Watch Neil Young perform ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ for Paul McCartney
The opening track from The Beatles’ debut album, ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, is the moment in which a new cultural shift began. Here, we revisit a rendition of the song by the great Neil Young, who performed the track with Crazy Horse for a star-studded crowd featuring original songwriter Paul McCartney.
Beatles aficionados will notice that Young’s version contains a little joke for Paul’s benefit. In a 2021 interview with Rolling Stone, McCartney opened up about the evolution of ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, as he explained: “My line was ‘She was just 17 and she’d never been a beauty queen,’” he said. “And I gave that look to John, like, ‘Beauty queen?’ And he sort of gave me a ‘Beauty queen?’ look back. So we just said, ‘Let’s do something different.’ Then ‘You know what I mean’ came up, which is much more satisfying.” This rendition, however, sees Young singing Paul’s original line.
‘I Saw Her Standing There’ was written while The Beatles were still living in Liverpool. According to Paul, it was written on the porch of his house on 20 Forthlin Road when he and John should have been at school. McCartney had come up with the original idea on the way back from a concert in Southport, with the pair finishing it off together. Remarkably, the duo even found time to add a piano part using the beloved upright in Paul’s impeccably neat living room.
Speaking in Many Years From Now, McCartney explained: “Sometimes we would just start a song from scratch, but one of us would nearly always have a germ of an idea, a title or a rough little thing they were thinking about and we’d do it. ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ was my original, I’d started it and I had the first verse, which therefore gave me the tune, the tempo and the key. It gave you the subject matter, a lot of the information, and then you had to fill in… It was co-written, my idea, and we finished it that day.”
So, how did Young know about Paul’s original lyric if he only revealed it in 2021? “I was telling Neil Young this story once,” McCartney continued. “We were doing something — the Hollywood Pavement of Fame, or whatever you call it. I said to him, ‘It was ‘beauty queen’ originally.’ He said, ‘Oh, great,’ then I thought he’d just forgotten it.” He hadn’t. “But that evening we were playing, I think it was MusiCares, and he did ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ with the original lyrics. ‘Just 17 and she’d never been a beauty queen.’ That’s Neil. He had to do that. Sounded good, I must say. But I like the revised lyric better.”
See the performance below.
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