Paul McCartney Yesterday, Halifax 2009 video follows in the 2nd part of the article
Power and talent of the Beatles has appealed to people for more than forty years across four generations
The success of The Beatles: Rock Band
Sometimes that fact surprises me like it did Thursday evening. Before supper I got the urge to play Yesterday on the guitar. I tried to play it from memory as I did 40 years ago in the key of F but I couldn’t remember all the chords.
After supper with the song half mastered, I brought my guitar and book into the kitchen to practice it while the girls were doing dishes. If you can’t help, you can at least entertain was my thought.
After I finished Yesterday, Maggie who is 14 grabbed the Beatles songbook and flipped to Hey Jude
Yesterday by Paul McCartney at Concert on the Commons, Halifax NS August 2009
“Play that,” Maggie said.
So I started into Hey Jude she sang along and danced across the kitchen floor.
Before the last note had rung, she gripped the book and flipped to With a Little Help From My Friends.
“Play that one.”
That was a challenge since I have the Joe Cocker version in my head but she wanted the original.
She was challenging me to play those tunes from the 60’s. It dawned on me: she has watched the teen flick Across the Universe over and over. She knows and likes the Beatles.
We played her game for almost an hour until my hands were sore. She picked the songs. I’d play and we’d sing along together while she danced.
Here were a young teenager and a Boomer enjoying the same music together. I don’t think there is any other group that she likes from the 60s. My 90 year old mother likes the Beatles, especially Yesterday so the video from the Halifax concert goes out to her.
The Halifax 2009 concert on the Commons was a mix of gray haired seniors, middle aged and very young people. The Beatles are a timeless group and Paul McCartney has been keeping the flame alive and bringing joy to all of us.
Playing Yesterday
I looked the song up in The Beatles Complete Chord Songbook
Yesterday is quite easy to play except for the number of chord changes. McCartney is playing the bass line on the top two strings with his thumb and strumming the bottom 3 strings (sometimes 4) with the back of his finger nails.
I actually cheat and transposed it to Bb5 which is easier on a baritone like mine. Who has Paul McCartney’s high range? McCartney appears to have tuned his acoustic guitar down one notch to use the G5 structure while really playing in the key of F. This is probably how he played it originally. (Wikipedia agrees with me.)
Yesterday
Yesterday is considered one of the best songs of the 20th century. It has been covered by other artists more than 3,000 times yet it almost wasn’t released.
Written around the time of the movie Help, the song was definitely Paul’s and none of the other Beatles like it. It wasn’t like their songs with its soft melody and evocative lyrics of regret.
The original release was the B side of “Act Naturally” sung by Ringo Starr. I remember it coming out we thought Yesterday was the real hit and Act Naturally just a throw away for Ringo.
Paul wrote Yesterday first as a tune that he woke from his sleep while staying with his girlfriend Jane Asher to play on the piano. He thought he might have stolen it from another song so he played it for everyone he met for awhile until no one could tell him the name of the tune.
“I was living in a little flat at the top of a house and i had a piano by my bed. I woke up one morning with a tune in my head and I thought, ‘Hey, I don’t know this tune – or do I?’ It was like a jazz melody. My dad used to know a lot of old jazz tunes; I thought maybe I’d just remembered it from the past. I went to the piano and found the chords to it, made sure I remembered it and then hawked it round to all my friends, asking what it was: ‘Do you know this? It’s a good little tune, but I couldn’t have written it because I dreamt it.'” The Beatles Bible
“So first of all I checked this melody out, and people said to me, ‘No, it’s lovely, and I’m sure it’s 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, it’s mine!’ It had no words. I used to call it ‘Scrambled Eggs’.” (Paul McCartney by Barry Miles)
John thought it needed a one line title. The code word for the song was scrambled eggs. “The song was around for months and months before we finally completed it,” said John Lennon. “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.” (Ian Hammond, Old Sweet Songs)
The lyrics came to Paul on a trip to Portugal. “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.” (Miles)
Bob Dylan panned the song and then recorded it four years later. Bit of a turnaround you might say.
The video and song is copyright by Paul McCartney used under “fair use” USA and “fair dealing” Canada copyright law as part of news or critical report. We recommend purchasing the video or music you like.
Story from Wikipedia and The Beatles Bible
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