“She’s Leaving Home,” on the Beatles’ album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”, comes in at number 82 on Rolling Stones’ list of the 100 Greatest Beatles Songs. The link notes that it’s based on a true story:
“She’s Leaving Home” was inspired by a newspaper story about a well-to-do 17-year-old girl named Melanie Coe who disappeared from her parents’ home in London. While McCartney took the perspective of the teen runaway, Lennon sang counterpoint (the “Greek chorus,” as McCartney called it) in the voice of the heartbroken parents.
The real-life Melanie Coe ended up going back home to her mom and dad after three weeks; she was pregnant and had an abortion. But the girl in the song represented all the teenagers who were running away from their conventional lives in the Sixties. In April 1967, McCartney visited Brian Wilson in L.A. to preview Sgt. Pepper, playing “She’s Leaving Home” on the piano for him and his wife. “We both just cried,” Wilson said. “It was beautiful.
This came out in 1967, and again, there was nobody writing anything like this at the time. Indeed, if you listened to it and didn’t know who did it, you’d be hard pressed to say that this is rock and roll. It’s just a beautiful ballad.
The antagonistic parent/offspring counterpoint reminds me strongly of Cat Stevens’s “Father and Son,” also a great song.
Wikipedia notes that it’s one of the few Beatles songs in which none of them play an instrument; it was accompanied by a string orchestra arranged not by George Martin, but Mike Leander, who arranged for many rock artists. They also give a quote from McCartney in his biography, Many Years from Now (I haven’t read it; has anyone?):
John and I wrote ‘She’s Leaving Home’ together. It was my inspiration. We’d seen a story in the newspaper about a young girl who’d left home and not been found, there were a lot of those at the time, and that was enough to give us a story line. So I started to get the lyrics: she slips out and leaves a note and then the parents wake up … It was rather poignant. I like it as a song, and when I showed it to John, he added the long sustained notes, and one of the nice things about the structure of the song is that it stays on those chords endlessly. Before that period in our song-writing we would have changed chords but it stays on the C chord. It really holds you. It’s a really nice little trick and I think it worked very well. While I was showing that to John, he was doing the Greek chorus, the parents’ view: ‘We gave her most of our lives, we gave her everything money could buy.’ I think that may have been in the runaway story, it might have been a quote from the parents. Then there’s the famous little line about a man from the motor trade; people have since said that was Terry Doran, who was a friend who worked in a car showroom, but it was just fiction, like the sea captain in “Yellow Submarine”, they weren’t real people.
The synergy between Lennon and McCartney amazes me. The moment the group disbanded, neither of them wrote much on their own that even came close to what they wrote together. Yes, there were a few exceptions, like “Imagine”, and I still think McCartney’s “Jet” and “Maybe I’m Amazed” would have been worthy of the Beatles, but the magic was gone. Harrison was the only one who produced a string of excellent songs after the Beatles disbanded.
Wikipedia adds two more tidbits:
When discussing Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, composer Ned Rorem described “She’s Leaving Home” as “equal to any song that Schubert ever wrote.”
and
In a bizarre coincidence, Coe had actually met McCartney three years earlier, in 1963 when he chose her as the prize winner in a dancing contest on ITV’s Ready Steady Go!. An update on Coe appeared in the Daily Mail in May 2008, and she was interviewed about the song on the BBC programme The One Show on 24 November 2010.
Here’s the video of Macca meeting Melanie Coe on television. Little did he know that she’d later feature in one of his best songs!
Very much enjoying this Beatles series! 🙂
That makes two of us. I used to listen to a lot of beatles on my walkman when I was younger, and this takes me back to those times.
Great songs from the best band in history.
Live and Let Die and Band on the Run are both excellent post-Beatles McCartney songs.
A lot of McCartney’s work with Wings still had the magic in my opinion! 🙂
All the Wings albums are erratic in quality with the exception of “Band on the Run”.
