An album title used by The Beatles was “inspired by Mick Jagger” after Paul McCartney overheard a comment about The Rolling Stones‘ frontman.
The Fab Four’s Rubber Soul album was seemingly inspired by a description given of Jagger, which was overheard by McCartney. Fans asked where The Beatles had gotten the name for the album from on the r/Beatles subreddit. One fan wrote: “The meaning behind the album names Rubber Soul and Revolver.” While their post has since been deleted, users have confirmed the origins of the band name relate to a comment made about The Rolling Stones’ frontman. One user confirmed Rubber Soul was thanks to McCartney, while the origins of the Revolver name related to a literal rotation made by the records on a turntable.
A fan wrote: “Mostly already covered here, but, yeah, Paul got Rubber Soul from the quote about The Rolling Stones, and Revolver was originally going to be called Abracadabra, Pendulums, Fat Man And Bobby, After Geography (Ringo Starr’s pun on The Rolling Stones’ Aftermath), Beatles On Safari, Magic Circle and Four Sides Of The Circle.
“Magic Circle was the leading contender, as the idea of a record as a magic circle was clever, then the idea of a record revolving, being a “revolver,” was next down the line of clever thinking.”
Another fan confirmed the origins of the Rubber Soul name, writing: “Rubber Soul is a play on the term ‘Plastic Soul’, a term used to describe white musicians playing a traditionally black style of music- essentially ‘fake’ soul music. The term was applied to The Rolling Stones a lot, who drew a lot of influence from the blues and black artists.”
A third added: “Rubber Soul was from Paul hearing someone refer to The Rolling Stones as having ‘Plastic’ Soul. He thought it was nice, but changed ‘plastic’ to ‘rubber’.” It is not the first time The Beatles had opted for wildly different album names, with Abbey Road famously referred to, initially, as Everest.
McCartney, speaking on The Howard Stern Show, recalled: “You’re making an album and towards the end of the album you think ‘oh we need a title for this,’ so you’re looking around and fishing around.
“The engineer, Geoff Emerick, who was our Beatles engineer who did all the great sounds for us, was smoking cigarettes called Everest. They’re like a kind of menthol cigarette at the time and we kind of looked at that and thought ‘it’s big, it’s heroic. That could be good for the album.’
“Just one day we were in Abbey Road working, and I just sort of said, ‘Well look, why not Abbey Road? Because if we did that we could just run outside, there’s a level crossing as we call it out there, and we could just stand there. We could get photographed, come back to work, it’d take two seconds. It’s not a bad title.”
