The White Album 50 Project: "Rocky Raccoon"

There's gonna be a showdown.

Paul McCartney's Western ballad "Rocky Raccoon" serves as a counterpoint to John Lennon's "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill" on the White Album.  Both are stereotypical portraits of American standards of manliness, but whereas John's song is acidic social commentary on America's obsession with dumb, raw power, Paul's tune is a lighthearted story about a cowboy who adheres to the values of rugged individualism and is ready to defend his honor. This plucky fellow isn't trying to save cattle, catch a bank robber, or fight off Indians - he's taking a stand with his gun at the ready to fight another man for . . . a woman!  Hooray for love!   

Of course, as told by a Brit, the story of Rocky Raccoon is a joke, and the joke is that Rocky is a two-dimensional character who's so self-assured that he goes into a losing situation thinking he can win.  The story concerns Rocky losing his girl Nancy to another guy named Dan.  Dan leaves Rocky with a black eye and a desire for revenge.  One day Rocky comes into town for the folk dance at the local saloon, at which he plans to shoot Dan's legs off.  But when he challenges Dan to a shootout for Nancy's hand, Dan shoots Rocky first.  Rocky is left severely wounded with no hope of getting Nancy back, although he doesn't believe it.  Paul didn't have to explain how "Rocky was a fool unto himself" who couldn't swallow his pride, as he did in an alternate take of the song that appears on Anthology 3; Rocky's cavalier attitude toward his own gunshot wound demonstrates that fact quite clearly.  "It's only a scratch," he says in response to a doctor's diagnosis that his gun-slinging days are over, and, in a peculiarly American example of unwarranted optimism, he declares he'll be an improved marksman once he's back on his feet.

Except that he's wounded so badly he can barely make it back to his hotel room.

And why does Rocky want a woman like Nancy back, anyway?  She sounds like a real hussy.  She didn't exactly resist Dan's courting, Paul making clear that she willingly "ran off" with him.  And to top it off, she gives herself her own name, Lil  - a name no one else calls her by!  Talk about self-importance!  Yes, Rocky is a fool, if he's so hung up on a vain woman like Nancy that he's willing to die for her.

Paul's tale is filled with logical flaws and idiosyncratic scenes, demonstrating that he doesn't take the song seriously - which actually adds to its charm.  For example, Rocky comes into town and books himself a room in . . . a saloon?  More likely, Rocky would have checked into a room at the local hotel - the hotel was always the most prominent building in a town in the Old West - and then made his way to the hoedown at the saloon.  (To be fair, some bars in Western towns did offer rooms for lodging.)  And he walked into town?  Where was his horse?  There's also a comical twist; when Rocky gets shot, the doctor tending to him is so drunk he lays himself out on the table, a cheeky reference to the bumbling doctor who tended to Paul after his 1965 moped accident.

Paul made changes to make the song sound more authentically American; Rocky was originally called "Rocky Sassoon" but "Rocky Raccoon" sounded more cowboy-like.  Also, he was originally from Minnesota, a state that was once a wild frontier but is hardly a place associated with cowboys; his residence was changed to the Black Hills of the Dakota Territory (the Black Hills are in present-day South Dakota).  The original choice of Minnesota might have been inspired by the fact that Bob Dylan came from there.  One thing Paul did keep throughout, in fact, was his Dylanesque rhyme scheme of a, a, b, c, c, b - the b-rhymes employing two-syllable words.

Paul developed the general outline for "Rocky Raccoon" while in India, and he improvised and revised the lyrics as the Beatles were recording the song. The result is a casual vibe that gives "Rocky Raccoon" the air of a traditional folk song that might be sung around a campfire.  Paul's wry, quasi-American vocal style (accompanied by his own rustic-style acoustic guitar) complements the feel of the song, and he gets sympathetic backing from John Lennon on harmonica (his first and only harmonica performance since Beatles For Sale, and his only one with a country and western sound) and George Martin on honky-tonk piano.  Ringo Starr adds a nice touch with an emphatic tap of his drum simulating Dan's gunshot.  The song is at its core an affectionate tribute to Western Americana that pastiches the tradition of the folk troubadour, and the Beatles put a lot of heart into the record.  Indeed, it was one of the easier, more effortless songs recorded for the White Album.  And despite Rocky's foolishness, we love him and root for him simply because he is an underdog, just as American moviegoers in 1976 would root for another underdog named Rocky, Sylvester Stallone's Rocky Balboa (more likely named for Marciano or Graziano than for a Beatles song, but what the heck!).

In a sense, Paul is directing his own movie, an old-time Western.  He made several experimental short movies on his own back in the sixties and pretty much directed the bulk of Magical Mystery Tour; this time he's merely using a tape machine instead of a camera. "Rocky Raccoon" plays as a sweet, melodramatic morality play, like many of the classic Westerns that have come out of Hollywood, and Paul wraps it up with a time-honored cinematic trick when he brings the story full circle with Rocky back in his hotel room with a Gideon Bible.  Gideon Bibles would have been familiar to the Beatles on their American tours, the Gideon Society being famous for leaving the Good Book in hotel rooms all across the U.S.  Paul tells us that it was left here "to help with good Rocky's revival."  What does he mean by that?  Is Rocky dying or has he been been born again?  Has he met God or found God?  The ending is open, because as any good movie director will tell you - and as Family would make clear in their cowboy-movie song "It's Only a Movie," the title track of their 1973 swan-song album - you always leave your audience wanting more. 

Fade to black.