When it comes to telling stories through song, Paul McCartney has been known to use a fictional character to get his point across a time or two. Here are a few of his most interesting fictional characters from The Beatles’ catalog.
“Rocky Racoon”
Written on The Beatles’ infamous India trip, “Rocky Racoon” describes a character named Rocky, whose girlfriend leaves him for another man. After getting punched by said man, Rocky goes to see the doctor, who walks in “stinking of gin.” This is definitely a story song, and it makes more sense once you understand the context behind it. Apparently, when McCartney wrote this one (primarily by himself), he was taking inspiration from his own experience with a doctor.
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“I was riding on a little moped to see my cousin Betty,” McCartney told the story to Bob Mortimer. “It was a moonlit night… I said, ‘Wow, look at that moon!’ When I look back, the bicycle is now [on its side] and there’s no way to get it back up. So I’m hitting that pavement.”
Apparently, his accident happened around Christmastime, so the doctor on-call wasn’t in the best state to give the Beatle stitches. McCartney explained, “And he’s trying to thread the needle but he can’t see it. So Betty takes it off him, and she threads it.”
“Eleanor Rigby”
McCartney came up with the first verse for “Eleanor Rigby” and then consulted the other Beatles to help him finish it. As morbid as it sounds, “Eleanor Rigby” was actually a name on a tombstone in Liverpool before it was used in a song, as McCartney would later discover. But when he was writing it, the Beatle was actually inspired by an older woman from his youth.
“Eleanor Rigby is based on an old lady that I got on with very well,” McCartney told The Lyrics. “I don’t even know how I first met ‘Eleanor Rigby’, but I would go around to her house, and not just once or twice. I found out that she lived on her own, so I would go around there and just chat, which is sort of crazy if you think about me being some young Liverpool guy.”
“Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”
If you’re a true Beatles fan, then you definitely know the lore behind “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”. Although Paul McCartney would eventually explain that the “silver hammer” in the song was meant to be an analogy for things going wrong, there’s something about this one that always feels a little confusing. Besides McCartney, it seemed that none of The Beatles were all too fond of this track.
“The worst session ever was ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’,” Ringo Starr said of recording the track. “It was the worst track we ever had to record. It went on for f*****g weeks. I thought it was mad.”
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