The Complete Idiot's Guides discussion

The song “Yesterday” by the Beatles holds the Guinness Record for being the most-covered song (recordings done by other artists) in the world. The most recent estimate is that there are approximately 4,000 recordings of the tune. But would it have been as popular if it went by what the Beatles originally called it—“Scrambled Eggs”?

It took Paul McCartney nearly a year to finish the lyrics for “Yesterday.” He even had a piano put on the set of the film Help, just so he could work on the song, which tried just about everyone’s patience. (George Harrison was quoted as saying, “Blimey, he’s always talking about that song. You’d think he was Beethoven or somebody!”)

Finally it was down to the title. While McCartney struggled to find just the right words, he and John Lennon came up with a placeholder: Scrambled Eggs. (The whole first line was “Scrambled eggs/oh my baby how I love your legs.”) John Lennon remembered it this way:

"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."

McCartney wrote the final lyric in the back seat of a car on his way to a vacation house in Portugal.


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