“Venus and Mars” has a few good songs, “Wings at the Speed of Sound” is almost entirely lame from start to finish, but I do like about half of “London Town”.
And it’s fascinating to me how that songwriting synergy worked! It wasn’t one guy writing the words and one guy writing the music. And it wasn’t really both guys writing together. It was one creating the main part of the song with the other contributing some feature that acted as a counterweight. You see it in this song, and it’s certainly true in “We Can Work It Out,” where Paul wrote the upbeat stuff and John contributed “Life is very short…”
Jerry, you’ll want to make a correction. The song is called “Maybe I’m Amazed” — and, yes, I agree. It is a really good song. Also, listen to the Ram album. Lots of good stuff to be heard there.
As for other very good McCartney solo tracks, I would nominate “Letting Go” (from Venus & Mars); “Wanderlust” (from Tug of War — and that song has some great counterpoint in the middle), and one of my favorites, “Jenny Wren” (from Chaos and Creation in the Backyard). McCartney spoke of “Jenny Wren” as a sort of sequel to “Blackbird”, and I think it’s one of his best songs from his solo years.
Fixed, thanks!
Not to pick nits, but it’s “Maybe I’m Amazed.”
I’ve read “Many Years from Now” and it remains one of my favorite biographies — actually, almost autobiographical in a sense. The author, Barry Miles, personally knew Paul from the days when he was dating Jane Asher. Barry was friends with her brother, Peter Asher, who later formed Peter & Gordon, and then went on to produce albums by James Taylor and others. He was also part owner of the Indica Gallery, the bookstore/art gallery where John Lennon met Yoko Ono. Much of the book is taken from conversations and interviews Barry had with Paul over the years, and it’s a fantastic “inside look” into McCartney’s life, spanning his boyhood through his time with Linda. I’d estimate that nearly half of the book is in direct quote form from McCartney.
McCartney is one of my favorite artists of all time, so perhaps I’m biased. Regardless, it is full of details about the Beatles that many enthusiasts of the group would enjoy reading.
Loving all the Beatles posts, Jerry 🙂
Many Years from Now is quite long, but worth reading. For me, the nicest feature was that McCartney briefly describes the genesis of virtually every Lennon-McCartney number, and so it is easy to see which Beatles songs were full collaborations, which were mostly Lennon or McCartney, and which were truly solo efforts. In the few instances were Lennon and McCartney provided different perspectives, I am guessing that McCartney’s memories were more accurate. For example, it seems that Lennon downplayed McCartney’s contributions to “In My Life” and probably overplayed his own contribution to “Eleanor Rigby”.
Absolutely – and where Lennon and McCartney did disagree on song contribution, McCartney/Miles noted it.
I highly recommend “Many Years From Now” as well. It’s the second best Beatles related book ever. The first being Ian McDonald’s “Revolution In The Head.”
Yes, “Revolution in the Head” is the book to own. Are you aware that there’s a second revised edition? It’s published here by the Chicago Review Press. I still own “Twilight of the Gods” by Wilfrid Mellers, but a lot of the theory in that book is a bit beyond me! (More than a bit, actually.)
The song is perfection. Paul asked Mike Leander to do the arrangement because George Martin was busy on a Cilla Black production. Martin conducted and produced the track but was supposedly a little hurt. The orchestration sounds flawless to me. Slight correction – the post Beatles McCartney number is “Maybe I’m Amazed”.
If memory serves, Leonard Bernstein was especially praising of She’s Leaving Home – comparing it to the works of the great masters.
Bernstein also loved “Good Day Sunshine”, particularly for its rollicking, barrelhouse piano. It is a great song and it’s one of their best (Ian MacDonald thinks so as well).
(yellow?) sub
+1
“She goes down the stairs to the kitchen clutching her handkerchief ” … simply wonderful.
Thanks, one of my favourite songs… a parent’s anthem.
“Imagine” is my all time favourite.
Ah, but “Imagine” isn’t a Beatles song! If you’re going to pick a favorite Beatles song, try again!
