What Goes On

Story Section status: Outdated

Recording

Equipment

Recording Timeline

• 5 March 1963 — Studio Two, 2.30–5.30pm: the attempt that did not happen — The first attempt to record the song was made at this session.¹ Two songs were scheduled and there was only time for one.¹ The song that was recorded that afternoon remains in the archive.¹ Nothing survives of this one from 1963 because nothing was committed to tape, which is why the released recording carries a 1965 take number and no earlier lineage. A booking that overran is the whole reason this is a Rubber Soul track and not an early-1963 B-side.
• 4 November 1965 — Studio Two, 11.00pm–3.30am: take 1 — An overnight booking that began at eleven and finished at half past three, with George Martin producing, Norman Smith engineering and Ken Scott second.¹ The song was revived from 1963 and handed to Ringo Starr for his statutory one vocal, with a joint composing credit.¹ The basic track was recorded in one take, with lead, rhythm and bass.¹ There is no take 2; the released record is the first and only pass at the song.
• 4 November 1965, same booking — the instrumental — The night also produced a purely instrumental number, essentially a rambling twelve-bar blues of the kind typical of these late sessions.¹ It belongs in this timeline because it establishes the character of the booking: this was not a session convened to finish an important song, it was a night of studio time being used up, and the song in hand was the one that had been waiting since 1963.
• 9 November 1965 — Abbey Road Room 65, 2.30–5.30pm: mono and stereo, both from take 1 — A three-hour afternoon in a mixing room rather than a studio, with Norman Smith engineering and Jerry Boys second, working through a batch of the album’s songs in one sitting.¹ Both mixes of this song were made that day.³ A remix log entry for the same date appears independently in the equipment literature.² The band were not in the room; Room 65 was a mixing facility, and a batch session of this kind is a production task rather than a creative one.
• 3 December 1965 — UK album release: Rubber Soul, side two, track one — Four weeks from the only take to the shops. The song opens the second side, which is a more prominent position than a drummer’s feature usually gets, and one consequence is that a great many people’s experience of side two of Rubber Soul begins with the album’s oldest and least worked-on recording.
• 21 February 1966 — US single release (Capitol 5587) — The song was first issued as a single in the United States on this date.¹ No British single ever carried it. An American release strategy built on extracting singles from albums put a one-take Ringo vocal from a three-in-the-morning session onto the back of a hit single, four months after it was recorded.

