“Yesterday” is a song by the English rock band the Beatles, written by Paul McCartney (credited to Lennon–McCartney), and first released on the album Help! in the United Kingdom in August 1965. As Lennon and McCartney were known to do at the time, a substitute working lyric, titled “Scrambled Eggs” (the working opening verse was “Scrambled eggs / Oh my baby how I love your legs / Not as much as I love scrambled eggs”), was used for the song until something more suitable was written. The original song, “Scrambled Eggs”, was written to hold the music and phrasing in place. It was performed by Paul McCartney and Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, and has been recorded and released by the Brittles, a Beatles-pastiche band. (More from Wikipedia)
I discussed last month that the opening riff from “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” came to Keith Richards in a dream. “Yesterday” has a similar origin; Paul McCartney had the entire melody in his head after a dream (probably sometime in 1964), and he rushed to the piano to play the tune before it faded from memory. This worried him considerably, as he wondered whether his “dream” was actually someone else’s song; but after checking with several people, Paul was convinced that it was an original work. There were no lyrics initially; the working title of the song was “Scrambled Eggs”, with these opening lines: “Scrambled eggs / Oh, my baby how I love your legs”.
Paul McCartney worked on the song incessantly for months; John Lennon is quoted in Wikipedia about “Yesterday”: “The song was around for months and months before we finally completed it. Every time we got together to write songs for a recording session, this one would come up. We almost had it finished. Paul wrote nearly all of it, but we just couldn’t find the right title. We called it ‘Scrambled Eggs’ and it became a joke between us. We made up our minds that only a one-word title would suit, we just couldn’t find the right one. Then one morning Paul woke up, and the song and the title were both there, completed. I was sorry in a way, we’d had so many laughs about it.”
(June 2015)
