The Beatles BibleA jokey song about a cuckolded young American man seeking revenge against a love rival, ‘Rocky Raccoon’ was written in India by Paul McCartney in early 1968.
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WikipediaRocky Racoon is another sort of comedy song/pastiche type of thing and from the White Album. It’s a fully developed song – not a fragment. It has some interesting ideas and paints a vivid picture of characters in a Western saloon.
Not my cup of tea, really, but as I get older I increasingly realize that Paul McCartney (who wrote this) is a creative genius in his own right. He has musical and artistic ideas pouring out of him all the time. Perhaps more than any other Beatle he was able to take the bones of a promising idea and flesh it out completely. Innovative arrangement, production, album cover etc.
To achieve this during the Beatle years he would work up what seemed his most promising ideas, sometimes facing opposition from other Beatles (although he had an ally in George Martin). He had a pretty good track record of creativity (!).
Many of the Beatles peak moments, where they did something truly original and ground breaking can be traced back to McCartney’s ideas, often sharpened, edited through the tension with Lennon. Sometimes the veto of the others was also important in creating something more coherent and organic.
Lennon also had some fantastic ideas, but these did not always flow so easily. Perhaps his internal critic was more active, possibly with good reason. When his ideas did meet the threshold they could often be quite honest, revealing and self-critical.
McCartney’s songs, by contrast, generally shy away from anything too frank or revealing, although sometimes you sense there is a coded message to or about himself. [There are a couple of possible exceptions, but I think the pattern holds]
Instead he often writes about third person characters and imaginative stories. Eleanor Rigby, She’s Leaving Home, Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da, Lovely Rita and so on. In doing so he’s keeping himself and his own feelings at a distance.
I think he does this mainly in the service of the musical ideas (melodies, arrangements, sounds); to get these ideas out, finished without too much internal editing.
The other Beatles didn’t always like these songs, and I admit that they are hit and miss for me. Rocky Racoon is a miss, because it doesn’t sit coherently with the rest of the album and because it’s a little too lacking in emotion, whereas She’s Leaving Home and Eleanor Rigby (both recorded without the other Beatles) tap into universal feelings. They are among McCartney’s best lyrics, as well as helping to define the overall tone of their respective albums.
I also think the tension between McCartney’s tendency to write feel-good, pastiche and musical hall flavoured songs helped shape Lennon and Harrison’s musical instincts allowing them to go beyond the genres they knew as teenagers, as they in turn exerted their influence on McCartney.
So if, like me, you are not keen on McCartney’s more quirky fiction/pastiche songs like Rocky Racoon, it’s worth reflecting that if he had somehow filtered them out we may also have missed out on She’s Leaving Home, Eleanor Rigby and much of the genre-busting invention of the later albums.