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4.17pm
24 October 2021
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As the story goes, “Misery ” was originally written for Helen Shapiro to sing, but after their offer for her to have it was turned down, Lennon and McCartney decided to modify the song so that the Beatles could perform it.
I’ve always been curious about the song’s lyrics; In the final recording, the first verse’s opening lines are “I’m the kind of guy / Who never used to cry”, but when they wrote the song for Helen Shapiro, they probably wouldn’t have used the word “guy” to describe her. Throughout the rest of the song’s lyrics, it would have been easy enough to switch around the pronouns and such, but since “guy” is supposed to rhyme with “cry” in the quoted lines above, that would have been harder to fix.
Are there any archives or photos of what the original lyrics for that verse might have been?
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Rube5.38pm
14 June 2016
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It could have been something like: “Now you’re not my guy / It makes me want to cry”
Something like that actually fits better being followed by “the world is treating me bad, misery” than the lyrics in the Please Please Me version.
The following people thank William Shears Campbell for this post:
The Hole Got Fixed, RubeHere | There | Everywhere
It's ya boi! The one and only Billy Shears (AKA Paul's Replacement)
"Sometimes I wish I was just George Harrison" - John Lennon
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