Here is a quick pub quiz question for you. Which megahit began as “Scrambled Eggs”, with the working lyrics:
Scrambled eggs
Oh my baby how I love your legs
Not as much as I love scrambled eggs...
It is, of course, “Yesterday” by The Beatles, which Guinness World Records lists as the most covered song of all time, amassing over 1,600 recorded versions to date, and 7 million performances in the 20th century alone.
If we can accept this as a working definition of the most successful pop song ever written and performed, we’re left with an intriguing question: could the song have achieved its staggering success if the lyrics hadn’t eventually morphed into “Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away...”? Or would it have been consigned to the same pile of novelty hits as David Bowie’s “The Laughing Gnome”, or The Beatles’ own “Yellow Submarine”?
By 1976, Paul McCartney was apparently determined to answer this himself, adorning the slick R&B of “She’s My Baby” with the immortal lines:
She’s taking me by
