“Died a death in some bin”: The Beatles song Paul McCartney called too bad to release
No other band can really match the baseline of quality that The Beatles had so effortlessly. Although John Lennon and Paul McCartney more than likely had countless songs in the can before getting to work on their classics with the Fab Four, there are hardly any songs in their catalogue that could be considered absolute duds from start to finish. Then again, they could write a few stinkers now and then, and McCartney remembered this song being so bad that they couldn’t bear to release it themselves.
At the same time, there was never a set standard of quality for what they put out on an album in the early days. There were still the iconic Beatles songs that we know and love from back in the day, but there are a handful of tunes that were clearly meant as a rush job, like when Lennon began writing the tune ‘Little Child’ for With the Beatles or the lower lights on albums like Beatles for Sale.
It’s also important to note that there was hardly any cohesion in some of their classics. Even on an album that’s enshrined in history like Help!, hearing them end things off with a mindless cover of a Larry Williams song rather than the far superior ‘Yesterday’ is still one of the biggest musical crimes that the band ever committed.
Still, the music never stopped for Lennon and McCartney, and that meant giving some tunes away to artists who needed a boost. While the more notable names were typically reserved for when the band worked with artists like Badfinger and James Taylor under Apple later, giving a song to starlets like Marianne Faithfull made perfect sense when McCartney dreamed up the song ‘Etcetera’.
It’s not like the band couldn’t operate in that format. They had been working on their first major tours with Helen Shapiro, and McCartney even felt that the gender-flipped version of ‘And I Love Her’ by Esther Phillips was one of his personal favourites, but he knew that ‘Etcetera’ was far too thin to have The Beatles’ name associated with it.
When talking about giving the tune away to Faithfull, McCartney felt that it simply wasn’t good enough for The Beatles to take a proper stab at, saying, “I knew Marianne, so it was natural that I would be asked to write a song at some point. I did write a song but it was not a very good one. It was called ‘Etcetera’ and it’s a bad song. I think it’s a good job that it’s died a death in some tape bin. Even then, I seem to remember thinking it wasn’t very good.”
But perhaps Macca is being a little bit too harsh in some respects. Granted, it is sugary to the point of diabetic coma levels, but hearing the early version entitled ‘Thingumybob’ is still an entertaining listen, if only to the orchestrations behind it and the skeleton of what McCartney was going for.
Then again, it’s not that far off the mark for McCartney to think that the tune was far from his finest hour. Because if you think about it, would anyone have tried to put this out as their own single if they knew that they had tracks like ‘For No One’ or ‘Eleanor Rigby’ at their disposal?
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