The Motown-Inspired 'Rubber Soul' Song That Took Only Two Takes

For as much as America latched onto the Beatles, the Beatles also latched onto America. More specifically, it was the music coming out of the famed Hitsville U.S.A., headquarters for Motown from 1959 to 1968.

"We were kind of the first people to open international eyes, in a way, to Motown," Paul McCartney said to Rolling Stone in 1986. "Whenever we came to the States they'd say, 'Who's your favorite artists?' And we'd say, 'Well, they're mainly Black, and American – Motown, man. It's all there, you've got it all."

The Beatles were by no means the only British band to absorb these sounds, but they were one of the most innovative in terms of how the influence was displayed in their own songs.

'Motown-Flavoured'

McCartney was thinking of Motown expressly when he wrote "You Won't See Me," the third track on 1965's Rubber Soul, recorded in just two takes.

"This was written around two little notes," he explained for Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now, "a very slim phrase, a two-note progression that I had very high on the first two strings of the guitar: the E and the B strings. I had it high up on the high E position, and I just let the note on the B string descend a semitone at a time, and kept the top note the same, and against that I was playing a descending chromatic scale."

"To me it was very Motown-flavoured," he continued. "It's got a James Jamerson feel. He was the Motown bass player, he was fabulous, the guy who did all those great melodic bass lines. It was him, me and Brian Wilson who were doing melodic bass lines at that time, all from completely different angles, L.A., Detroit and London, all picking up on what each other did."

Listen to the Beatles' 'You Won't See Me"

Lyrically, McCartney's inspiration was decidedly more stressful. He'd been dating the hugely famous Jane Asher since 1963, a child star turned even more successful actress. Their relationship at the time, under the pressure of both people's intense careers, was strained, something the British press had no problem exacerbating. (The couple eventually broke up in 1968.)

"I became very wary of the press early on," Asher recalled in a 2024 interview with The Guardian, "and I decided to keep my private life as private as I possibly could, which was hard because my life was so publicised at that time. I probably became too wary, and reluctant to talk about anything. Back then, journalists seemed to write anything, regardless of whether it was true or not."

There was one other non-Beatle that played a role in the creation of "You Won't See Me." It was Mal Evans, the band's longtime road manager and personal assistant who somehow always got roped into lending his hands — he plays the single A note on the Hammond organ that can be heard in the later portion of the song.

Just a few weeks after Rubber Soul was released on Dec. 3, 1965, the Beatles actually attempted to further the Motown connection. Producer George Martin reportedly called from London to ask if Motown's team of writer-producers Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier and Eddie Holland would be interested in writing two songs for the Beatles to record.

Evidently, nothing came of that call.

"We were supposed to do an album along the lines of The Beatles Meet Holland-Dozier-Holland, but Berry Gordy [founder of Motown Records] refused to do it," McCartney later said in 1986. "We were going to write each other songs and perform them but we couldn't put it together because we were primarily known as writers and I don't think Berry wanted to disturb that."