Rocky Raccoon

The Zoo Crew has got Rocky Raccoon spinning for the Zoo Freaks, and if you have never sat still for the whole story you are in for a ride. This one lives on the double album The Beatles, the plain white sleeve everybody still calls the White Album, and it comes in like a campfire tale told by a guy who has been on the road too long and likes the sound of his own voice. Paul McCartney sings it, the credit reads Lennon-McCartney, and the band treats it like a little western they cooked up between meditation sessions. Over at THE ZOO we keep the deep cuts coming without the commercials, and this one belongs in the stack right next to the other White Album oddballs that still sound like they were written for a room full of friends.

Paul has told the writing story more than once, and the best version comes from a Radio Luxembourg interview he gave in November 1968, right around the time the album was hitting the shops. He was sitting on the roof of the ashram in Rishikesh with a guitar, John Lennon beside him, and Donovan hanging around the same patch of sun. They were just messing with chords. Paul started the progression, the three of them began making up words, and the lines arrived fast. At first the cowboy was called Rocky Sassoon. Paul changed it to Raccoon because Sassoon did not sound like a man who would book a room in a saloon and come looking for the fellow who ran off with his girl. He told the interviewer he did not know a thing about the Appalachians or cowboys and Indians. He just made it up. The American accent was a joke, same as most of the song.

Years later he put it even plainer in Barry Miles's book Many Years From Now. Rocky Raccoon is quirky, very him. He likes talking blues, so he started there, then slid into a tongue-in-cheek parody of a western and kept throwing in lines that amused him. He called it a little one-act play, with most of the dialogue handed to the characters. Rocky is the lead. The girl whose real name was Magill called herself Lil, but she was known as Nancy. Dan is the rival who wins the fight in the saloon. The doctor who shows up later is the punchline. In a 2008 Mojo interview Paul said he was basically spoofing the folk singer. The scanning of the old prospector voice, crossed with a bit of George Formby, was the fun of it. The story just unfolded.

The gin-soaked doctor is not pure invention. Paul later told Bob Mortimer, in a conversation tied to his book The Lyrics, about a night he was riding a little moped over to see his cousin Betty. He looked up at the moon, the bike went out from under him, and he hit the pavement hard enough to smash his lip. Betty called a doctor. It was around Christmas, and the doctor arrived stinking of gin, slurring that Paul needed a couple of stitches, with no anaesthetic on hand. He could not thread the needle. Betty took it and threaded it for him. Paul has said the doctor even had to do the stitching twice. That scene walked straight into the lyric: the doctor came in stinking of gin and proceeded to lie on the table, and Rocky told him it was only a scratch. John Lennon, talking to David Sheff, did not claim a note of it. Paul wrote it, he said. Would he have gone to all that trouble about Gideon's Bible?

That Bible line is one of Paul's favorites. Rocky checks into his room, finds the book in the drawer, and figures some fellow named Gideon must have left it for the next guy. Paul has said he likes the idea of Gideon as a character. He had seen those Bibles in hotel drawers for years and always wondered who Gideon was. The Black Hills setting, the gun, the revenge that does not quite land, the girl with three names, all of it sits in that same playful pocket. Canadian photographer Paul Saltzman, who was at the ashram, has said he told Paul about a girlfriend who had left him for another man, and that the triangle in the song echoes that story. Beatles historian Kenneth Womack has pointed to Robert W. Service's poem The Shooting of Dan McGrew as another shadow in the background. Danny Thomas, who drummed with the 13th Floor Elevators, has claimed the name Rocky nods toward Roky Erickson. Paul never needed any of those theories. He already had the roof, the chords, and the drunk doctor.

They cut the track at EMI Studios on 15 August 1968, with George Martin producing. Martin also sat in on the barrelhouse piano, the honky-tonk figures that turn the talking blues into something you could almost two-step to if the floor was uneven. John plays harmonica, and this is the last Beatles record that carries his harp. The vocal is Paul in character, half narrator and half Rocky, dropping the accent in and out like a man who knows he is putting on a show. The whole thing runs a little over three minutes and sits on side two of the first disc, between Piggies and Don't Pass Me By, which tells you everything about how wide that album was willing to swing. It came out on 22 November 1968, on Apple, credited to Lennon-McCartney, with Martin in the producer's chair. Richie Havens later covered it and took a version into the Canadian charts, but the original still feels like the one that belongs on a porch.

None of that campfire business happens if four Liverpool kids do not find each other in the first place. John Lennon started a skiffle outfit in 1956 at Quarry Bank High School and named them the Quarrymen after a line in the school song. They played parties, dances, and the odd cinema, chasing the Lonnie Donegan sound that was cheap to put together and loud enough for a church hall. On 6 July 1957 the Quarrymen were playing a garden fete at St. Peter's Church in Woolton, set up on the back of a flatbed truck. Ivan Vaughan brought along a mate from the Liverpool Institute, Paul McCartney, who was fifteen. Paul watched the set, then played Twenty Flight Rock and a bit of Be-Bop-A-Lula, and showed John how to tune a guitar and grab chords John did not have yet. John asked him in. Paul joined that fall.

Paul brought George Harrison around early in 1958. George was younger, and John hesitated, but George auditioned on a bus with Raunchy and made the spot. The group cut a couple of amateur sides that year, Buddy Holly's That'll Be the Day and an original called In Spite of All the Danger, and started leaving skiffle behind for rock and roll. Stuart Sutcliffe came in on bass, the name drifted through a few jokes, and by August 1960 they had settled on The Beatles, a play on Buddy Holly's Crickets with a beat dropped in so it read like the music. Hamburg knocked the edges off them in the long night sets. Pete Best held the drum stool until Ringo Starr came over from Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. Brian Epstein saw them at the Cavern in 1961, cleaned up the look, and got them to George Martin at Parlophone. Love Me Do arrived in 1962. By the time Paul was sitting on that roof in India, the four of them had already rewritten what a rock and roll band could carry, and they still had room for a fake cowboy and a Bible in a drawer.

If you want the trail straight from the source, the band keeps the song written up on the official site at thebeatles.com, where Rocky Raccoon sits with its White Album notes and the lyric about the Black Mountain Hills of Dakota. They post on Facebook, share the archive shots on Instagram, and keep the updates rolling on X. Apple Corps and Universal also run The Beatles Official Fan Group for the folks who still want to argue about which White Album side is the keeper. However you find them, the song remains what Paul said it was: a short play, a spoof, and a true story about a doctor who could not thread a needle, dressed up like a western and left on the record for anybody who wants to hear it again.