TOP 100 SONGS OF THE BEATLES ― 4

“Yesterday" (McCartney – September 13, 1965)  



Help! – Side 2, Track 6 (2:03)

YouTube [Live]

From Wikipedia, Rolling Stone, About.com, and Google –

"Yesterday" is a song originally recorded by the Beatles for their 1965 album Help!. Although credited to "Lennon–McCartney", the song was written solely by Paul McCartney. It remains popular today with more than 2,200 cover versions, and is one of the most covered songs in the history of recorded music. At the time of its first appearance the song was released by the Beatles' record company as a single in the United States but not in the United Kingdom (for further details see below). Consequently, whilst it topped the American chart in 1965 the song first hit the British top 10 three months after the release of Help! in a cover version by Matt Monro. "Yesterday" 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 a melancholy acoustic guitar ballad about the break-up of a relationship. McCartney is the only Beatle to appear on the recording, and it was the first official recording by the Beatles that relied upon a performance by a single member of the band. 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.) 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.

History –

Although Paul McCartney and George Martin have claimed this was written during the Beatles' 1964 tour of France, which would have made it a year and a half old when it was recorded, Paul's later claim of the song coming to him in a dream at girlfriend Jane Asher's house, along with other anecdotal evidence, would seem to suggest that it was written sometime in January 1965, when Paul awoke with the full melody intact and played it on the piano in Asher's attic.

The odd (but not unheard of) nature of the song's "creation" caused Paul to take the melody around to industry vets for about a month, asking them if he'd unconsciously stolen someone else's song. In order to keep the melody in his mind, Paul wrote a comedic first verse that went, in part, "Scrambled eggs / Oh how I really really love your legs..." Having shown it to the band in the spring of 1965, the group began to refer to the uncompleted song as "Scrambled Eggs," perhaps ensuring that the finished version would start with its title.

Paul kept working at the melody in off hours, leading Help! director Richard Lester to jokingly threaten to throw the piano off the sound stage if McCartney didn't stop playing it.

Finally, on May 27, 1965, Paul flew to Lisbon, Portugal, to vacation at the villa of Shadows member Bruce Welch. On the car ride in, Paul began to compose lyrics on the back of an envelope, based around a title (and theme) of "Yesterday."

Although the other group members liked "Yesterday" well enough, they didn't consider it Beatles material -- especially not after George Martin, the band's producer, suggested scoring it with nothing but acoustic guitar and a string section. Martin thought of releasing it as a solo Paul single, but even McCartney balked at that; his own main concern was that the result not sound too much like easy-listening music. Finally, compromises were reached: Martin used a classier string quartet for the arrangement, and McCartney agreed not to release the song as a single in England. (Though it was released there on an EP of the same name, and as a single in 1976.) 

The song was done in two takes, Paul having reversed two lines accidentally in the first. The string quartet was laid down the next day, with McCartney's vocal fed into the studio as a guide. Martin's contribution to "Yesterday," other than the arrangement, was to convince Paul that a one-word title was not "corny." Paul, for his part, had but one instruction to the string quartet: no vibrato. (He was reportedly afraid the result would sound like gypsy music.)

Capitol made the decisions on which songs were released as singles in the US, however, but "Yesterday" was not even considered for a-side single release there; it was relegated only to the flip of "Act Naturally," sung by Ringo, the group's most popular member in the US. However, fan reaction was immediate, and the song was quickly re-positioned as the A-side.

The vague lyrics have been rumored to deal with the very sudden death of McCartney's mother, and the resultant guilt he felt over his selfish and somewhat cold reaction to it. If this is true, it would appear to be subconscious on the singer's part. The performance of the song on the British TV show Blackpool Night Out (August 1965, and the very first performance of this song on television) reportedly shows Paul dedicating this song to ex-girlfriend Iris Caldwell. Other reports have him phoning Iris, who supposedly found him too unemotional, and playing the song for her to prove otherwise.

