Evanston RoundTable, April 9, 2025

The mop tops never played at Welsh-Ryan Arena or Dyche Stadium (as Ryan Field was known then). To my knowledge they never even visited our fair city when they came to Chicago to perform at the International Amphitheater in 1964 and 1966 and Comiskey Park in 1965.

Nevertheless, the band has an interesting and unique presence at Northwestern University. The school owns the Beatles Manuscripts, which consist of seven original lyric sheets acquired in the early 1970s from a collection put together by the avant-garde American composer John Cage.

The seven lyric sheets — including The Word, Eleanor Rigby and Yellow Submarine — may be worth as much as $15 million based on recent auction sales, said Greg MacAyeal, curator of music collections for the university library.

As a result, the originals — scribbled on envelopes, torn from spiral notebooks and written on the back of bills — are stored in a place MacAyeal won’t reveal, for obvious security reasons. He said archly that they’re located somewhere “across the universe.”

Magical mystery tour

Kept in a box inside a case inside a vault, the originals are only rarely brought out for inspection, (though you can see them in this 2018 feature on WTTW). “Too easy to steal,” MacAyeal noted. And when they are taken out of storage, Northwestern police are close at hand.

However, that doesn’t mean the lyric sheets — the second largest such library collection in the world, after the British Library — can’t be seen by the public. High-quality facsimiles are on display in room 208 on the second floor of Deering Library. Unfortunately, the library is closed until fall for renovations.

The story of how they came to Northwestern is almost as interesting as the collection.

In the mid-1960s, Cage sought out music manuscripts from a number of modern composers for a collection he titled Notations, ultimately published as a book in 1969. The collection included manuscripts — the actual music writing — of such esteemed mid-century composers as Igor Stravinsky, Milton Babbitt, Elliot Carter, Gyorgy Ligeti, Steve Reich and Terry Riley.

With a little help from my friends

At some point during his acquisition efforts, Cage was encouraged to include some pop music as well, and, being acquainted with John Lennon’s wife Yoko Ono through the New York art scene, asked her to contribute some lyric sheets by the Beatles.

“Cage learned that Northwestern was interested in building a library collection of new music,” MacAyeal said, “and cold called the head of the music library. The collection was acquired as a donation.”

Aside from The Word, Eleanor Rigby and Yellow Submarine, there’s I’m Only Sleeping, Good Day Sunshine, And Your Bird Can Sing (with a working title “You Don’t Get Me”) and For No One (with working title “Why Did It Die?”). Except for The Word, which was included on the 1965 album Rubber Soul, all those songs are from the 1966 album Revolver.

Many Beatles fans (including this one) consider these two albums the band’s best, and among the most important pop music LPs ever made. Village Voice critic Richard Goldstein described Revolver as “a revolutionary record” that was every bit as important “to the expansion of pop as was Rubber Soul … a key work in the development of rock ’n’ roll into an artistic pursuit.”

Eleanor Rigby, the lyrics of which explore loneliness and death, sung by Paul McCartney accompanied by a closely miked octet of four violins, two violas and two cellos playing music arranged by the band’s esteemed producer George Martin, might be the greatest two minutes of art music ever written. Martin said he was inspired by film composer Bernard Herrmann, particularly the scores he wrote for Psycho and Fahrenheit 451. “That really impressed me, especially the strident string writing.”

It’s all too much

It did not impress the musicians, who were uncomfortable with the microphones positioned so close, where it could knock against their valuable instruments and amplify any slight mistake. “The musicians were horrified!” recalled engineer Geoffrey Emerick. “One of them gave me a look of disdain, rolled his eyes to the ceiling, and said under his breath, ‘You can’t do that, you know.’” Emerick did it anyway, mindful of Martin’s instructions.

There were 14 takes during the three-hour session on April 28, 1966 at the famous Abbey Road Studio Two in London, with the last take being the one used on the recording. The musicians were paid the standard union fee of nine pounds, the equivalent of about $225 today. They left the studio immediately after the session was completed, forgoing a chance to hang out with Lennon and McCartney in the control room to listen to the playbacks.

The song was admired by such literary luminaries as poet Allen Ginsberg and novelist William S. Burroughs. McCartney wrote in his book The Lyrics that Ginsberg thought it was a “great poem” and “[Burroughs] was impressed by how much narrative I’d got into those verses.”

As to whose handwriting is shown on the individual songs, that’s not altogether clear. According to MacAyeal, Ono said “the way the Beatles would work is they would all sit together and work out the songs on paper with one of them writing. She does not say which person wrote which of the manuscripts.” Beatles’ expert Robert Rodriguez, in the WTTW broadcast, guessed that The Word was in Lennon’s handwriting but the colorful artwork was by McCartney.

Cage himself is a fascinating figure, a leader in the artistic avant-garde and a “pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music and non-standard use of musical instruments…,” according to Wikipedia. He was “the most important and influential composer in the second half of the 20th century,” said Peter Gena, a champion of his work who taught at Northwestern’s music school from 1976 to 1983. “His ideas found expression in all the classic arts and literature.”

Cage’s experiments in electronic music even found expression on Lennon’s masterpiece, Tomorrow Never Knows from Revolver, which featured such radical pop techniques as musique concrete, tape looping and electro-acoustic audio manipulation.

The end

The Beatles Manuscripts are not the only unique and unusual part of Northwestern’s eclectic collections. There are also ancient Sumerian cuneiform tablets, miscellaneous flyers and pamphlets from the 1871 Siege of Parisand a “Death Collection” consisting of a variety of death-related imagery and various materials from the notorious 1924 Chicago “thrill killers” Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. RoundTable writer Wendi Kromash describes some of the other library collections in this recent article.

But the seven Beatles lyric sheets stand atop the heap. The band’s cultural impact was inestimable, and their music was and remains supremely wonderful and important.

Good to have the Fab Four with us in Evanston!