Ah, yeah, here:
"'What if the gum had been given to a student with a heart condition?' Says the principal, justifying suspending the student who shared Jolt gum -- caffeinated gum -- with a fellow student. Hey, wait... on that theory you can't share a Coke! But they do turn off the soda vending maching during class hours. So doesn't that vindicate the principles of the principal? Yes, kids, you'll have to suffer through the long hours of classes caffeine-free -- unless you bring your own supply of Jolt gum. Then, after class, step right up to our machines, slip in your coins, and partake of the semi-forbidden substance.... As I write this, the song playing in the café is -- I'm not kidding -- Bob Dylan's "4th Time Around," with the lines about gum...
Ah, the 60s: the most overrated decade of the 20th century.
I remember the album release well being 15 at the time. 'Baby You Can Drive My Car' was obviously the best track on the album then and it still is today.
Just my $.02
I heard this album, collected, corralled and begged contributions to buy my first guitar in 1965. The first song I ever learned to play was the lovely minimalist baroque piece "For No One", obviously a McCartney composition. Then I learned the entire album. That was fifty years ago now. Just opened a high school Shakespearean Theater class with a piece by John Dowland. I think I'll close it with the second song I ever learned "Norwegian Wood".
I thought Norwegian Wood was about a boner.
I suppose we're doomed to never hear the last word about The Beatles.
Always found it amusing that the first Lennon song is about his infidelity and his last song his threatening his girl for even looking at another man.
Didn't Lennon confirm that he burns down the house in the "Lennon Remembers" interviews from 1971?
Before this album I had no interest in the Beatles.This was the first Beatles album that I owned and purchased it went it was released.
I think John said in the Playboy interviews the whole burning down the house thing was Paul's. Of course, he wasn't beyond playing fast and loose with the facts.
I, like Bob R, got into The Beatles after the fact, and started with the red vinyl compilation. When I went back and collected the original albums I always thought Rubber Soul marked their transition into the great artists they became. Most of my friends who disagree pick Revolver.
I've always been partial to the "So I lit a fire" = "I fired up a doobie" theory, although Quaestor's boner theory is also excellent.
Vaguely Dylanesque lyrics:
Don't cut out my paper heart, I ain't dyin' anyway
Take a look at eye full towers
Never trust them dirty liars
Sippin' lemon yellow booze 'ole' leadbelly sings the blues
All dressed up on wedding day keep on trippin' anyway
RIP Scott Weiland.
I am Laslo.
I've always understood 'Norwegian Wood' to be a reference to marijuana.
Guy's hanging out with a chick. They get high, have sex.
She goes off to work. He lights up another joint and relaxes.
The Beatles were known to obfuscate drug references in their songs.
Plausible deniability.
Fifty years out, the release of a particular album seems a huge event, but, did it really seem all that huge at the time?
Yes, the Beatles were huge in 1965, but, isn't popular culture mostly just background in most people's lives? How momentous an event was it at the time, viewed in a non-anachronistic way?
I was 19 and at a post-wedding party in Philadelphia the first time I listened to Rubber Soul. What it said to me was that maybe there really was something to these four lads from Liverpool and it was the point at which I started paying them real attention. I thought it was a great album. Still do. Don't recall experiencing any particular angst, nor any particular enlightenment, over it, though.
People who report on the "arts" frequently are full of themselves.
I googled the author - turns out he was all of eight-years-old when Rubber Soul got released. So, safe to say he's not writing about his own experience of enlightenment or angst due to the release of the album. There probably wasn't even much hoopla at the time (I wasn't around for it myself), not in the way that Sgt. Pepper got celebrated as an event upon its release. It took quite a few years before Rubber Soul got recognized as something great.
...but I was 14, and I'd already lived through a summer of Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" and "Rubber Soul" didn't feel like a surprising, abrupt end to pop songs cheerleading for love. It felt like The Beatles — who'd been looking more and more passé — making a grab to catch up to what had been going on in America.
You see... even at age 14, Althouse was the most self-aware, coolest, and hippest chick in the room - or so she tells us.
Ya sure, Prof... 14 year old girls only think that deeply in their memory when they're 60+ and need grist for their blog.
Norwegian wood was not about burning down the house. MAYBE, the Talking HEads burning down the house was about burning down a house. And I was assuming it was a metaphor about partying.
But Norweigwn wood, no way. Even if paul said it, it's not true. He was known to dabble in pot smoking. I think he had just smoked a doozie and wrote C Moon, or uncle Alberts farm, or some other McCartney curio, and someone asked him about it and he riffed the way someone high might do.
Also, did Dylan really do that line about gum? That has to be one of the clunkier the lines I've ever heard. That's probcbly why the byrds never did a version of that song. McGuinn was like. "Tambourine men, that's cool. Spitting out gum, what the fuck? We're not doing that crap. What's that song about the mining disaster with the bells? We'll do that one."
My neighbor friend had to have a baby-sitter because his mother worked. Actually it was his little brother that made it necessary, as we spent little time indoors.
Anyway, the sitter liked Gary Lewis and The Playboys, and played all their stuff on the big stereo console record player they had. I was always impressed by the sound of that console. We just had a cheap one, and it was so mom could listen to her French 78 RPM record collection.
Anyway, whenever I hear the Playboys on the radio, I get nostalgic.
I had no knowledge of Dylan, and if you asked me to name one of his songs, it would be like asking me to name a song by Taylor Swift. Beatles were strictly AM radio fare. AM radio sucked...
My older sister gave me that album for Christmas that year, and I wore the grooves off it.
Been a Beatles fan for 40 years, never heard that interpretation of Norwegian Wood before today. Skeptical.
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