John Lennon, who liked the song, was bothered by the lyrics' lack of resolution; he was also bothered for the rest of his life by fans who thought he'd co-written it (as the credits insist) and would sing it whenever they saw him. He was known to mock the song in the studio during his solo years. ("I'm not half the man I used to be... now I'm an amputee.")  

Origins –

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.

McCartney's initial concern was that he had subconsciously plagiarized someone else's 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 their 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, 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'."

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 McCartney's work in progress, George Harrison summing this up when he said: "Blimey, he's always talking about that song. You'd 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 Day's 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 song's 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 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."

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, 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."

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".

Composition and structure –

Ostensibly simple, featuring only McCartney playing an Epiphone Texan steel-string acoustic guitar backed by a string quartet in one of the Beatles' first use of session musicians, "Yesterday" has two contrasting sections, differing in melody and rhythm, producing a sense of disjunction.

The first section ("Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away...") opens with an F chord (the 3rd of the chord is omitted), then moving to Em7 before resolving to A7 and then to D-minor. In this sense, the opening chord is a decoy; as musicologist Alan Pollack points out, the home key (F-major) has little time to establish itself before "heading towards the relative D-minor." He points out that this diversion is a compositional device commonly used by Lennon and McCartney, which he describes as "delayed gratification".

The second section ("Why she had to go I don't know...") is, according to Pollack, less musically surprising on paper than it sounds. Starting with Em7, the harmonic progression quickly moves through the A-major, D-minor, and (closer to F-major) B♭, before resolving back to F-major, and at the end of this, McCartney holds F while the strings descend to resolve to the home key to introduce the restatement of the first section, before a brief hummed closing phrase.

Pollack described the scoring as "truly inspired", citing it as an example of "[Lennon & McCartney's] flair for creating stylistic hybrids"; in particular, he praises the "ironic tension drawn between the schmaltzy content of what is played by the quartet and the restrained, spare nature of the medium in which it is played."

The tonic key of the song is F major (although, since McCartney tuned his guitar down a whole step, he was playing the chords as if it were in G), where the song begins before veering off into the key of D minor. It is this frequent use of the minor, and the ii-V7 chord progression (Em and A7 chords in this case) leading into it, that gives the song its melancholy aura. The A7 chord is an example of a secondary dominant, specifically a V/vi chord. The G7 chord in the bridge is another secondary dominant, in this case a V/V chord, but rather than resolve it to the expected chord, as with the A7 to Dm in the verse, McCartney instead follows it with the IV chord, a B♭. This motion creates a descending chromatic line of C–B–B♭–A to accompany the title lyric.

The string arrangement reinforces the song's air of sadness, in the groaning cello line that connects the two halves of the bridge, notably the "blue" seventh in the second bridge pass (the E♭ played after the vocal line, "I don't know / she wouldn't say") and in the descending run by the viola that segues the bridge back into the verses, mimicked by McCartney's vocal on the second pass of the bridge. This viola line and the high A sustained by the violin over the final verse are the only elements of the string arrangement attributable to McCartney rather than George Martin.

When the song was performed on The Ed Sullivan Show, it was done in the above-mentioned key of F, with McCartney as the only Beatle to perform, and the studio orchestra providing the string accompaniment. However, all of the Beatles played in a G-major version which was used in the Tokyo concerts during their 1966 tours.

When McCartney appeared on The Howard Stern Show, he stated that he owns the original lyrics to "Yesterday" written on the back of an envelope. McCartney later performed the original "Scrambled Eggs" version of the song, plus additional new lyrics, with Jimmy Fallon and The Roots on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.

Resemblance to other songs

In 2001, Ian Hammond speculated that McCartney subconsciously based "Yesterday" on Ray Charles' version of "Georgia on My Mind", but closed his article by saying that despite the similarities "Yesterday" is a "completely original and individual [work]."

