The Beatles' lyrics: Holy pop relics
Hunter Davies' new book gathers the original scribblings of the Fab Four that became timeless pop classics. CBS News
Songs with word by The Beatles have never failed to delight their listeners. Now many of those songs are delighting library-goers as well. Mark Phillips takes us browsing:
On a busy road in London sits the British Library, and its collection of about 170,000,000 literary works and historic documents.
Some of them are given pride of place in the Treasures Gallery. Oh, you know, original works of Shakespeare . . . handwritten musical scores by Beethoven . . . the Magna Carta, only the first recorded attempt at constitutional government . . .
And a collection of original lyrics of Beatles songs, scribbled on scraps of paper, or the backs of envelopes, or on a child's card. "Yesterday." "Ticket to Ride." "A Hard Day's Night."
The music seems everlasting. But the lyrics were disposable, throw-aways . . . until Hunter Davies picked them up.
'Well, the Beatles never seemed -- John and Paul, main writers, never seemed to have any paper in the house," Davies said. "They had these massive houses, but they never had stationery or notepads. The songs suddenly came to them, obviously the music, they played the guitar or the piano; but when it came to the words, they were going 'round the house going, 'Gimme some paper. Gimme a scrap.'"
Davies has now assembled the scraps -- those he collected when he hung around with the Beatles as their official biographer, and with Paul on a family vacation. He took his lyrics and those he borrowed from others, and put them into a book.
Once the songs were recorded, the Beatles lost interest in the scribbled notes.
'I would say, 'I'm gonna write about this song. Can I have this?' This being a scrap of paper where they scribbled the words," Davies said. "And the words would be perhaps changed. Perhaps Ringo had come in and they'd say, 'Ringo, this is what we are doing tonight.'
Little, Brown
"So at the end of the day they would say, 'Yes, you can have them' because the cleaners would burn them.'"
And those original lyrics tell secrets of how the songs came to be.
The scribbled lines of "Help" show what Davies said were Lennon's difficulty with the scan of the line: "When I was younger than I am today" became "When I was younger, so much younger than today."
