I have mentioned on this blog that of all the Beatles' albums, my personal favorite is "Rubber Soul." And while I do love every single album the Beatles put out, there is just something special about the songs on "Rubber Soul" that I enjoy. So when I found out through the "Beatles-Book Club" on Facebook that the March book was going to be This Bird Has Flown: The Enduring Beauty of Rubber Soul, Fifty Years On by John Kruth, I was pretty excited to read it. My 2nd favorite Beatles album is "Revolver," and I read Rob Rodriquez's book; I found it to be enjoyable and educational, and I hoped to have a similar experience with this book.
The first thing I should say is that it took me a full month to read this book. Anyone who knows me, will know right off the bat that there is a problem. I am a very fast reader and I typically read a book in 4 days, especially if I really like it.
This book on Rubber Soul examines each song on both the U.S. and the U.K. versions of the album. Each chapter is about each individual song, and it gives the background of the song and how it was written, how it was recorded, and some information about cover versions of the song. However, it took a while for the book to dig into those songs. The background information went way into Bob Dylan, and I read more about Dylan than I ever cared to read. It was interesting to read about how the name "Rubber Soul" came about and the famous story of how they got the photo taken and the card moved back and elongated their faces, and they wanted it like that.
But by the time we got to the "meat" of the book, I was bored. But I pushed through and kept reading. I liked reading about the history of the use of the sitar and how it was used on Norwegian Wood. The whole chapter on that song was my favorite in the book.
But the rest of the book seemed to wander all over the place. For example--in the chapter about "Nowhere Man" the author wrote a long thing about John Lennon's father (I guess he was suggesting that Alf was the Nowhere Man?) and then went into how in the 1970s John got kicked out of a bar when he had a tampon strapped to his forehead during a Smother's Brothers performance (wow----that was totally incorrect and what did that have to do with Nowhere Man?)
After a while, I felt like the author, while doing his research on Rubber Soul, was finding all sorts of neat Beatles tidbits and decided to throw them into the book, even though they didn't directly relate to Rubber Soul. I am really not sure why he had a whole section devoted to the Butcher Album.
But what really bothered me, I guess, was that it became obvious that the author disliked George Harrison. He even retold Geoff Emmrick's story about how Paul used to come back and re-record George's guitar parts on certain songs. Now, that story isn't one that anyone but Mr. Emmrick believes, and I just really did not like it being retold in this book.
This Bird Has Flown wasn't a terrible book, but it wasn't the great book that I was really hoping it would be. You can order it and decide for yourself from Amazon.
The link below is the affiliate link to Amazon, where you can purchase this book. I get a small percentage of anything purchased through this link. Money made from the Amazon Afflication is used to pay the annual fee to keep this site online. Thank you for your support. Sara
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