Eleanor Rigby

From BeatlesWiki

Jump to: navigation, search

Eleanor Rigby is a song off The Beatles' 1966 album Revolver. It was written by Paul McCartney, with help from the other three Beatles and Pete Shotton. It was credited to Lennon/McCartney, as usual.

Contents

[edit] Writing

Eleanor Rigby was originally released as a single with Yellow Submarine. John Lennon commented in 1966, "I don't like supposing that somebody like Jesus was alive now and pretending and imagining what he'd do. But if he was Jesus and he held that he was the real Jesus that had the same views as before - well, Eleanor Rigby wouldn't mean that much to him." Paul McCartney wrote the song in the music room of then-girlfriend Jane Asher's house on Wimpole Street in London. McCartney recalled, "I wrote it at the piano, just vamping an E minor chord; letting that stay as a vamp and putting a melody over it, just danced over the top of it. It has almost Asian Indian rhythms." Like Yesterday, the melody of the song was written long before the lyrics. Because of this, McCartney would improvise words and sounds to fill in lines. Donovan recalls him being played an early version at his flat in London's Maida Vaile. Donovan recalls, "One day I was on my own in the pad running through a few tunes on my Uher tape recorder. The doorbell rang. It was Paul on his own. We jammed a bit. He played me a tune about a strange chap called 'Ola Na Tungee'. 'Ola Na Tungee/Blowing his mind in the dark/With a pipe full of clay/No one can say.'" The lyrics were eventually written at Wimpole Street, where Paul first thought of the idea of a wedding in a church. McCartney recalls, "While I was fiddling on a chord some words came out: 'Dazzie-de-da-zu picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been...' This idea of someone picking up rice after a wedding took it in that poignant direction, into a 'lonely people' direction." For much of the song's composition, McCartney was considering using the name Miss Daisy Hawkins, though he dropped the idea because he did not find it realistic. He got the name Rigby from a shop in Bristol; Rigby & Evens Ltd, Wine & Spirit Shippers. He was going to visit Jane Asher, who was appearing in 'The Happiest Days Of Your Life' at the Old Vic Theatre. He got the name Eleanor from Eleanor Bron, an actress who played the female lead in Help!. McCartney recalled, "I thought, I swear, that I made up the name Eleanor Rigby like that. I remember quite distinctly having the name Eleanor, looking around for a believable surname and then wandering around the docklands in Bristol and seeing the shop there. But it seems that up in Woolton Cemetery, where I used to hang out a lot with John, there's a gravestone to an Eleanor Rigby. Apparently, a few yards to the right there's someone called McKenzie." The Woolton Cemetary is part of St. Peter's Church, where John Lennon first met Paul McCartney on July 6, 1957. After the first verse of the song was completed, McCartney brought the song to Kenwood, John Lennon's home in Weybridge. There, he and the other Beatles, as well as Lennon's school friend Pete Shotton, helped work on the song. Ringo Starr suggested that Father McKenzie should be "darning his socks in the night when there's nobody there." The "Ah, look at all the lonely people" refrain was supposedly George Harrison's idea. The idea that Eleanor Rigby and Father McKenzie don't meet until Rigby is dead was Pete Shotton's idea and was later written by McCartney. The Beatles, however, didn't yet know what to name the character later to become Father McKenzie. McCartney recalls, "I had Father McCartney as the priest just because I knew that was right for the syllables, but I knew I didn't want it even though John liked it so we opened the telephone book, went to McCartney and look what followed it, and shortly after, it was McKenzie. I thought, Oh, that's good. It wasn't written about anyone. A man appeared, who died a few years ago, who said, 'I'm Father McKenzie.' Anyone who was called Father McKenzie and had any slim contact with The Beatles quite naturally would think, Well, I spoke to Paul and he might easily have written that about me; or he may have spoken to John and thought John thought it up. John wanted to stay McCartney, but I said, 'No, it's my dad! Father McCartney.' He said, 'It's good, it works fine.' I agreed it worked, but I didn't want to sing that, it was too loaded, it asked too many questions. I wanted it to be anonymous. John helped me on a few words but I'd put it down 80-20 to me, something like that." John claimed that he wrote "about seventy per cent" of the song, though both Paul McCartney and Pete Shotton recall that Lennon wrote very little of the song, with Shotton claiming that Lennon's contibution was "virtually nil". Lennon remembered, "Ah, the first verse was his and the rest are basically mine. But the way he did it... Well, he knew he had a song. But by that time he didn't want to ask for my help, and we were sitting around with Mal Evans and Neil Aspinall, so he said to us, 'Hey, you guys, finish up the lyrics.' Now I was there with Mal, a telephone installer who was our road manager, and Neil, who was a student accountant, and I was insulted and hurt that Paul had just thrown it out in the aid. He actually meant he wanted me to do it, and of course there isn't a line of theirs in the song because I finally went off to a room with Paul and we finished the song. But that's how... that's the kind of insensitivity he would have, which upset me in later years. That's the kind of person he is. 'Here, finish these lyrics up,' like to anybody who was around. Oh, he had the whole start: 'Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been.' And he had the story and knew where it was going. So we had to work out, 'Well, is there anybody else in this story?' We came up with Father McCartney for a bit, but Paul said his dad would be upset, so we made it into McKenzie, even though McCartney sounded better. And then we went on to new characters... It's hard to describe, even with the clarity of memory, the moment the apple falls. The thing will start moving along at a speed of its own, then you wake up at the end of it and have this whole thing on paper, you know? Who said what to whom as we were writing, I don't know. I do know that George Harrison was there when we came up with 'Ah, look at all the lonely people.' He and George were settling on that as I left the studio to go to the toilet, and I heard the lyric and turned around and said, 'That's it!'"

