The author of the New York Times' mixed review of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Richard Goldstein, loved the Beatles' previous album Revolver. In his review in the Village Voice, he wrote:
Revolver is a revolutionary record, as important to the expansion of pop territory as was Rubber Soul. It was apparent last year that the 12 songs in Rubber Soul represented an important advance. Revolver is the great leap forward. Hear it once and you know it’s important. Hear it twice, it makes sense. Third time around it’s fun. Fourth time, it’s subtle. On the fifth hearing, Revolver becomes profound.
As far as Eleanor Rigby though, he didn't write about the musical aspect of the song directly, instead focusing on the lyrics:
“Eleanor Rigby” is an orchestrated ballad about the agony of loneliness. Its characters, Eleanor herself and Father MacKenzie, represent sterility. Eleanor “died in the church and was buried along with her name.” The good father writes “words to the sermon that no one will hear/No one comes near.” As a commentary on the state of modern religion, this song will hardly be appreciated by those who see John Lennon as an anti-Christ. But “Eleanor Rigby” is really about the unloved and un-cared-for. When Eleanor makes up, the narrator asks: “Who is it for?”‘ While the father darns his socks, the question is: “What does he care?”
Edward Greenfield, writing for the British newspaper the Guardian, adored Revolver and had the same kind of response to Eleanor Rigby that I did fifty years later:
"Eleanor Rigby" (with "square" string octet accompaniment) is a ballad about a lonely spinster who "wears the face that she keeps in a jar by the door" and about Father McKenzie "writing the words of sermon that no one will hear," the verses punctuated by wailing cries of "Look at all the lonely people: where do they all come from?"
There you have a quality rare in pop music, compassion, born of an artist's ability to project himself into other situations. Specific understanding of emotion comes out even in the love songs - at least the two new ones with the best tunes, both incidentally sung by Paul McCartney, the Beatle with the strongest musical staying power.
Eleanor Rigby - I bought a Haydn LP the other day and this sounds just like it. It's all sort of quartet stuff and it sounds like they're out to please music teachers in primary schools. I can imagine John saying: 'I'm going to write this for my old schoolmistress'.
Of course John didn't actually have much to do with the song, it was Paul's baby.
While Googling to learn more about contemporary reviews of Eleanor Rigby, I was flabbergasted to find that Paul McCartney published an article in The New Yorker about writing Eleanor Rigby in 2021 (Archived version here) and I somehow missed it until now.
I wrote about Eleanor Rigby in December 2016 - almost nine years now - called The loneliness of Paul McCartney, in which I marveled that it had been written by a 24-year-old social butterfly pop star.
In the New Yorker article, McCartney explains how this miracle came to pass:
Growing up, I knew a lot of old ladies—partly through what was called Bob-a-Job Week, when Scouts did chores for a shilling. You’d get a shilling for cleaning out a shed or mowing a lawn. I wanted to write a song that would sum them up. Eleanor Rigby is based on an old lady that I got on with very well. 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. Later, I would offer to go and get her shopping. She’d give me a list and I’d bring the stuff back, and we’d sit in her kitchen. I still vividly remember the kitchen, because she had a little crystal-radio set. That’s not a brand name; it actually had a crystal inside it. Crystal radios were quite popular in the nineteen-twenties and thirties. So I would visit, and just hearing her stories enriched my soul and influenced the songs I would later write.
The contemporary reviews of Eleanor Rigby mention that the song uses classical music instruments, but don't comment on how powerful they sound in the recording. That is what is so striking about the song, in addition to its compassion. The Beatles' sound engineer Geoff Emerick had a lot to say about the recording in his book Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of The Beatles,
There was also a bit of stress during the recording of “Eleanor Rigby,” though for an entirely different reason. After hearing Paul play this beautiful song on acoustic guitar, George Martin felt that the only accompaniment that was necessary was that of a double string quartet: four violins, two violas, and two cellos. Paul wasn’t immediately enamored of the concept—he was afraid of it sounding too cloying, too “Mancini”—but George eventually talked him into it, assuring him he would write a string arrangement that would be suitable.“Okay, but I want the strings to sound really biting,” Paul warned as he signed off on the idea. I took note of what he said and began thinking of how to best accomplish that.
String quartets were traditionally recorded with just one or two microphones, placed high, several feet up in the air so that the sound of the bows scraping couldn’t be heard. But with Paul’s directive in mind, I decided to close-mic the instruments, which was a new concept. The musicians were horrified! One of them gave me a look of disdain, rolled his eyes to the ceiling, and said under his breath, “You can’t do that, you know.”His words shook my confidence and made me start to second-guess myself. But I carried on regardless, determined to at least hear what it sounded like.We did one take with the mics fairly close, then on the next take I decided to get extreme and move the mics in really close—perhaps just an inch or so away from each instrument. It was a fine line; I didn’t want to make the musicians so uncomfortable that they couldn’t give their best performance, but my job was to achieve what Paul wanted. That was the sound he liked, and so that was the miking we used, despite the string players’ unhappiness. To some degree, I could understand why they were so upset: they were scared of playing a bum note, and being under a microscope like that meant that any discrepancy in their playing was going to be magnified. Also, the technical limitations at the time were such that we couldn’t easily drop in, so they had to play the whole song correctly from beginning to end every time.Even without peering through the control room glass, I could hear the sound of the eight musicians sliding their chairs back before every take, so I had to keep going down there and moving the mics back in closer after every take; it was comic, really. Finally, George Martin told them pointedly to stop moving off mic. In the end, the players did a good job, though they clearly were annoyed, so much so that they declined an invitation to listen to the playback. We didn’t really care what they thought, anyway—we were pleased that we had come up with another new sound, which was really a combination of Paul’s vision and mine.It was during the Revolver sessions that I realized I simply couldn’t rely on textbook recording techniques in terms of mic positioning and placement. The Beatles were demanding more, so much more, of both me and of the technology. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were making tremendous advancements in the recording process.
Emerick was an important, if usually overlooked aspect of the Beatles' sound and he participated in most of their recordings except "Let It Be" and most of the White Album. And wow, does he have opinions about the Beatles, which made his book controversial. He likely would have agreed with the Guardian critic's assessment of McCartney as "Beatle with the strongest musical staying power." George Harrison, on the other hand... but I will write about that in another post.
The Eleanor Rigby section of the movie "Yellow Submarine":