Paul McCartney at AAMI Park Melbourne on Tuesday 5 December 2017. Photo by Ros O'Gorman

Paul McCartney at AAMI Park Melbourne on Tuesday 5 December 2017. Photo by Ros O'Gorman

Neil Young Is The Only Person To Perform Paul McCartney’s Original ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ Lyrics

by Paul Cashmere on November 15, 2021

in News

Paul McCartney has revealed to Howard Stern that his original lyric to ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ was a mistake and that John Lennon had him change it. But then McCartney told Neil Young the story and Young performed the original.

McCartney wrote ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ with the opening lyrics “well she was just 17, never been a beauty queen”.

Paul told Howard Stern that when he presented the song to John Lennon “we both looked at each other and I knew he was going to say that and I knew ‘oh, this is not good’. It wasn’t good. It was a rhyme but it wasn’t good.”

Decades later Paul told Neil Young about the line. Neil then sang the line at a music industry benefit. “Years later I was getting a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and Neil Young was there. I told him that story. There was a MusiCares thing, a big benefit in LA and Neil was playing there and he did that song and he used that line”.

Paul McCartney considers ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ the best song he has ever written.

‘I Saw Here Standing There’ was track one side one of the very first album for The Beatles ‘Please Please Me’. The first live recording at the Cavern Club in Liverpool later 1962. It was a slow song then. The version you know was recorded on 11 February 1963 at EMI Recording Studios at 3 Abbey Road, London. The studios were renamed Abbey Road Studios after The Beatles’ Abbey Road album in the 1970s.

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