[edit] Recording

The earliest recorded version was a demo version. In his 1997 biograpghy, Many Years From Now, McCartney recalls that he used a studio in Montagu Square in London to "demo things. I'd just written 'Eleanor Rigby' and so I went down there in the basement on my days off on my own. Just took a guitar down and used it as a demo studio." A short snippet of McCartney playing acoustic guitar might be a segment of this demo from this period. McCartney later claimed that Marianne Faithfull showed an interest in recording this song after she and Mick Jagger were played the demo. In Many Years From Now, McCartney recalls, "I remember thinking to myself, What am I going to do when I'm thirty? Thirty was the big age. Will I still be in a group? I remember being round at John Dunbar's house, having a very clear vision of myself in a herringbone jacket with leather elbow patches and a pipe, thinking Eleanor Rigby, this could be a way I could go, I could become a more serious writer, not so much a pop writer." Studio recording started on April 28, 1966. The string section, scored by George Martin, was inspired by music written by Bernard Herrmann for the Truffaut film Farenheit 451. The Beatles did not play any instruments on the record. After a close-miked string octet was recorded in fourteen takes, Paul McCartney recorded his vocals. John Lennon recalled in 1980, "The violins backing was Paul's idea. Jane Asher had turned him on to Vivaldi, and it was very good, the violins, straight out of Vivaldi. I can't take any credit for that, a-tall." On April 29, McCartney added more vocals, and McCartney, Lennon, and Harrison added harmonies. The string parts without any vocal overdubs were included on the 1996 compilation Anthology 2.

[edit] LOVE Mix

A mix of this song was included on the 2006 Beatles remix album. The lead vocals, unlike the lead vocals on the vocals on the original Revolver mix, are centered, rather than being on only one channel. The song has an intro taken from the instrumental version of the song previously released on Anthology 2. Towards the end of the mix, it transitions into Lennon's guitar parts from Julia. Also, the swarmandel part from Strawberry Fields Forever appears in this Julia outtro, as well as string part from I Am The Walrus, which then transitions into I Am The Walrus.

[edit] The real Eleanor Rigby

Eleanor Riby was born in 1895 and married a man named Thomas Woods. She died on October 10, 1939 at age 44. She was buried with her grandfather John Rigby, his wife Frances and their daughter Doris. Her tombstone has become a landmark for Beatles fans who visit Liverpool. In 2008, a document with the signature of E. Rigby, then a 16-year-old scullery maid at Liverpool's City Hospital, was auctioned off to raise money for Sunbeams Music Trust. The document was given to charity by Paul McCartney in 1990.

[edit] Recording Sessions

[edit] Personnel

[edit] The Beatles

[edit] Guest Musicians

[edit] Production

[edit] Available Versions

[edit] The Beatles

[edit] Paul McCartney

  • To Be Completed...

[edit] Known Unavailable Versions

All versions below are unavailable on any release, official or bootleg, unless marked otherwise.

A (%) indicates an overdub, edit piece, or basic track available only as part of another recording. The overdub, edit piece, or basic track by itself has not been released.

[edit] Available On

[edit] Cover Versions

[edit] Sources

Retrieved from "http://www.beatleswiki.org/wiki/Eleanor_Rigby"
Personal tools