Yesterday or… Scrambled Eggs?

Yesterday – one of the most famous and popular song of The Beatles.

The melody of it, the lyrics… this song is touching and telling us a story we can all relate to.

In the next pages everything you thought about the lyrics of this song is going to shatter!

Hold tight, and lets start the journey of how ‘Yesterday’ was born.

Paul woke up one morning with the tune for ‘Yesterday’ in his head. There was a piano by the bed and he went straight to it and started playing.

“It was just all there,” he said. “A complete thing, I couldn’t believe it.”

Paul was initially unsure whether he had actually thought it up himself or if he had unintentionally stolen it from another composer. He played the tune to the other Beatles and recalled, “It was like handing in something you’d found at the police station and waiting to see if anyone claimed it.”

A song coming to you in a dream is a pretty imposing moment in one’s career and McCartney was determined to make sure the tune became a song. As such, the singer used any lyrics he could think of so that he could compose the melody of the track. The original title for the song, therefore, was actually ‘Scrambled Eggs.’

McCartney’s original lyrics were, “Scrambled eggs, Oh you’ve got such lovely legs, Scrambled eggs. Oh, my baby, how I love your legs.”

Paul must have conceived the tune early in 1965, but it wasn’t until June when he took a brief holiday in Portugal that he’d completed the lyric. He then hit on the idea of using a one word title – ‘Yesterday’.

Paul stated, “I remember mulling over the tune ‘Yesterday’, and suddenly getting these little one-word openings to the verse. I started to develop the idea… da-da da, yes-ter-day, sud-den-ly, fun-il-ly, mer-il-ly and Yes-ter-day, that’s good. All my troubles seemed so far away. It’s easy to rhyme those a’s: say, nay, today, away, play, stay, there’s a lot of rhymes and those fall in quite easily, so I gradually pieced it together from that journey. Sud-den-ly, and ‘b’ again, another easy rhyme: e, me, tree, flea, we, and I had the basis of it.”

Two days after returning from Portugal, Paul recorded ‘Yesterday’ at Abbey Road. The song startled pop fans at the time because it featured a string quartet with Paul as the only Beatle on the session. In America it became a single and reached the Number 1 spot but, in Britain, it was never released as either an A or a B side during the group’s career. It rapidly became a pop standard, covered by everyone from Frank Sinatra to Marianne Faithfull.

In the next pages are some of the covers for this song:

One of the covers actually refers to the original lyrics.

When Paul McCartney stopped by to visit Jimmy Fallon on ‘Late Night’ show, the former Beatle talked about the origins of ‘Yesterday’. Fallon then asked McCartney to perform the never-before-heard “Scrambled Eggs” version with him, which he willingly obliged.

Beside scrambled eggs, other subjects explored in this cover: women’s legs, waffle fries.

Fallon tried to add a verse about chicken wings, but the vegetarian McCartney shot him down and changed it to tofu wings.

The lyrics:

Scrambled eggs
Oh my baby how I love your legs
Not as much as I love scrambled eggs
Oh we should eat some scrambled eggs

Waffle fries
Oh my darling how I love your thighs
Not as much as I love waffle fries
Oh have you tried the waffle fries

They are
So damn good that they should be illegal
They’re like
Regular fries but they’re shaped like a waffle

Chicken wings…
“Chicken wings? No, no, no… Vegetarian, no chicken wings.”
“Oh, I forgot, it was actually…”
Tofu wings
Oh my baby when I hear you sing
All I think about is tofu wings
Oh did you bring the tofu wings

There’s a
Place I know where I go for kick-ass wings
We could
Even get a side of onion rings

Scrambled eggs
Oh my baby how I love your legs
Not as much as I love scrambled eggs
Oh let’s go get some scrambled eggs