Too Bad About Sorrows

From earlybeatlessongs:

Thank heavens for the Get Back bootlegs! “Too Bad About Sorrows” is an historic song not just for the Beatles but for popular music as a whole – McCartney cites it as the very first one that he and Lennon wrote together, entering it in their exercise book as “A Lennon-McCartney Original” in the latter months of 1957. (Although Lewisohn places it in 1958, I think late-1957 is more likely, and so we will enter it here in the chronology, accepting that it’s not possible to be absolutely certain.)

No trace of the song is left from that early era, but it surfaces on the 1969 tapes. It was first recalled on January 8, when Lennon sang a garbled version of the first line or two, before switching to “Just Fun”, to laughter from McCartney. It was remembered again on January 22, where McCartney tears into it with Presley-esque gusto. However he soon loses his confidence, and the rest of the group also falters, only to re-launch into inappropriate rhythms and wrong chords (presumably as a joke) before coming to a halt at around the minute mark. Nevertheless, we get a reasonable idea of how the song goes, and there’s a line (“There’ll be no tomorrow”) which reminds us of one in the later “There’s A Place”. 

Messy this might be, but it’s priceless nonetheless – Lennon and McCartney running through their first ever composition! Although there are other audio fragments known (such as a 1978 interview McCartney did with Melvin Bragg for the South Bank Show in which he sings the hook line), they add nothing to the marvellous and terrible 1969 recording.

It’s just we all used to sag off every school day. You know, and go back to my house, and the two of us would just sit there and write. There’s a lot from then, you know? There’s about 100 songs from then that we never reckoned, ’cause they were all very unsophisticated songs.

Paul McCartney talking to Michael Lindsay-Hogg – January 3, 1969 – Transcript from Peter Jackson’s film “The Beatles: Get Back“, 2021

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