McCartney: A Life in LyricsFace cream, a Bristol liquor business, and a lifelong reverence for the elderly are just a few of the rather ordinary and disparate inspirations Paul McCartney brought together in the creation of a masterpiece: “Eleanor Rigby.” In this episode, McCartney and Paul Muldoon tease out the song's lyrical inspirations and discuss the influence a Bernard Herrmann score for a Hitchcock film had on the lead single from 1966’s “Revolver."
“McCartney: A Life in Lyrics” is a co-production between iHeart Media, MPL and Pushkin Industries.
The series was produced by Pejk Malinovski and Sara McCrea; written by Sara McCrea; edited by Dan O’Donnell and Sophie Crane; mastered by Jason Gambrell with sound design by Pejk Malinovski. The series is executive produced by Leital Molad, Justin Richmond, Lee Eastman, Scott Rodger and Paul McCartney.
Thanks to Lee Eastman, Richard Ewbank, Scott Rodger, Aoife Corbett and Steve Ithell.
Pushkin. Hi, everyone, it's Paul muldoon. Before we get to this episode, I wanted to let you know that you can binge all twelve episodes of McCartney A Life and Lyrics right now, add free by becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber. Find Pushkin Plus on the McCartney A Life and Lyrics Show, pedge in Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin dot fm, slash Plus.
Oh my god, I wanted to become a person who wrote songs, and I wanted to be someone who's life was in music.
I'm Paul Muldoon. I'm a poet, a lover of not only the lyric poem, but the song lyric. Over the past several years, I've got to spend time with one of the greatest songwriters of our era.
And will you look at me?
It's happened. I'm going on too. I'm actually a performer. Oh I actually I'm a songwriter. My god, Well that that crypta homie.
That is sir Paul McCartney. We worked together on a book looking at the lyrics of more than one hundred and fifty of his songs, and we recorded many hours of our conversations. This is McCartney a life in lyrics, a masterclass, a memoir, and an improvised journey with one of the most iconic figures in popular music. Each episode is centered around the writing of a particular song, the people and the circumstances that inspired it. In this episode, eleanor Rigby. Not many people know this, but an early ambition of Paul McCartney's was to be a poet.
I feel okay about admitting to the fact that, yeah, I wanted to look a bit bookish. I wanted to smoke a pipe on the top deck of a boss.
McCartney was friendly with the poet Allen Ginsberg, who had even revised some of McCartney's poems.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical megan. I knew Ginsburg quite well, and he edited some of my poems.
And did he attempt to edit eleanor Rigby.
No, he said, that's a that's a great I was very pleased. It was like in the best review.
The subject of eleanor Rigby kept coming up in my conversations with Paul McCartney. It was like a reference point for him, a beacon. He would steer by There are many ways into this song, many things to talk about, but let's start with the central character, eleanor Rigby herself.
I wanted a character who some god all the little old ladies that I'd known, and I'm looking back on it, and I knew quite a few.
Paul McCartney's dad had brought Paul and his brother up to be rather gallant. He taught them to stand up for old ladies on buses.
And he was the type we would offer his hat good morning. So I've been kind of encouraged too. If I ever saw an old lady struggling with shopping, I would be the gallant young man.
Can I carry that for you? Oh that's a really lovely Thank you very much.
Chat chat chat, go to the house drop it off. Would you like a cup of tea?
Paul was an active Boy Scout and one of his favorite activities was Barber Job Week, a common boy Scout activity throughout England at the time. In Maidenhead, Buckingham Share, a group of enterprising cabs turn up in the town hall for their Bobby Job tat, where kids would knock on doors and offer their services for a shilling.
I'm so glad I had to do all of this, like knocking on doors. Yes, excuse me, it's Bob job week. Have you any jobs that you would like me to do? And mostly would be puzzled as to what when I'd liked what I said, Well, if you got shared out of the back and it maybe it's and he's tidying, Oh yes, that's good. Or if you've got the garden needs taking, oh yes. Have to give them the ideas. So I would, And in this way I kind of got to meet a lot of older people and I really loved it. I mean, once I got ten Bob, and I think they kind of liked me.
