A Conspiracy Theory You Can Dance To

When I was meeting with our wedding deejay about song choices, I mentioned that my favorite band was the Beatles. And that prompted a very odd suggestion.

“I could play ‘Eleanor Rigby,’” she said.

I said, “Jesus Christ, anything but that. Who would even pick that?!”

“People choose it all the time because it mentions a wedding.”

First off, “Eleanor Rigby” is an unusual song for the Beatles, or at least it was when they recorded it: it features a string octet and only Paul singing. Second, playing it at a wedding reception would be similar to screening the “Red Wedding” episode of Game of Thrones. I mean, that also mentions a wedding.

“Eleanor Rigby” begins and ends at church. It opens in the aftermath of a wedding. The eponymous character, a spinster, is picking up the scattered rice with a sense of longing for the wedding she herself will never have. The song's closing events are about as happy (if not as messy) as the Game of Thrones ep.

Everybody on the dance floor!!

Which brings me to my third point: I seem to be the only person on earth who finds that song deeply upsetting. (Most everyone else does seem to be disturbed by the Red Wedding. But I think short-sighted moron Robb Stark deserved his fate way more than Eleanor deserved hers.)

I first heard the song in the summer of 1981, fifteen years after its release. I was nine years old, and my family were expats living in Hong Kong. John Lennon’s death had occurred about eight months earlier, igniting a Beatles revival that supercharged my then-burgeoning obsession with their music. But because I’d discovered them through their Saturday-morning cartoon, which tended to feature their earliest songs, I didn’t know about their later, experimental turn.

A collection of not-very-old oldies

I’ve written about the first Beatles tape I ever bought, at a record stall in Stanley Market. Months later, I put my allowance toward my second Beatles tape, an eclectic mix called A Collection of Beatles Oldies. This was issued by EMI in 1966, right in the middle of their career, so “oldies” was meant to be ironic. Not least because it contains the months-old “Eleanor Rigby.” It’s the second-to-last song, followed, with stunning mood whiplash, by “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.” This is the sort of song arrangement butchery you’d normally expect from Capitol Records, EMI’s American sister label; as George Harrison later recalled, they would take an official Beatles LP release, “put the singles on, take off a bunch of tracks, change all the running order, and then they’d make new packages like Yesterday and Today, just awful packages.”

Nothing to see here, no dismembered dolls or songs that go together in any way.

Anyway…in this particular package, amid earlier hits such as “Day Tripper” and “I Feel Fine,” lay this strange thing I was unprepared for: no jangly guitars or even any guitars at all. Just frenetic strings and Paul’s voice singing the story of a woman whose lonely life ends with her going unremarked, unmourned—even by her priest—and unsaved. In fact, not only isn’t Eleanor saved; no one is. “What does he care?” Paul asks the of sock-darning Father McKenzie, then wonders, “All the lonely people—where do they all come from?” It’s not just Eleanor who’s alone, but many, many people, lost to indifference. The song was so disturbing to nine-year-old me that I literally cried for a week. Because it occurred to me that even if Paul wasn’t telling a true story, such things could and did happen in the world.

"Buried alone with her name. Nobody came."

Pictured, in a Liverpool cemetery: a totally different Eleanor Rigby

As I got older, my Beatles fanaticism didn’t die out. It just got stronger. And although I still dodge “Eleanor Rigby” whenever possible, I did become more adept at processing sad songs. Which was good, because the Beatles didn’t stop writing them.

“Eleanor Rigby” feels like a different beast than, say, “For No One” or “She’s Leaving Home,” though. Its predecessor is “Yesterday,” which features only Paul singing and playing his acoustic guitar accompanied by a string quartet. On the surface, “Yesterday” is a song about a breakup, but it may also be about Paul’s loss of his mother. “Rigby” ups the ante, with double the number of string instruments and a deceased subject who isn’t even loved or missed.