In July 2003, British musicologists stumbled upon superficial similarities between the lyric and rhyming schemes of "Yesterday" and Nat King Cole's "Answer Me, My Love" (originally a German song by Gerhard Winkler and Fred Rauch called Mütterlein), leading to speculation that McCartney had been influenced by the song. McCartney's publicists denied any resemblance between "Answer Me, My Love" and "Yesterday". "Yesterday" begins with the lines: "Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away. Now it looks as though they're here to stay." In its second stanza, "Answer Me, My Love" has the lines: "You were mine yesterday. I believed that love was here to stay. Won't you tell me where I've gone astray".

From Rolling Stone –

The tune that would go on to become the most covered song in history began as something called "Scrambled Eggs." It also began in a dream.

"It fell out of bed," Paul McCartney once said about the origins of "Yesterday." "I had a piano by my bedside, and I must have dreamed it, because I tumbled out of bed and put my hands on the piano keys and I had a tune in my head. It was just all there, a complete thing. I couldn't believe it. It came too easy."

In fact, it was so fully formed that he was sure he must have unconsciously plagiarized a melody he'd heard somewhere else. So for months he allowed the unpolished song to sit on the shelf, occasionally strumming a few bars for George Martin or Ringo Starr and asking, "Is this like something?"

Martin recalled McCartney playing him the song as far back as January 1964, before the Beatles even landed in America. McCartney's own recollection has him writing the tune later, but regardless, John Lennon confirmed that the song "was around for months and months before we finally completed it."

For a long time, McCartney couldn't get past the placeholder words "Scrambled eggs/Oh, my baby, how I love your legs." He finished the actual lyrics on a holiday with his girlfriend, actress Jane Asher, creating a frank poem of regret that he has called "the most complete song I have ever written."

Recording the track was more challenging. As Martin explained, "It wasn't a three-guitars-and-drums kind of song. I said, 'Put down guitar and voice just to begin with, Paul, and then we'll see what we can do with it.'" After trying several different approaches, including one with Lennon on the organ, Martin made an unorthodox suggestion. "I said, 'What about having a string accompaniment, you know, fairly tastefully done?' Paul said, 'Yuk! I don't want any of that Mantovani rubbish. I don't want any of that syrupy stuff.' Then I thought back to my classical days, and I said, 'Well, what about a string quartet, then?'"

McCartney still wasn't convinced. "I said, 'Are you kidding?'" he recalled. "'This is a rock group!' I hated the idea. [Martin] said, 'Well, let's just try it, and if you hate it, we can just wipe it and go back to you and the guitar.' So I sat at the piano and worked out the arrangements with him, and we did it, and, of course, we liked it."

The recording captures the Beatles' inventive spirit, opening the door to a willingness to experiment with new sounds. "Yesterday" signaled to the world that the Beatles — and rock & roll — had made a sudden leap from brash adolescence to literate maturity.

After the session, Martin took manager Brian Epstein aside and quietly suggested that since none of the other Beatles contributed to the track, perhaps the song should be issued as a Paul McCartney solo record. Epstein's response, according to Martin, was, "This is the Beatles — we don't differentiate." Meanwhile, the group was still unsure about "Yesterday" and didn't release it as a single in the U.K. "We were a little embarrassed by it," McCartney said. "We were a rock & roll band."

"Yesterday" quickly went to Number One in the U.S. (It was one of a half-dozen tracks Capitol left off the American version of the Help! soundtrack and was released as a single instead.) It is the most popular song in the Beatles' catalog, recorded more than 2,500 times — by everyone from Ray Charles and Elvis Presley to Frank Sinatra and Daffy Duck — a fact that did not necessarily sit well with Lennon, who had nothing to do with it. Lennon once joked, "I go to restaurants and the groups always play 'Yesterday.' I even signed a guy's violin in Spain after he played us 'Yesterday.' He couldn't understand that I didn't write the song. But I guess he couldn't have gone from table to table playing 'I Am the Walrus.'"