These relationships with elderly women are the original inspiration for eleanor Rigby.
So I imagined this lady and I gave her a scenario, and she's picking up the rice in the church.
Helen and Rigby picks up the rice in a church where a wedding has.
Been so she's cleaning up in the church, which immediately sort of puts her in a social position and gives us an idea that they might be a little bit of poignancy with this rice. And it's not for her. It was where a wedding had been And then she waits at the window and facing the jar by.
The door, waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in her job by the door. Who is it far?
My mom's favorite was Nivia, and I love it to this day.
Beautiful packaging.
Ye kind of scared me a little that women used quite so much cold cream, greasy stuff. It was my dread when I got older and got married, that I would marry someone who would say, oh, I love and would put one of these big shower capsule on the curlers and have masses of things. And I really so I played on my mind quite a bit. So she was wearing the face she keeps in the job by the door.
The name Eleanor had come partly from the actress Eleanor Brawn, a star at the time who had briefly dated John Lennon and starred in The Beatles nineteen sixty five movie Help.
I Am not what I seem.
Sure, Hey, my skin so right through to the skin. There's more here than meets the eye. See Eleanor, I think is always a thing. Because we worked with Eleanor Brom took me a long time to think of Elana Rigby.
Paul's girlfriend at the time, Jane Asher, was also an actress, and one time when she was playing at the Bristol Old Vic, Paul was wandering around outside.
I was wondering, I'm waiting for the play to finish, and saw this shot, said Rigby. That's there's my surname, right. It's nice, it's ordinary, but it's striking, it's strong, It's got all the sort of stuff I've been looking for.
This is how Paul McCartney remembers it. Others have pointed out that the Rigby name have come from somewhere different.
There is a grave up in Wilton Church with John and I wandered around endlessly talking about our future, and there is a grave there.
On the gravestone is the name eleanor Rigby, and not far from it another grave with the name McKenzie on it.
I don't remember. I we haven't seen that grave, stores not, but it's been suggested to me that, you know, psychologically, I will have seen it, and.
I think we do see things without seeing. Of course, they.
Plant themselves to plain and then I have to go to Bristol and see it and go Ah.
The other main character in the song started out as father McCartney, but it changed during a writing session with John Lennon.
I had father McCartney because it was the right syllables, and I remember playing.
In the said that's great.
Father McCartney loved it. I said, I'm really not comfortable with it because it's my dad and my father McCartney, Father McKay's me, you know, it's it's not I don't want to I don't want to be that personal with this. So we literally got the phone book out and went on from McCartney, McCartney, McCartney, McKenzie, that's.
Good, father McKenzie, and then we had.
Him working, but his work was darning his socks, because he was a sort of poor old vicar.
Darning his sucks in the night when there's nobody there.
What does he care?
All the lonely people where a lovely due The.
Father McCartney didn't make it into the lyrics of Elma Rigby, but he did play an important role in Paul's musical upbringing.
My dad had sat me down as a kid and taught me and my brother the idea of harmony. Every brother sang in harmony, so me and my brother did. I once performed at a talent competition with my brother Mike when I was eleven, and we sang Bye my Love. Didn't win, obviously not talented enough for the bottling's crowd. My dad was self taught, had learned, listened to things and could play them. You know, I said, Dad, teaching piano like you play. He said no, So he said I can't play.
Said you can't, I can hear you.
He said no, I can't play properly. You've got to go and learn soul.
Partney went out to learn from a proper piano teacher, but he didn't find that kind of music lesson to be so stimulating.
He just killed me. I couldn't do it when you go, and you'd go to I've heard better stuff than this on the radio. This is not great, but okay, I'm sure we have to start here. And then she set homework. Go home and learn what a crotchet and the quavering thing us and come back. So it was like, I've got homework from school. I don't need your homework.