Please note that I didn’t say “all time Beatles song”. 🙂 And for me, Simon and Garfunkel are right up there in the stratosphere too. Oh, am I venturing off topic? 😛
Yes, after I hit the “post comment” button I thought you might’ve meant that.
I meant to add my earlier comments that “Let Me Roll It”, with a style that deliberately apes Lennon (it was McCartney’s attempt at reaching out to his former partner), is also one of McCartney’s best songs from the 1970s.
[seconds later]
I just found this at Wikipedia. Hmm. Maybe not “deliberately”:
—
The song was seen by critics as a pastiche of John Lennon’s sound, particularly the riff and the use of tape echo on the vocals. McCartney, however, never claimed the song was intended as a pastiche of Lennon. McCartney did say the vocal “does sound like John… I hadn’t realized I’d sung it like John.”
—
By the way, there is one “Lennon & McCartney” song from the 1970s: “Mull of Kintyre”. Quotes, because the story has it that while Lennon didn’t have a hand in writing it (but McCartney had asked Lennon to sing back up), it was Lennon who suggested to McCartney that he add bagpipes to the song. I forget where I read this from many years ago but I’d like to know if this has been confirmed anywhere.
OK, I have to be a skeptic and wonder at the colossal coincidences that have come up in the inspirations of some of these favorite Beatles songs. First, there happens to be a tombstone for Eleanor Rigby right next to the place where John and Paul met. Now today it turns out that Paul actually prominently and publicly interacted with the runaway who inspired today’s song. I am beginning to suspect that these things stuck in McCartney’s subconscious memory until triggered by something (meeting another Eleanor, or reading a newspaper article about the runaway), and it was these subconscious memories that drew his attention to these triggers and helped shape these songs. That’s my theory, and it’s mine.
I imagine someone will criticize my assessment of the improbability of these events. I am well aware that the odds against almost any post-hoc selection of events like this will seem small, but they happen anyway every day. What are the chances that I happen to grab a taxi driven by someone who used to live in my town of birth? Very small, but almost certainly I could have found some kind of connection between his life and mine, which would have been equally improbable, or more so. Humans are notorious for finding meanings in random patterns. But I think these two McCartney coincidences I’ve mentioned go beyond that.
I just remembered something I hadn’t thought of in years: We studied Sgt. Pepper’s in Sunday school! Such an extraordinary collection of verse, it just seemed worthy of discussion.
Harrison wasn’t the only one who produced a string of excellent songs. Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band is an amazing album.
Cold Turkey, Instant Karma, and Nobody Loves You are incredibly emotionally raw and honest songs that I hope people discover for many years to come. #9 Dream and Watching The Wheels are excellent. Mind Games… There is a fair bit of good Lennon stuff.
Much of MacCartney’s solo stuff is intentionally lightweight, but he has had his moments too.
#9 Dream
Yes. Yes.
Ah! böwakawa poussé, poussé.
The referenced meeting between McCartney and Brian Wilson occurred shortly after the Beach Boys released Pet Sounds, a transitional album analogous in its own way to Pepper’s, back in the band’s middle period, when it was striving to make serious music (or at least Brian Wilson was, and the rest of the band was still willing to follow), after the band’s early years churning out a surf and drag-racing tunes, but before it devolved into a nostalgia/novelty act playing holiday gigs in stadiums full of pot-bellied, balding boomers, before its ugly turn toward reactionary politics.
The entirety of the “Band on the Run” album is worthy of the Beatles. It’s loaded with great songs and even has that pseudo-concept album aspect that both Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Road have. It’s enjoyable throughout and clever as hell. Given the circumstances under which it was recorded it’s even more impressive.
I’m loving these Beatles’ post, Jerry!
*posts
Thank you Jerry, for posting this. I know an awful lot about the Beatles, but I didn’t know that Paul McCartney had actually met the inspiration for She’s Leaving Home! Great story!