Recording –

The track was recorded at Abbey Road Studios on 14 June 1965, immediately following the taping of "I'm Down", and four days before McCartney's 23rd birthday. There are conflicting accounts of how the song was recorded, the most quoted one being that McCartney recorded the song by himself, without bothering to involve the other band members. Alternative sources, however, state that McCartney and the other Beatles tried a variety of instruments, including drums and an organ, and that George Martin later persuaded them to allow McCartney to play his Epiphone Texan steel-string acoustic guitar, later on editing-in a string quartet for backup. Regardless, none of the other band members was included in the final recording. However, the song was played with the other members of the band in concert during 1966, in G major instead of F major.

McCartney performed two takes of "Yesterday" on 14 June 1965. Take 2 was deemed better and used as the master take. On 17 June, an additional vocal track by McCartney and a string quartet were overdubbed on take 2 and that version was released.

Take 1, without the string overdub, was later released on the Anthology 2 compilation. On Take 1, McCartney can be heard giving chord changes to George Harrison before starting, but George does not appear to actually play. Take 2 had two lines transposed from the first take: "There's a shadow hanging over me"/"I'm not half the man I used to be", though it seems clear that their order Take 2 was the correct one, because McCartney can be heard, in Take 1, suppressing a laugh at his mistake.

In 2006, just before the album Love was released, George Martin elaborated on the recording set-up of the song:

"Paul played his guitar and sang it live, a mic on the guitar and mic on the voice. But, of course, the voice comes on to the guitar mic and the guitar comes on to the voice mic. So there's leakage there. Then I said I'd do a string quartet. The musicians objected to playing with headphones, so I gave them Paul's voice and guitar on two speakers either side of their microphones. So there's leakage of Paul's guitar and voice on the string tracks."

Takes: 2

Personnel

Paul McCartney – Vocals, acoustic guitar (Epiphone FT-79 "Texan")

Sidney Sax, Tony Gilbert – Violin
Ken Essex – Viola
Francisco Gabarro – Cello

Release –

Eleven years after the US release, EMI released "Yesterday" on a single in the UK.

Since "Yesterday" was unlike the Beatles' previous work and did not fit in with their image, and was essentially a solo recording, the Beatles refused to permit the release of a single in the United Kingdom. This did not prevent Matt Monro from recording the first of many cover versions of "Yesterday". His version made it into the top ten in the UK charts soon after its release in the autumn of 1965.

The Beatles' influence over their US record label, Capitol, was not as strong as it was over EMI's Parlophone in Britain. A single was released in the US, pairing "Yesterday" with "Act Naturally", a track which featured vocals by Starr. The single was released on 13 September 1965 and topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart for four weeks, beginning on 9 October. The song spent a total of 11 weeks on the chart, selling a million copies within five weeks.

"Yesterday" was the fifth of six number one singles in a row on the American charts, a record at the time. The other singles were "I Feel Fine", "Eight Days a Week", "Ticket to Ride", "Help!", and "We Can Work It Out". The record was equaled by the Bee Gees in the 1970s and surpassed by Whitney Houston in the 1980s. "Yesterday" also marked a turning point in who wrote number one singles for the group. Lennon wrote five through "Help!", whereas afterwards McCartney wrote eight starting with "Yesterday". On 4 March 1966, "Yesterday" was released as an EP in the UK, joined by "Act Naturally" on the A-side with "You Like Me Too Much" and "It's Only Love" on the B-side. By 12 March, it had begun its run on the charts. On 26 March 1966, the EP went to number one, a position it held for two months. Later that same year, "Yesterday" was included as the title track for the US-only Yesterday and Today album, which was originally packaged in the "butcher sleeve".

