The Beatles
"Rubber Soul"
(Capitol, 1965)

By STEPHANIE ZACHAREK Writing about "Rubber Soul" here is as close as I'll ever come to writing one of those trendy "when I was six my family packed up and moved out West and gosh I was such an interesting kid" memoirs. My family never moved, and our adventures were few. But my adventures, steered by the arm of a turntable through my older sisters' modest record collections, were another story. I first heard "Rubber Soul" (the American version, naturally), around the time it came out, when I was five; the Beatles were my first drug. But if they gave me a glimpse of the kind of life I couldn't wait to get to -- would somebody sing a song like "Girl" about me someday? -- they also whispered secrets to me that I couldn't yet fully comprehend, entrusting me to hang onto them until I could grasp them, beckoning and issuing a warning at the same time. Songs like "Wait" were jangly enough to hold my attention, and yet the menace of "Run for Your Life" wasn't lost on me: love was a danger as well as a pop daydream. I'll bet there are other women of my generation who remember hearing the line "I'd rather see you dead little girl than to be with another man" and thinking, "Hey, wait! I'M a little girl!" But I adore "Rubber Soul" mostly because it taught me the power of memories before I really had any, suggesting to me that someday, when I was older, I'd be able to flash forward or backward from a specific sadness and somehow take comfort. "In My Life" didn't just prepare me to deal with loss; it helped me through my first one, when my first-ever beloved cat ran away. Even when I hear the song today, his chunky, tough-guy tomcat face comes back to me like a ghost, and I think about how, even though I understand so much better now what John Lennon meant, I had a pretty decent handle on it even then. I laugh now when I hear Oasis sing, "Please don't put your life in the hands of a rock 'n' roll band." Obviously, they did, and I did too. How could I not have trusted the Beatles? Facing up to their songs meant accepting love, anger, and even death, but it also meant having your own money and being able to buy your own black turtleneck and suede jacket. You won't see Liam or Noel Gallagher, or least of all me, writing a book called "My Life in Rock." The Beatles wrote it for us way in advance, almost before our lives really began.

Download a clip (1MB) of "In My Life"
from "Rubber Soul"

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