DO YOU REMEMBER? Billboard #1 Hot 100 (This Week in 1965) The Beatles: Yesterday Yesterday is a song originally recorded by The Beatles for their 1965 album Help! The song remains popular today with more than 2,200 cover versions, making it one of the most covered songs in the history of recorded music. It was voted the best song of the 20th century in a 1999 BBC Radio 2 poll of music experts and listeners and was also voted the No. 1 Pop song of all time by MTV and Rolling Stone magazine the following year. In 1997, the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI) asserts that it was performed over seven million times in the 20th century alone. Yesterday is an acoustic guitar ballad about a relationship break-up. It was the first official recording by The Beatles that relied upon a performance by a single member of the band, Paul McCartney. He was accompanied by a string quartet. The final recording was so different from other works by The Beatles that the band members vetoed the release of the song as a single in the United Kingdom. (However, it was issued as a single there in 1976.) Although credited to Lennon–McCartney, the song was written solely by McCartney. In 2000 McCartney asked Yoko Ono if she would agree to change the credit on the song to read McCartney–Lennon in the The Beatles Anthology but she refused. According to biographers of McCartney and the Beatles, McCartney composed the entire melody in a dream one night in his room at the Wimpole Street home of his then girlfriend Jane Asher and her family. Upon waking, he hurried to a piano and played the tune to avoid forgetting it. McCartneys initial concern was that he had subconsciously plagiarised someone elses work (known as cryptomnesia). As he put it, For about a month I went round to people in the music business and asked them whether they had ever heard it before. Eventually it became like handing something in to the police. I thought if no-one claimed it after a few weeks then I could have it. Upon being convinced that he had not robbed anyone of his melody, McCartney began writing lyrics to suit it. 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), was used for the song until something more suitable was written. In his biography, Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now, McCartney recalled: So first of all I checked this melody out, and people said to me, No, its lovely, and Im sure its all yours. It took me a little while to allow myself to claim it, but then like a prospector I finally staked my claim; stuck a little sign on it and said, Okay, its mine! It had no words. I used to call it Scrambled Eggs. During the shooting of Help!, a piano was placed on one of the stages where filming was being conducted and McCartney would take advantage of this opportunity to tinker with the song. Richard Lester, the director, was eventually greatly annoyed by this and lost his temper, telling McCartney to finish writing the song or he would have the piano removed. The patience of the other Beatles was also tested by McCartneys work in progress, George Harrison summing this up when he said: Blimey, hes always talking about that song. Youd think he was Beethoven or somebody! McCartney originally claimed he had written Yesterday during the Beatles tour of France in 1964; however, the song was not released until the summer of 1965. During the intervening time, The Beatles released two albums, A Hard Days Night and Beatles for Sale, both of which could have included Yesterday. Although McCartney has never elaborated his claims, a delay may have been due to a disagreement between McCartney and George Martin regarding the songs arrangement, or the opinion of the other Beatles who felt it did not suit their image. Lennon later indicated that the song had been around for a while before: 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 couldnt 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 couldnt 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, wed had so many laughs about it. McCartney said the breakthrough with the lyrics came during a trip to Portugal in May 1965: 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, thats good. All my troubles seemed so far away. Its easy to rhyme those as: say, nay, today, away, play, stay, theres 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. On 27 May 1965, McCartney and Asher flew to Lisbon for a holiday in Albufeira, Algarve, and he borrowed an acoustic guitar from Bruce Welch, in whose house they were staying, and completed the work on Yesterday. The song was offered as a demo to Chris Farlowe prior to The Beatles recording it, but he turned it down as he considered it too soft. The Beatles
Posted on: Thu, 23 Oct 2014 07:34:06 +0000