Before a song makes it onto an album, it likely undergoes countless transformations and revisions before reaching its final form, and these Beatles lyrics that were almost scrapped for something else are certainly no exception. In hindsight, it’s hard to imagine these Beatles classics having any other lyrics besides their official album versions.
Nevertheless, the fact that these songs were one change of heart or misdirection away from being completely different is a testament to songwriting’s fleeting, precarious nature.
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“Hey Jude”
Paul McCartney famously wrote the iconic Beatles track, “Hey Jude,” as an empowering bit of advice for bandmate John Lennon’s eldest son, Julian Lennon, who was struggling to deal with his father’s recent split from their family. Interestingly, it would also be John who saved McCartney from getting rid of one of the most recognizable lines in the entire song. In Barry Miles’ Many Years From Now, McCartney recalled playing the song for John and Yoko Ono. When he got to the lyric that said, the movement you need is on your shoulder, the musician said, “I’ll change that. It’s a bit crummy.”
“John said, ‘You won’t, you know. That’s the best line in it!’” McCartney continued. “That’s collaboration. When someone is that firm about a line that you’re going to junk, and he said, ‘No, keep it in.’ So, of course, you love that little line twice as much because it’s a little stray. It’s a little mutt that you were about to put down, and it was reprieved, and so it’s more beautiful than ever. When I’m singing it, that is when I think of John.”
“I Saw Her Standing There”
“I Saw Her Standing There” is one of the best examples of the Beatles’ early years when they were squarely in their teeny bopper era. The handclaps, the whoooo’s, the mention of falling in love as a teenager—the 1963 track is quintessentially Fab Four, serving as the opening track to the band’s U.S. debut, Introducing… The Beatles. But for a brief moment, the lyrics in this iconic Beatles song were going to be something completely different. As Paul McCartney put it in Anthology, “John would like some of my lines and not others.”
“He liked most of what I did,” he continued. “But there would sometimes be a cringe line, such as, She was just seventeen, she’d never been a beauty queen. John thought, ‘Beauty queen? Ugh.’ We were thinking of Butlins, so we asked ourselves, ‘What should it be?’ We came up with, You know what I mean, which is good, because you don’t know what I mean.”
“Eleanor Rigby”
Paul McCartney has always been a master at blending fiction and fantasy with his extensive use of characters in his songs, and “Eleanor Rigby” is no exception. The song centers around two main characters: the titular Eleanor Rigby, who is picking up the rice in the church where a wedding has been, and Father McKenzie, writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear. However, before it was Father McKenzie, it was actually going to be Father McCartney. Although John Lennon was a fan of the first character name, McCartney ultimately changed his mind.
Although McCartney liked the fact that his last name had the correct number of syllables, as he explained in Beatles ‘66: The Revolutionary Year, “I thought people would think it was supposed to be my dad, sitting knitting his socks. Dad’s a happy lad. So, I went through the telephone book, and I got the name McKenzie.”
“Yesterday”
Closing out our list of Beatles lyrics that almost never were is arguably one of the more drastic lyrical changes a Fab Four tune ever underwent from start to finish. Alas, sometimes the melody comes before the lyrics, and a songwriter has to improvise. This is how the classic Beatles track “Yesterday” was temporarily called “Scrambled Eggs.” “It didn’t have any words at first,” Paul McCartney explained in Anthology. “I blocked it out with ‘scrambled eggs.’ Scrambled eggs, oh, my baby, how I love your legs, diddle diddle, I believe in scrambled eggs.”
“This song was around for months and months,” John Lennon added. “It became a joke between us. Then, one morning, Paul woke up and the song and the title were both there, completed. I was sorry in a way. We had so many laughs about it. And it had been issued in America as an orchestral piece by George Martin called “Scrambled Egg.” Now, we are getting letters from fans telling us they’ve heard a number called “Scrambled Egg” that’s a dead copy of “Yesterday.””
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