One of the best things about The Beatles during their early days was how different they all appeared to be from one another. Elvis Presley had been dominating the musical landscape as the King of rock and roll, but the Liverpudlians now offered themselves up as four-quarters of an empirical dynasty. Fans who perhaps didn’t enjoy John Lennon’s outlandish outspokenness might find comfort in George Harrison’s quieter sensibilities.

This unique marketing action pushed by Brian Epstein can arguably be seen as perhaps the group’s first genius move. Of course, their stint as a bonafide boy band would soon turn into becoming some of the most influential musicians of all time. However, their willingness to operate as different personalities interested in separate things would hold fast.

Even as the group split, they quartet would take entirely different routes to become solo stars. Paul McCartney would extend his prolific songwriting nature to peddle out many albums in a short space of time. John Lennon would be a far more experimental creator, embracing primal therapy and using sound as an expression. George Harrison would, of course, welcome a far more spiritual outlook to his work while Ringo Starr continued on being the affable chap named Ringo. But their differences extended further into how they would speak about the band.

John Lennon had a habit of putting down his previous material in his later years. Never one to be overly nostalgic or terribly fond in his recollections, Lennon had no problems calling ‘It’s Only Love’ “abysmal” or labelling ‘Mean Mr. Mustard’ “a piece of garbage.” Even acclaimed songs like ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Let It Be’ weren’t immune to Lennon’s scorn, but he usually saved the harshest critiques for himself. That includes Rubber Soul album closer ‘Run For Your Life’.

“I never liked ‘Run For Your Life’, because it was a song I just knocked off,” Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1970. “It was inspired from – this is a very vague connection – from ‘Baby, Let’s Play House’. There was a line on it – I used to like specific lines from songs – ‘I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man’ – so I wrote it around that, but I didn’t think it was that important.” The tune was written during a very formative moment for the group.

The Beatles had an untenable working schedule at the time, so the members would often bring half-formed or derivative ideas to the band, hoping they could be ironed out or changed to fit within the band’s context. The recording of Rubber Soul was especially exhausting, and the band’s change to a folkier direction still included some holdovers from their basic rock and roll past. ‘Run For Your Life’ would be one of them.

“John was always on the run, running for his life,” McCartney would recall in the book Many Years From Now. “He was married; whereas none of my songs would have ‘catch you with another man’. It was never a concern of mine, at all, because I had a girlfriend and I would go with other girls; it was a perfectly open relationship so I wasn’t as worried about that as John was. A bit of a macho song.”

Lennon would later claim to have “always hated” the song, even going so far as to label it as his “least favourite Beatles song”. So how did it end up on Rubber Soul? Two reasons: the band were approaching their deadline and needed to meet a certain run time (that’s how Help! holdover ‘Wait’ ended up on the album as well), and George Harrison expressed an admiration of the track.

When talking to author David Sheff, the songwriter called ‘Run For Your Life’ something of a “sort of throwaway song of mine that I never thought much of, but it was always a favourite of George’s.” It’s hard to say why Harrison was apparently so fond of the track. His guitar work isn’t anything special, and although he was as much of an Elvis fan as the other Beatles’, he favoured Carl Perkins on the whole. Harrison doesn’t appear to have commented on the song during his lifetime, so we’ll just have to trust Lennon when he says it was a Harrison favourite.

However, perhaps the most interesting part of this story is that it offers us a glimpse into the band’s working relationship. It would seem that they operated as four different cogs in one well-oiled machine throughout their career. Just because one cog found a certain product distasteful, it just needed the other cogs to help move it through the machine.