Ten years later on 8 March 1976, "Yesterday" was released by Parlophone as a single in the UK, featuring "I Should Have Known Better" on the B-side. Entering the charts on 13 March, the single stayed there for seven weeks, but it never rose higher than number 8 (however, by this time the song had been featured on no less than three top 5 albums and an EP which topped the charts). The release came about due to the expiration of the Beatles' contract with EMI, Parlophone's parent. EMI released as many singles by the Beatles as they could on the same day, leading to 23 of them hitting the top 100 in the United Kingdom charts, including six in the top 50.

In 2006, a version of the song was included on the album Love. The version begins with the acoustic guitar intro from the song "Blackbird" only with "Blackbird" transposed down a whole step to F major from its original key G in order to transition smoothly into "Yesterday".

Debate on the release of the song –

Concerning the debate on how the song should be released, Martin later said:

"[Yesterday] wasn't really a Beatles record and I discussed this with Brian Epstein: 'You know this is Paul's song... shall we call it Paul McCartney?' He said 'No, whatever we do we are not splitting up the Beatles.'"

Reception –

"Yesterday" is one of the most recorded songs in the history of popular music; its entry in Guinness World Records states that, by January 1986, 1,600 cover versions had been made, by an eclectic mix of artists including Cilla Black, Marianne Faithfull, Tose Proeski, The Mamas and the Papas and Barry McGuire, The Seekers, Joan Baez, Donny Hathaway, Michael Bolton, Bob Dylan, Liberace, Frank Sinatra, Matt Monro, Elvis Presley, Ray Charles (1967), Marvin Gaye, Daffy Duck, Jan & Dean, The Sylvers, Wet Wet Wet, P. P. Arnold, Plácido Domingo, The Head Shop, Billy Dean, Wing, En Vogue, LeAnn Rimes, Muslim Magomayev and Boyz II Men. In 1976, David Essex did a cover version of the song for the ephemeral musical documentary All This and World War II. After Muzak switched in the 1990s to programs based on commercial recordings, Muzak's inventory grew to include about 500 "Yesterday" covers. At the 2006 Grammy Awards, McCartney performed the song live as a mash-up with Linkin Park and Jay-Z's "Numb/Encore". It is Vladimir Putin's favorite Beatles song.

"Yesterday" won the Ivor Novello Award for 'Outstanding Song of 1965', and came second for 'Most Performed Work of the Year', losing out to another McCartney composition, "Michelle". The song has received its fair share of acclaim in recent times as well, ranking 13th on Rolling Stone's 2004 list "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time" and fourth on the magazine's list "The Beatles 100 Greatest Songs" (compiled in 2010). In 1999, Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI) placed "Yesterday" third on their list of songs of the 20th century most performed on American radio and television, with approximately seven million performances. "Yesterday" was surpassed only by The Association's "Never My Love" and the Righteous Brothers' "You've Lost That Loving Feeling". "Yesterday" was voted Best Song of the 20th century in a 1999 BBC Radio 2 poll.

"Yesterday", however, has also been criticized for being mundane and mawkish; Bob Dylan had a marked dislike for the song, stating that "If you go into the Library of Congress, you can find a lot better than that. There are millions of songs like 'Michelle' and 'Yesterday' written in Tin Pan Alley". Ironically, Dylan ultimately recorded his own version of "Yesterday" four years later, but it was never released.

Shortly before his death in 1980, Lennon explained that he thought the lyrics did not "resolve into any sense... They're good – but if you read the whole song, it doesn't say anything; you don't know what happened. She left and he wishes it were yesterday – that much you get – but it doesn't really resolve. ... Beautiful – and I never wished I'd written it." "Paul wrote this great song, 'Yesterday.' It's a beautiful song. I never wished I'd written it, and I don't believe in yesterday... Life begins at 40, so they promise and I believe it. What's going to come?" Lennon made reference to the song on his album Imagine with the song "How Do You Sleep?". The song appears to attack McCartney with the line "The only thing you done was Yesterday, but since you've gone you're just another day". Lennon later said in an interview with Playboy that the song was actually an attack on himself as opposed to McCartney.

