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The many childhood inspirations behind The Beatles’ ‘Rocky Raccoon’

Fri 24 January 2025 6:00, UK

Nostalgia is a powerful creative force in Paul McCartney‘s songwriting. Whether it’s his unabashed love for the old British music hall on ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’, the Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band concept dreamed up from the memories of his father’s The Jimmy Mac Jazz Band, and great American songbook composer Irving Berlin almost guides McCartney’s pen as he was writing ‘Here, There and Everywhere’.

This unapologetic penchant for sentimentality could veer into twee much to the chagrin of the rest of The Beatles, John Lennon infamously dubbing the 1968 double-LP’s ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’ as “granny shit”, according to studio engineer Geoff Emerick’s 2011 tell-all book.

While John Lennon had a better hit rate with his ‘throw-away’ cuts, ‘I Am the Walrus’ and ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite!’ some of the group’s most fascinating work, when McCartney got his affectionate musical nods right they could stand as an album’s quaint yet memorable highlight. Sketched out during his transcendental retreat in Maharishi Yogi’s Rishikesh ashram, the jovial country ballad ‘Rocky Raccoon’ is McCartney’s nostalgic fondness at its most playfully enduring.

A comic western exploring the love triangle between the titular Rocky, his ‘gal’ Lil McGill, whom everyone knows as Nancy, and the town’s brutish rival Dan, who punches poor Rocky in the eye to win Lil’s affection.

Licking his wounds and exacting revenge in the local saloon, he bursts into the room Dan and Nancy are sharing and challenges Dan to a duel, promptly losing due to Dan’s swift aim. Assured his wounds are only superficial by the gin-drunk doctor, Rocky spots the room’s Gideon’s Bible and tells himself he’ll recover.

Complete with a faux southern drawl narrative intro and Mrs Mills’ famous honk-tonk Steinway piano during its ragtime middle, ‘Rocky Raccoon’ is McCartney operating at his most effectively whimsical and forms an essential component of The Beatles‘ jumbled toy-box collection of eclectic material across its two discs. Like many of McCartney’s songs, its influences are a composite of the big names of his youth.

So, who were the childhood inspirations for ‘Rocky Raccoon’?

Fuelled by skiffle, bawdy ukelele comedy, and variety pantomime, ‘Rocky Raccoon’ is overwhelmingly wedded to the British pop culture of yesteryear despite its American setting. Crossing ‘King of Skiffle’ Lonnie Donegan’s Dixieland banjo and wartime morale-booster George Formby’s innuendo-laden novelty songs with Stanley Holloway’ and creative partner Marriott Edgar’s comic poems, most notably ’32’s The Lion and Albert, McCartney’s humorous tale of jilted love and drunken revenge wrote itself.

A keen poking fun of the contemporary pop scene and idiosyncracies of everyday life also found their way. “I was basically spoofing ‘the folk-singer.’ And it included Gideon’s Bible, which I’ve seen in every hotel I’ve ever been in,” McCartney told Mojo. “You open the drawer, and there it is! Who’s this guy Gideon!?”

Concluding, “I still don’t know to this day who the heck he is. I’m sure he’s a very well-meaning guy. ‘Rocky Raccoon’ was a freewheeling thing, the fun of mixing a folky ramble with Albert in the lion’s den with its ‘orse’s ‘ead ‘andle!”