“We live as we dream, alone”Yet another double A side from The Beatles and a 'taster' for the then forthcoming 'Revolver' album (and it only seems like yesterday I was talking about 'Rubber Soul'). This time, both songs would appear on that album, though in a perverse twist they'd turn out to be the two least representative examples of the music on that album.
Which isn't to say that that was the sole reason for the pairing - it's passed into common knowledge that we won't be meeting the 'Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane' twofer on this road, but if we did then I'd be pointing out that the disparate mix of experimental psychedelia ('Strawberry Fields Forever') and almost vaudeville nostalgia ('Penny Lane') were united by a chord of childhood memory that ran through the hole at the centre of the single to join the both sides. There's a symmetry there that belied the actual sounds in those grooves. Similarly, both 'Eleanor Rigby' and 'Yellow Submarine' compliment the other with one a song of friendship and camaraderie while the other is a sorry tale of loneliness and social alienation.
Unique at the time in The Beatles' canon, 'Eleanor Rigby' does not actually have any of the band playing on it; the spare string backing is provided by an octet of studio musicians and arranged by McCartney. George Martin scored it and in the sharp and brusque sweeps of violin I can hear more than a shade of Bernard Hermann's score for 'Psycho'; there's horror in 'Eleanor Rigby' too, but it doesn't come from a knife. Combined with her very name, its busy despair provides a vivid pen portrait of how Eleanor must have been in life - a key element of John Major's picture postcard vision Britain as a "land where warm beer is served to the distant echo of leather on willow and the tring-a-ling of bicycle bells rung by spinsters on their way to Holy Communion", an idealised, stereotypical image that McCartney flips to give a taste of the reality beneath.
A hymn to the 'lonely people', McCartney précis the Rigby's life in a series of beautifully underwritten images drawn with the black ink precision of a draughtsman's pen. To my mind, it shares bloodline with Ralph McTell's 'Streets Of London', but whilst McTell was showing the loneliness beneath the surface to provoke a reaction from the listener ("So how can you tell me you're lonely?"), McCartney's lyric is far more observational. Like the ghosts leading Scrooge through his present and future, McCartney offers up a series of interlinked scenes involving two characters for us to examine, but provides no comment on what he reveals. "Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been"- there are a lot of gaps there; why is Eleanor picking up the rice? To tidy the church before Communion? Or is it a symbolic of her longing for a possible life she never had? McCartney doesn't say, but he doesn't need to. We know.
Then there's Father McKenzie, alone with his God "writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear. No one comes near". Did he know Eleanor I wonder? Did he notice her at church at any time before she actually died there? And being the only mourner at her funeral - was he there as friend or because of his duty? McCartney doesn't say, but it leaves a nagging feeling of something wasted, of two with the potential to have found happiness had they been aware of the need in each other. But it's too late now, and McCartney presents a devastating 'well that's that' summation at the closing "Father McKenzie, wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave. No one was saved" that's heartbreaking. Their God has failed them both. The horror, the horror.
What would Eleanor have given to join the party on the flip side I wonder? A world away from the spare chamber piece of 'Eleanor Rigby', 'Yellow Submarine' is a smorgasbord of sound and colour that paints an arms linked portrait of friendship and togetherness as told by a man who left Eleanor's lonely town behind for a life on sea. Or under it. Bill Hicks did a memorable skit on how The Beatles were so strung out on drugs in 1966 that they not only wrote a sing about a yellow submarine, they even let Ringo sing it.* I've no doubt Bill's tongue was in his cheek, but even if it wasn't I'd suggest there's a far greater clarity and purpose behind this than an acid fuelled daydream.
Because what interests me most about 'Yellow Submarine' is the effort that went in to it; foe something that is essentially a children's sing song, this is nevertheless The Beatles with the lid off, pulling rabbit after rabbit out of the hat in a Heath Robinson style that Wikipedia sums up very well:
"On the second session the studio store cupboard was ransacked for special effects, which included chains, a ship's bell, tap dancing mats, whistles, hooters, waves, a tin bath filled with water, wind and thunderstorm machines, as well as a cash register,which was later used on Pink Floyd's song "Money". Lennon blew through a straw into a pan of water to create a bubbling effect, McCartney and Lennon talked through tin cans to create the sound of the captain's orders, at 1:38-40 in the song, Ringo stepped outside the doors of the recording room and yelled like a sailor acknowledging "Cut the cable! Drop the cable!", which was looped into the song afterwards, and Abbey Road employees John Skinner and Terry Condon twirled chains in a tin bath to create water sounds".
Put simply, it's something I doubt could have been recorded at any time prior to 1966. Drugs may have aided by loosening their minds, but with their star in such an ascendancy they were allowed free reign to create such mayhem in the studio just to furnish a pop song, something I very much doubt they or anybody else would have been allowed to do even a few years previously. But put even simpler, 'Yellow Submarine' is a song that never fails to make me smile. And that's good enough.
I opened this review with a quote from Joseph Conrad's 'Heart Of Darkness' because I think it neatly sums up the dark heart of the world of 'Eleanor Rigby'; Eleanor lived 'in a dream' too, and then she died alone. But change the 'Of' of the source to 'And' to get 'Heart And Darkness' and you get a description of the duality at the core of this single. Would Eleanor have been saved had she'd been asked aboard that submarine, and would she have even gone? If I know Eleanor then probably not. On both counts. But away from Conrad's pessimism, that doesn't mean there's no joy to be had from companionship and friendship. And that's all I have to say on that. A magnificent pairing.
* And when Starr sings "and our friends are all aboard", he means it - Brian Jones, Donovan, Pattie Boyd, Marianne Faithfull and Neil Aspinall are all there singing along in the background.
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