Trivia –

Such was the song's immediate popularity that the band added it to their 1966 tour set list, with Paul playing and singing the song alone on acoustic guitar (though the Budokan hall concerts in Japan reportedly feature a whole band arrangement).

Although some historians consider George and Ira Gershwin's "Summertime" (from Porgy and Bess to be a serious contender to the throne, "Yesterday" is widely considered to be the most covered song of all time, with over three thousand versions recorded so far.

"Yesterday" was the most popular song ever played on American radio until 1973. With over eight million performances on radio and television, "Yesterday" has been surpassed only by The Association's "Never My Love" and the Righteous Brothers' "You've Lost That Loving Feeling." (It would take approximately 40 years to play "Yesterday" eight million times in a row!) Like episodes of I Love Lucy, it is estimated that "Yesterday" is currently on the airwaves somewhere in the world at any given moment.

In recent years, Nat King Cole's "Answer Me" has been suggested as a lyrical (but not musical) antecedent to "Yesterday' featuring as it does the lyric "Yesterday, I believed that love was here to stay, won't you tell me where I've gone astray." Musically, it has recently been compared to an Italian ballad from the 19th century, "Piccere' Che Vene a Dicere." Structurally, it has also been likened to Ray Charles' "Georgia On My Mind."

Paul himself had to acquire the rights to re-record this song for his 1985 film Give My Regards To Broad Street, since, at that time, they were controlled by Michael Jackson. When the group's Anthology 2 CD was released in 1996, Yoko Ono refused to let the songwriting credits be issued to McCartney alone, claiming this would violate the pair's original agreement. When issuing his concert DVD Back in the U.S.: Live 2002 Paul responded by switching the Beatles songs' credits to "McCartney/Lennon."

Singer Matt Monro had the first hit cover of "Yesterday," hitting the UK Top Ten with it in October 1965. Other Brit vocalists including Billy J. Kramer and Chris Farlowe, claim they were offered the demo to record before the Beatles even did, but both felt it didn't fit their image. Farlowe ended up recording it eventually. (McCartney denies the offer.)


Today in Beatles History (From The Internet Beatles Album) April 6 – 

1962 – Performance at the Cavern, with the Saints Jazz Band.

1963 – 10.31-11.30am. BBC's Easy Beat broadcast (recorded 3 April 1963).

1966 – Studio 3. 2.30-7.15pm. Recording: "Mark I" (working title of "Tomorrow Never Knows") (overdub onto take 3). Studio 3. 8.15pm-1.30am. Recording: "Got To Get You Into My Life" (takes 1-5). Producer: George Martin; Engineer: Geoff Emerick; 2nd Engineer: Phil McDonald.
– Dub of effects for 'Tomorrow Never Knows'.

1967 – Paul flies to Los Angeles.
– Studio 2 (control room only). 7.00pm-1.00am. Stereo mixing: Crossfades for LP; "With A Little Help From My Friends" (remixes 1-3, from take 11); "Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite!" (remixes 1-8, from take 9); "Fixing A Hole" (remix 1, from take 3); "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds' (remixes 1-5, from take 8). Producer: George Martin; Engineer: Geoff Emerick; 2nd Engineer: Richard Lush.

1969 – Abbey Road, Studio unknown. Mono mixing: "Get Back" (remix 5); "Don't Let Me Down" (remix 1). Stereo mixing: 'Get Back' (remix 1); "Don't Let Me Down" (remix 1). Producer: George Martin?; Engineer: Glyn Johns; 2nd Engineer: Jerry Boys.
– Session booked by Paul to improve the "Get Back" mix. The stereo mixes are, initially, for use in the US. End of sessions for "Get Back"/"Don't Let Me Down".

1989 – A Mercedes Benz made in 1970 for John is auctioned at Christie's.