3 Iconic Beatles Songs That Had Weird Working Titles

Hey, all good ideas have to start somewhere. Here are a few Beatles songs that had weird working titles before they became the tracks we know and love.

“Sexy Sadie”

“Sexy Sadie” is actually a tribute to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, an Indian spiritual leader, disguised as a pop song. Lennon apparently started writing this one while waiting for a taxi. He was preparing to leave India at the time and started writing this one with “Maharishi” in place of the “Sexy Sadie” title.

“John had a song he had started to write which he was singing: ‘Maharishi, what have you done?’ and I said, ‘You can’t say that, it’s ridiculous,’” George Harrison told The Beatles Anthology. “I came up with the title of ‘Sexy Sadie’ and John changed ‘Maharishi’ to ‘Sexy Sadie’. John flew back to Yoko in England and I went to Madras and the south of India and spent another few weeks there.”

“Yesterday”

The working title for this Lennon-McCartney collaboration was “Scrambled Eggs.” Apparently, before the song’s actual opening verse was written, McCartney had come up with something else.

“Scrambled eggs/Oh my baby how I love your legs/Not as much as I love scrambled eggs.”

Eventually, the title was changed to “Yesterday”, thanks to the persuasion of the fifth Beatle, George Martin.

“Paul said he wanted a one-word title and was considering ‘Yesterday’, except that he thought it was perhaps too corny. I persuaded him that it was all right,” producer George Martin told Mark Lewisohn.

“Tomorrow Never Knows”

This one was originally supposed to be called “The Void”. Lennon changed the title because he wanted to make it more digestible for Beatles fans. Apparently, “Tomorrow Never Knows” was in part inspired by drug experimentation and in part inspired by a book by Timothy Leary.

“…John had got hold of Timothy Leary’s adaptation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which is a pretty interesting book,” Paul McCartney explained to The Beatles Anthology. “For the first time we got the idea that, as with ancient Egyptian practice, when you die you lie in state for a few days, and then some of your handmaidens come and prepare you for a huge voyage. Rather than the British version, in which you just pop your clogs. With LSD, this theme was all the more interesting.”

Photo by: David Redfern/Redferns