Rubber Soul - rushed? | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

Interesting that they arrived back in the UK on the 2nd September from the US tour but didnt enter into the recording studios to commence recording what became ‘Rubber Soul ‘ until the 12th October, the album completed under a month later on the 11th November.

Also they had so little to record that a recording session on the 27th October was cancelled

October 27

A recording session booked for this date was cancelled because John and Paul had not yet written sufficient new material.

George Martin: “We hope to resume next week. We are not waxing songs by other composers. We want this to be an all Lennon/McCartney album.”

(source: ‘The Beatles Diary Volume 1: The Beatles Years’)

There’s no doubt it was rushed as they also had to start recording well into the night to get tracks finished, something that wasn’t the norm at EMI. And I read somewhere recently that the stereo mix was so lousy because George M had to get it done quickly (not that they spent a heck of a lot of time on stereo mixes then anyway).

More than likely they were high.

I like this quote from George, taken from the Rubber Soul section of the ‘Anthology’ book.

Reefers are hard to avoid in The Beatles’ story. All the time, Mal and Neil would sit in Studio No. 2 behind the sound baffles while we were working, rolling them up and smoking. You can hear on one of the tapes from the sessions: a song starts and John goes, ‘Hang on, ‘ang on…’ And Paul starts filling in for him. Then John comes back: ‘Ahhhh. OK, OK.’ And by the time the engineers have rewound the tape you’re thinking, ‘I’ll just go and have another hit…’

LoveUlikeGuitars said
EDIT:

Did Paul start to take acid by this point? I’m guessing they had the acid experience by this point.

But wasn’t reefer a part of their lives since that Dylan meeting? They had it before that, but from then on they had it pretty heavily. If I recall correctly, this was going on during Help ! where they pushed the film director to his limit.

Paul first took acid on the 21st March 1967 after taking John home from a ‘Getting Better ‘ recording session. Joe’s article on the Beatles and drugs quotes Paul in ‘Many Years From Now’;

I thought, Maybe this is the moment where I should take a trip with him. It’s been coming for a long time. It’s often the best way, without thinking about it too much, just slip into it. John’s on it already, so I’ll sort of catch up. It was my first trip with John, or with any of the guys. We stayed up all night, sat around and hallucinated a lot.

Me and John, we’d known each other for a long time. Along with George and Ringo, we were best mates. And we looked into each other’s eyes, the eye contact thing we used to do, which is fairly mind-boggling. You dissolve into each other. But that’s what we did, round about that time, that’s what we did a lot. And it was amazing. You’re looking into each other’s eyes and you would want to look away, but you wouldn’t, and you could see yourself in the other person. It was a very freaky experience and I was totally blown away.

There’s something disturbing about it. You ask yourself, ‘How do you come back from it? How do you then lead a normal life after that?’ And the answer is, you don’t. After that you’ve got to get trepanned or you’ve got to meditate for the rest of your life. You’ve got to make a decision which way you’re going to go.

I would walk out into the garden – ‘Oh no, I’ve got to go back in.’ It was very tiring, walking made me very tired, wasted me, always wasted me. But ‘I’ve got to do it, for my well-being.’ In the meantime John had been sitting around very enigmatically and I had a big vision of him as a king, the absolute Emperor of Eternity. It was a good trip. It was great but I wanted to go to bed after a while.

I’d just had enough after about four or five hours. John was quite amazed that it had struck me in that way. John said, ‘Go to bed? You won’t sleep!’ ‘I know that, I’ve still got to go to bed.’ I thought, now that’s enough fun and partying, now … It’s like with drink. That’s enough. That was a lot of fun, now I gotta go and sleep this off. But of course you don’t just sleep off an acid trip so I went to bed and hallucinated a lot in bed. I remember Mal coming up and checking that I was all right. ‘Yeah, I think so.’ I mean, I could feel every inch of the house, and John seemed like some sort of emperor in control of it all. It was quite strange. Of course he was just sitting there, very inscrutably.

Tho according to Barry Miles that was Paul’s second

They knew that the studio roof had just a low parapet and were worried that John might try to fly. Paul and Mal Evans took John back to nearby Cavendish Avenue and Paul decided to keep him company on the trip – Paul’s second.