The Beatles song that was complimented by William S. Burroughs
The Beatles hobnobbed with quite a few elite thinkers during their 1960s heyday. Famous meetings with the likes of Bob Dylan and Muhammad Ali have been well-documented, but just about anybody and everybody tried to get a piece of the Fab Four when they were on the cutting edge of culture. Tales of writers like Ken Kesey attempted to track them down in London abound in the entertainment world, but not every brief meeting between celebrities was given the obsessive documentation that would come from today’s world.
That’s why it is strange to see Paul McCartney drop names in his book The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present that hadn’t ever seemingly been connected to The Beatles. In the section where McCartney recalls writing ‘Eleanor Rigby’, McCartney judged the poetic merits of his writing through the compliments of two of the most beloved writers of all time: Allen Ginsburg and William S. Burroughs.
“Allen Ginsburg told me it was a great poem, so I’m willing to go with Allen. He was no slouch,” McCartney explained in the book. “Another early admirer of the song was William S. Burroughs who, of course, also ended up on the cover of Sgt. Pepper. He and I had met through the author Barry Miles and the Indica Bookshop, and he actually got to see the song take shape when I sometimes used the spoken-word studio that we had set up in the basement of Ringo’s flat in Montagu Square”.
“Burroughs and I hung out, and he’d borrowed my reel-to-reel a few times to work on his cut-ups,” McCartney explained. “When he got to hear the final version of ‘Eleanor Rigby’, he said he was impressed by how much narrative I’d got into three verses. And it did feel like a breakthrough for me lyrically – more of a serious song”.
“John never had anything like my interest in literature, though he was very keen on Lewis Carroll and, in particular, Winston Churchill,” McCartney also claimed in the section of the book dedicated to ‘The End’. “In my case, I was always fascinated by the couplet as a form of poetry in English right the way through”. That preoccupation with poetry helped McCartney’s songwriting blossom, and compliments from some highly talented writers must also have helped.
Check out ‘Eleanor Rigby’ down below.
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