At this point, pretty much everybody with a passing interest in rock history knows about the uproar that ensued when John Lennon made a remark about the Beatles being “more popular than Jesus” during a 1966 interview. But even hardcore fans might not have heard Lennon’s opinion on what Jesus would have thought about one of the Beatles’ most enduring classics: “Eleanor Rigby,” from the album Revolver, released that same year.
During a 1966 press conference in Chicago, Lennon reflected on how Jesus might have reacted to “Eleanor Rigby,” which deals with themes like loneliness, death and faith, or lack thereof (“No one was saved”).
“I don’t like supposing that somebody like Jesus was alive now and pretending and imagining what he’d do,” Lennon began. “But if he was Jesus and he held that he was the real Jesus that had the same views as before — well, ‘Eleanor Rigby’ wouldn’t mean that much to him,” he said, per the Beatles Bible website.
As Paul McCartney explained in The Lyrics: 1956 To the Present, the character of Eleanor Rigby was inspired by a real person.
“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,” he recalled.
“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,” McCartney continued. “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…So I would visit, and just hearing her stories enriched my soul and influenced the songs I would later write.”
McCartney wrote the music to the “Eleanor Rigby” before the lyrics, which took some time to evolve (in fact, an early version included the lines: Ola Na Tungee/Blowing his mind in the dark/With a pipe full of clay/No one can say). Eventually, as he explained in Anthology, McCartney was “fiddling on a chord some words came out: ‘Dazzie-de-da-zu picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been…’ This idea of someone picking up rice after a wedding took it in that poignant direction, into a ‘lonely people’ direction.”
Related: John Lennon Thought This Bob Dylan Song Was So ‘Pathetic’ and ‘Embarrassing’ He Wrote a Parody
After initially naming the song’s main character Miss Daisy Hawkins, McCartney switched to Eleanor Rigby, finding inspiration in the actress Eleanor Bron, who played the female lead in Help!…or so he thought.
“I thought, I swear, that I made up the name Eleanor Rigby like that…But it seems that up in Woolton Cemetery, where I used to hang out a lot with John, there’s a gravestone to an Eleanor Rigby. Apparently, a few yards to the right there’s someone called McKenzie,” McCartney revealed, referring to the song’s Father McKenzie character.
Interestingly enough, the real-life Eleanor Rigby was born in 1895 and lived in Liverpool, marrying a man named Thomas Woods before she died at the age of 44 in 1939…so she wasn’t a lonely old lady after all. Her tombstone is often visited by Beatles fans.
Related: Beatles’ Son Releases Song With Easter Egg About His Famous Father