When Paul McCartney was twenty one and the Beatles already gaining national popularity, he gave the piano lessons another go.
And this was Royal Guildhall School of Music Guy and he tried, but by then I'd written Alan Rugby and he had to take me back to the five finger exercise do do. I couldn't. I couldn't do the show. I just didn't want to do it.
Many of Paul's peers felt the same way about traditional musical training.
Everyone in my generation, all of us groups John George, Paul and Ringo, Nick, Charlie Peace, and I don't think any of us can read music. And now I will teach a kid how to play the piano how we learned it, and I will show them a couple of chords to get started on. And if they're musical, they're off. You get C D minor E minor F G A minor right there. That's like most of the Beatles songs. That's more than you need to.
Know, which leads us back to eleanor Rigby, a song that grew from a single chord.
In its basic sense, it's just an E minor.
Chord, and.
All the fun happens with my melody and the syncopation and the words do do do do do do do do do. It's all against the form fast.
By the who Is It Fun?
George Martin, the Beatles producer, had introduced Paul to the idea of the string quartet on the song Yesterday.
And I had resisted the idea at first, but when it worked, I fell in love with the idea. So I knew now that I wanted to do a similar thing with eleanor Rigby. So I would go round to George's house with arrange a little session. And I said to him, you know, I'm fascinated by Bach because I'd suddenly grasped that it was mathematics. I could see one two one two, and then on top of that one two three four one two three four one two now forming a sort of pyramid, and then watch the four five six seven, one to three foot five six seven and one to three foot sixteen stars. So I loved this two four eight sixteenth thing. And I brought this idea and talked to George about this, and he said, well, Bach, you know, would have done this, and he laid out the chords as he had done on yesterday. George, talking about this later, would say that he then became inspired by Bernard Hermann, who had written the Psycho music right, which is very dramatic, and he wanted to bring some of that into the arrangements.
Alfred hitch cox nineteen sixties classic about the Sinister Bates Motel had been a huge box office success.
Dirty Night, You have Vacancy, We have twelve vacancies, twelve cabins, twelve vacancies.
In the movie, Anthony Perkins character meles with his dead mother and takes revenge on his desires. Whether she's just a stranger, she's hungry, and it's writing out together. They kill Janet Lee in that famous char scene, and it's Bernard Hermann's stabbing violins that make that scene so iconic. While eleanor Rigby isn't a film, of course, McCartney says that writing the lyrics was like structuring a movie.
Well, I was seeing is like a film just in my imagination. I've got two protagonists that are lonely, she and then him. He's not sort of you don't feel so sorry for him, but he's lonely. So you've got these two. So all the lonely people now becomes the chorus where do they belong? Where do they come from?
And in the third verse, the characters are brought together.
Died in the church, so we brought her back to a rice cleaning duties. And so one day she keels over in the church and was buried along with her name. So, yeah, she dies, and then he comes back. He's the one who buries and he's wiping his hands as he walks from the great No one was saved. And that's your sort of wrap up to the story.
And of course there's some kind of strain connection between the elderly woman, and of course in Psycho it turns out to be a woman who's kind of mummified in some ways, the kind of crazy so Linco strange.
Maybe George thought that link as well. That's possibly he's thinking just purely musically. You know when.
You finished it, did you realize at that moment, you know, this is one hell of a song.
I thought this is a cracker. Yeah, you do you do when you've when you've got something that that Linda's dad used to say, he's left ball twitched.
There's a physical response.
Hell Rigby died in the church and was married alone with the name Nobody came Boto Mackenzie wiping the dad from his hands as he watched from the grave. No one was saved all Alonely do.
They all come.
All alone?
Do now be lone?
Eleanor Rigby from the Beatles nineteen sixty six album Revolver. In the next episode, we traveled behind the Iron Curtain to let ourselves in one one of the greatest jokes of the Cold War era. Back in the U s s R.
Back in the U s s R.
Ben the New Place.
McCartney A Life in Lyrics is a co production between iHeartMedia NPL and Pushkin Industries.
