When music publisher Dick James heard John Lennon’s song “No Answer” in the fall of 1964, he told the songwriter that he and the Beatles were making progress. When asked what James meant, the publisher replied that “No Answer” tells the whole story. It had a bow and ended with a resolution.
This meant that other Beatles songs were not like this, but that was not the band’s intention to produce such songs. These were sustained bursts of energy with chord changes and melodic audacious acts that continue to excite us, overlooked as they became the first catalog of the Beatles.
Lennon and Paul McCartney used copious amounts of pronouns to heighten the urgency of these songs, as if they were secrets for just one person—you—for what the whole world could hear, that was okay, and suited to what felt like loyalty.
But the Beatles didn’t tell stories in their songs. Few have done it in rock and roll. Folk had Bob Dylan, and in the rock arena, in the mid-1960s, Ray Davies of the Kinks began to sound a narrative, in which his songs followed the movements of the characters.
Still, there was nothing quite like Paul McCartney’s “Eleanor Rigby,” a short story that is also a song, a complete piece of literature that deserves fresh praise in modern times with the release of the mega-film. Revolver box set.
My earliest memories of the Beatles involved car trips with my family. Just as Bob Dylan had to pull over to the side of the road after listening to one Beatles song after another at a local station in 1964, the Beatles continued to run the dial—or at least the old station—in my childhood in the 1980s. . I loved them and the Beach Boys for one simple reason why so many people have always loved the Beatles and the Beach Boys: the melody.
It often goes no further than that. We enjoy a song that we can hum, sing, whistle. I suggest we also love a well-told story where we can hum, sing, whistle—that’s how language works. Read the end of James Joyce’s “The Dead” or one of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s best short stories, and the language carries you, just as a melody does. You are not doing the job. You are riding a wave.
I hit my head on “Can’t Buy Me Love”, “Love Me Do”, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You” which remains the most exciting piece of music or art I’ve ever experienced but “Eleanor Rigby”, and the story he told touched me so clearly that I had nightmares.
Lennon and McCartney innovated in equal measure, a fact that people have been slow to grasp. The consensus is that Lennon is the flamboyant guy and McCartney is the perfect professional. Where Lennon was radical, McCartney was a tried-and-true master.
This is out of date bullshit. I think the talents each of them possessed and the fear they felt for each other—a healthy fear, but fear nonetheless—motivated each other to do everything they could.
That’s how competition works. It’s not a comforting situation when you’re competing with someone who is great at what you both do. They may be your best friend, but you’ll be nervous and the only way to unleash that nerve is to throw yourself into the competitive task at hand.
Lennon was the storyteller of the group, and before the band, going back to his days at school, a semi-regular fake newspaper or satirical literary magazine—which was essentially it—was his own making. Daily Howl.
But while not as flamboyant as the Beatles advances we normally talk about—”Tomorrow Never Knows”, “A Day in the Life”—nothing in the band’s output was as new, explosive, progressive as McCartney’s. The 1966 story song “Eleanor Rigby” and it’s all about her literary quality.
My first memory, or first feeling about myself, was that I was going to write. I knew. I knew before I knew I was a man or that my family loved me. It was knowledge that I seemed to have entered this world with, but it went beyond the traditional bedtime stories and books. He had a lot to do with music, and during the formative years I turned to music more than anything else.
Not like other Beatles songs
When we read, we hear a story as much as anything—if the author is any good. We see the narrative in our heads, too. Reading has little to do with the page. It’s just the messenger and the messenger almost dissolve in our hands, because we are moving. The best writing never makes you feel like you’re reading it.
“Eleanor Rigby” brought this point to me even though I had nightmares. I did not experience the song as music. Or if I did, non-musical, post-musical, in the best of stories.
From the first moment I knew this was not like other Beatles songs. “Eleanor Rigby” was unlike any song I’d ever heard. Beatles songs were focused on me, on you, on us, but not on “Eleanor Rigby.” There are no personal, “compromise and connect” style pronouns. All third person.
The first line of “Oh look at all the lonely people”—originally suggested by George Harrison and happily snatched by an accepting McCartney—starts us in the media res, and that “ah” adds a literary solemnity. .
You’ve seen it in poems and in Shakespeare’s plays. The line immediately establishes us as the audience, the people who have gathered beforehand to witness. We feel like we’re part of this song – this story – as if we have a job to do, as consultants are brought in to oversee and review, which is a lot like reading.
We then see the first of our two main characters cleaning up after a wedding in Eleanor Rigby, so we know it doesn’t belong to her. The description is concise but so well written that we also know that no one else took part in this scene. He’s the only cleaner-top.