Studio Notes

• One take, and what that actually means — The basic track was got in a single take, with lead, rhythm and bass played together.¹ A take number is a count of attempts at the basic track, so take 1 means the first pass was kept — not that the record was made in one pass, since the vocals went on afterwards. The distinction matters because “recorded in one take” is often read as a claim about the finished record when it is a claim about the rhythm section’s first attempt.
• A song that waited two and a half years for a session that had room for it — The 5 March 1963 booking had two songs on it and time for one.¹ Nothing about this song’s eventual sound was determined in 1963, because nothing was taped; what the 1963 date establishes is that the material predates almost everything else on the album by two years. The gap between a song being written and a song being recorded is invisible on a finished record, and this is one of the few cases in the catalogue where the session paperwork makes it explicit.
• Eleven at night to half past three in the morning — The booking that produced the record ran overnight.¹ EMI sessions of the period were normally daytime affairs in three-hour blocks; a session running past midnight was a concession the band had won rather than a norm, and it changes what gets recorded. Songs attempted at that hour are songs that do not need a fresh ear — a settled arrangement, a simple form, a single pass.
• An instrumental jam on the same tape — The same night produced a purely instrumental number described as essentially a rambling twelve-bar blues typical of the sessions.¹ Two very different uses of studio time sit side by side in one booking: a song with a release date attached and a jam with no destination. Both are on the same night’s paperwork, which is a useful corrective to any account of these sessions as uniformly purposeful.
• Mixing in Room 65, not in a studio — Both mixes were made in Room 65, a dedicated mixing room, in a single three-hour afternoon covering several of the album’s songs.¹ Batch mixing has consequences that are audible: settings carry across songs, attention is divided, and a track late in the batch gets what is left of the afternoon. It also means no band member was present to argue for anything, which is the standard condition for the album’s 1965 stereo.
• Two mixes, one afternoon, one take — The mono and the stereo were both made on 9 November from the only take.³ A remix entry for the same date is logged independently in the equipment literature.² Where two mixes are made in one sitting from one source, differences between them are decisions taken minutes apart rather than months apart — which is why the divergences on this song are small and specific rather than structural.
• A guitar figure that is on one mix and not the other — In the closing guitar work, the two stereo mixes carry what appears to be a short additional overdub that the mono does not.³ This is the most useful A-B on the song: the difference is at the end, it is a part rather than a level, and it means the mono and the stereo are not simply two fold-outs of the same four-track balance. Something was included in one pass and left out of the other.
• Off-mike singing at the break and the ending — Starr’s off-mike vocal during the break and at the ending is easier to hear on some mixes than on others.³ Off-mike singing is leakage — a voice arriving at a microphone it was not aimed at — and how audible it is depends entirely on the balance chosen at the desk. It is the kind of detail that survives on a live-in-the-room one-take recording and is engineered out of a heavily overdubbed one.
• How the kit was captured in this period — EMI practice at this point placed a D19c overhead above the snare, angled slightly back toward the drummer to reduce guitar and bass leakage.² On a track cut live with lead, rhythm and bass in the room, that angle is doing real work: everything the overhead picks up beyond the kit is on the drum track for good, so the leakage decision is made once, at setup, and cannot be revisited at the mix.
• Why the leakage matters more here than usual — On a record built from many overdubs, spill onto the drum track can be masked. On one built from a single live pass with vocals added on top, it is a structural part of the sound.¹ The off-mike vocal audible at the break is the same phenomenon heard from the other direction — a room in which several sources were live at once, captured by microphones that could not be told to ignore one another.

Releases

One take, two 1965 mixes made in the same afternoon, and a genuine part-level difference between them at the end of the song. The mono and the stereo are worth hearing back to back for the closing bars alone.

• 1965 UK mono LP — Rubber Soul (3 December 1965, Parlophone PMC 1267, side two, track one) — Dry and close, with the vocals well forward and the kit compact. The closing guitar work is simpler here than on the stereo: the short extra figure heard at the end of the stereo is absent. This is the version the group signed off.
• 1965 UK stereo LP — Rubber Soul (3 December 1965, Parlophone PCS 3075, side two, track one) — Made the same afternoon as the mono. The spread pulls the backing vocals away from the lead and makes the off-mike singing at the break and the ending easier to pick out. The closing bars carry a short additional guitar figure that the mono does not.
• 1966 US single — Nowhere Man / What Goes On (21 February 1966, Capitol 5587, B-side) — The 1965 master through Capitol’s cutting chain, brighter and hotter as American singles of the period generally are. This is the only single issue the song has ever had; there was never a British one.
• 1966 US LP — Yesterday and Today (Capitol T 2553 mono / ST 2553 stereo) — The same 1965 mixes, relocated to the American compilation assembled from tracks Capitol had held back. The song’s American context is therefore completely different from its British one: side two, track one of a considered album in the UK, a compilation track in the US.
• 1987 CD — Rubber Soul (EMI CDP 7 46440 2) — A new stereo prepared for the CD issue and the only stereo in print for the following twenty-two years. It keeps the closing guitar figure of the 1965 stereo while pulling the image toward the centre, so it sits between the two 1965 mixes rather than beside either.
• 2009 stereo remaster — Rubber Soul (Parlophone 99457 2, 2009) — A return to the 1965 stereo, remastered rather than remixed. The wide 1965 placement comes back, and with it the clearest presentation of the off-mike vocal detail. Start here if you are comparing.
• 2009 mono — The Beatles in Mono (2009) — The 1965 mono remastered and issued on CD in its own right. Nothing is rebalanced, so the absent closing figure stays absent — which is what makes this the necessary half of the comparison rather than a redundant one.