At least “Rigby” turned out not to be based on a true story, unlike “Yesterday,” “She’s Leaving Home,” and “A Day in the Life.” But beyond “Rigby”’s bleak lyrics, there’s something even more crushing in the string arrangement. The presence of two violas and two cellos gives the song a heaviness and severity that only add to the horror. If “horror” sounds like a dramatic assessment of a Macca tune, consider this aspect: four violins shrieking over the dark, weighty harmony strings. In a 2022 New Yorker article about the song, McCartney mentioned that he and George Martin based the staccato string rhythm on the murder theme from Psycho. “And, of course," McCartney added, "there’s some kind of madcap connection between Eleanor Rigby, an elderly woman left high and dry, and the mummified mother in Psycho.”

Everybody on the dance floor!

As if that weren’t macabre enough, my second choice of Beatles album has deathly implications on the cover art. A Collection of Beatles Oldies was released because the Fab Four wanted to spend their creative energy experimenting with their sound (and drugs) in the studio—which equated to longer lapses between albums—and following Revolver’s release in August, they didn’t have an album for the 1966 Christmas market. To fill the void, EMI cranked out a “greatest hits” compilation. In the meantime, with news spreading that the Beatles had abandoned touring and fans wondering What The Actual Fuck, Lads, rumors also began to spread that the Beatles were breaking up. Then an alternative theory developed: the Beatles had, in fact, replaced Paul with a doppelganger. The Cute One had met his end on the M1, where he was decapitated (somehow secretly) in a car crash. Clues abounded on the succeeding albums, from backward-facing Paul on the Sgt. Pepper cover to John’s friend who “blew his mind out in a car” to the Abbey Road funeral procession.

But A Collection of Beatles Oldies got there before “A Day in the Life” was a glint in John’s eye. The candy-colored op-art on the sleeve holds the first of the grim evidence: the Beatlesque gent at its center is about to get hit in the head with a car. The drumhead he's leaning against contains the word “OLDIES,” and if you alphabetically shift the first two letters, you get "PM DIES." Not good for Paul. (Unless "PM" referred to then-prime minister Harold Wilson? Did anyone ever look into that?)

Honk-honk, Mr. Wiiiiilllson.

Then there’s the back cover, a photograph of the band sequestered in their Tokyo hotel room before the Budokan concert. Paul sits apart from the others, his expression wistful and mysterious. He’s wearing black and is apparently hovering in a cloud of ectoplasm. (They are not, I repeat, NOT, bored out of their minds and smoking because it's about the only activity they can do to alleviate the boredom. That and stare at objets d'art brought in because they weren't allowed to go out to a museum for fear of causing fan-related chaos.)

I don’t know how Paul Is Dead Theory would have hit me when I was nine, but by that point I'd watched episodes of The Beatles cartoon that had more believable plot lines. Glad I didn't know about the Psycho connection.

I mean, it does provide a decent clue as to why they stopped touring.

I think there’s another factor in “Rigby” that shook me, not because of Paul but because of John. No sooner had I discovered the Beatles than he was murdered. Amid the flurry of Beatles songs I was consuming, his posthumous “(Just Like) Starting Over” played on radios everywhere, a constant reminder of his life cut short. For all the Beatle content I have absorbed in the four decades since, John has always held an aura of tragedy.

However, let’s observe the positive side of that then-decade-and-a-half-old song that broke me on a balmy Hong Kong summer afternoon. People still dismiss Paul as capable only of churning out upbeat pop hits, silly love songs. That’s unfair: “Eleanor Rigby” shows off his versatility, particularly as it (as well as “For No One”) appears on the same album as some of his bounciest songs, “Good Day Sunshine” and “Got to Get You into My Life.” I have to admit, in the end, that this song that wrecked me as a child is a testament to its author’s genius. I’ve made my peace with "Eleanor Rigby"; sometimes I can sit and listen to it.

But, per the Revolver lineup, it better follow “Taxman” and it better lead into “I’m Only Sleeping.” Context matters, y'all.

Everybody on the dance floor!