The 'Rubber Soul' Song Inspired by Little Richard

At 9 p.m. on the evening of Nov. 10, 1965, the Beatles began a session at EMI in London. Finally, at 4 a.m. the following morning, they emerged with "The Word," which eventually appeared on 1965's Rubber Soul.

It was one of the first instances of the Fab Four writing about love as a concept, instead of a more specific scenario involving people.

"It sort of dawned on me that love was the answer, when I was younger, on the Rubber Soul album," John Lennon, the song's primary writer, said for Anthology. "My first expression of it was a song called 'The Word.' The word is 'love,' in the good and the bad books that I have read, whatever, wherever, the word is 'love.' It seems like the underlying theme to the universe."

Of course, there were other things that were floating around Lennon's head around this time.

"You read the words, it's all about – gettin' smart," he said to David Sheff in 1980. "It's the marijuana period. It's love, it's the love-and-peace thing."

Listen to the Beatles' 'The Word'

Apart from love itself, the driving inspiration behind "The Word," at least from a strictly musical perspective, was one of Lennon's heros: Little Richard. Listen to "The Word," in which Lennon and Paul McCartney sing a dual lead vocal that stays mostly in the same place, and you'll understand. It was something they'd been wanting to do.

"John and I would like to do songs with just one note like 'Long Tall Sally,'" McCartney said back in 1969 for a book called The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics. "We get near it in 'The Word.'"

Lennon had first been introduced to Little Richard, and more specifically "Long Tall Sally," as a kid.

"This boy at school had been to Holland. He said he'd got this record at home by somebody called Little Richard, who was better than Elvis," he told the journalist Maureen Cleeve. "Elvis was bigger than religion in my life. We used to go to this boy's house after school and listen to Elvis on 78s. We'd buy five senior service loose in the shop and some chips and go along. The new record was 'Long Tall Sally.' When I heard it, it was so great. I couldn't speak."

READ MORE: Top 10 Little Richard Songs

Not terribly long after that, Lennon and his bandmates were afforded the opportunity to work alongside Little Richard.

"In the early days of the Beatles we played with Richard in Hamburg and got to know him," McCartney said in 2020, just after Richard's death at age 87. "He would let us hang out in his dressing room and we were witness to his pre-show rituals, with his head under a towel over a bowl of steaming hot water he would suddenly lift his head up to the mirror and say, 'I can't help it cos I'm so beautiful". And he was."

McCartney too had heard Richard at a young age and instantly fallen under his spell: "I owe a lot of what I do to Little Richard and his style; and he knew it. He would say, 'I taught Paul everything he knows.' I had to admit he was right."