“How many of us are doing a version of what Eleanor and Father McKenzie did? Press the refresh button. Lie about the glory of our last weekend. ”
Do you see how this detail describes it? Why isn’t anyone else helping? Did someone ask him to do this? Why just him? It’s unlikely, and more likely he took on the sad task because that’s what he does. And he saw everything he could bear to see about the happiness of others. We know so much about this character – this person – with almost no words. That’s how superscript works.
It was then said that he lived in an alternate reality, a dream, as many people in our world now do. People do not respond to the truth; they run away from it and try to plant something else in its place, looking for others to provide the process. This is Twitter, right? Internet identities. He is looking out the window, that is, passive, a spectator of lives that do not belong to him. Next, we get the first line of mind-blowing psychedelia in all rock, but rock never sounded like that: “Wearing the face that he hid in a jar by the door.”
This little one got Colin. “What’s going on man?” I thought. I was scared. I understood that the metaphor was at work, but you also had some kind of elbows at your sides, which made me think that he was wearing and taking off as he had a lot of faces. We all do. On my way home in the fading autumn sun one Sunday afternoon, I remember staring intently at my parents in the front seat, as if their faces were about to slip into unfamiliar faces. And shooter? The narrator asks who the face is for. It’s clearly for Eleanor herself but it doesn’t even fit the person she belongs to. Thus, we are told that there is someone here who is not of the world – it has been pointed out, and what could be more terrifying than that?
The second line introduces Father McKenzie and we are again in the middle of a character’s activities. He’s patching his socks, and our first impression is that it’s the highlight of his social calendar. This is what he does when his job is done. This is what to look forward to.
When she is not fulfilling a duty of her profession, she is lonely like Eleanor. They’re settled into versions of the same activity – and solitude certainly feels like a terrible chore and hard work – but separate from each other.
We think it’s a relief for the pastor to hop on his bike and head to Eleanor’s for tea and some harmless gossip about the locals—because it felt like we were in an Edwardian rural parish. and the condition of Mr. Browning’s favorite pig, who fell ill. But we anticipate that will not happen.
George Martin used a pair of spring quads with a staccato thrust and urgency, the ever-so-light, stiff kind we don’t normally get with string quads. It looks like a more tuned version of Bernard Hermann. psychopath Goal. I barely notice this support because I’m locked into the narrative, just like when I’m reading a book that you can’t famously put down. The car alarm goes off outside, but that car alarm is dead for you, so to speak. There’s no vibration on the radar that would disrupt your intent, your focus, on the need to know what happened to these people.
That’s what writing means: to make people need to know. Repeatedly. The priest writes down the sermons that he will not give in order to have an activity to do. Again, I believe this is Edwardian – although we haven’t been told, and we don’t need to be told – but how recognizable is this behavior now? How many of us are doing a version of what Eleanor and Father McKenzie did? Press the refresh button. Lie about the glory of our last weekend. Claiming our best lives and living each day like it’s your last, which is one of the worst advice ever given, when you think about it.
Eleanor Rigby is living the last day of her life in the last line of the song. You don’t know it’s coming, but she feels the same when she does. Death follows. This was a song about death in life, and official death seems like a banal box that has been checked out like any other. Box control for the sake of box control.
Two people who were supposed to meet and help each other are now “meeting”, but that’s probably because they said the words at Father McKenzie’s funeral. We don’t need to know the details.
We’re totally invested in a good story, and a little mystery goes a long way because it gives us a role and a say and fills in some stuff. This is another feature of the best writing; Become a writer as you read your story. No one showed up at the funeral, and Father McKenzie is cleaning up the dirt from Eleanor’s grave at a later date—or so it seems to me. Will return there for visits. To show respect. But who is he visiting? To whom does he show this respect? HE? HE? People living like this? We? We were told that no one was saved, which also means save yourself, the same advice Jacob Marley gave to Ebenezer Scrooge.
John Lennon claimed that he wrote most of this unlikely song, and it runs counter to the memories of those who were there, or as close as possible to being there. In their post-Beatles interviews, Lennon and McCartney rarely differed in their statements about who wrote what. Just this song and Lennon’s “In My Life”.
I think Lennon understood what “Eleanor Rigby” was and his insecurity – for a while – overpowered him. It was the figure of Dick James who had experienced a song that was now a short story. Or a short story with a song. They are the same when neither can be cured. This one talks about the success Paul McCartney had with “Eleanor Rigby”, even the lives he had.