“Scrambled eggs, oh, my baby, how I love your legs” — original lyrics for opening of Yesterday, as written by Paul McCartney.

PJ Parrish

My husband is a Tom Petty freak. So in the interest of marital bliss, I have come to know alot about Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers. Alas, never saw him in person but I have been dragged to more Petty cover groups than I can remember — including a really fabulous tribute band called The Traveling Milburys.

I’ve come to really like Petty’s music. And I now recognize that he is one of rock’s greatest lyricists.  As his biographer Warren Zanes wrote, Petty was not “the intellectual gymnast that Elvis Costello was, never as grandly romantic as Springsteen. Petty nonetheless got in there a little deeper than the others.”

I’ve come to envy Petty’s way with words. He had an emotional economy, packing more punch with fewer lines than even Dylan. As Zanes says, he was the kind of writer who “could set up a story in a couple of words.”

She was an American girls, raised on promises…

And this one’s dear to my wrtier’s heart: He had a true love of ambiguity, never hitting you over the head, never telling you what to feel. He gives the listener (or reader) more space to breathe and imagine. I always liked Petty’s song “A Room At The Top,” When I first listened to it, I felt uplifted. Until I really listened.

I got a room at the top of the world tonight
I can see everything tonight
I got a room where everyone
Can have a drink and forget those things
That went wrong in their life

Petty called it the most depressing song he’d ever writtten. But you know, it depends on your mood when you hear it.

Petty also had a gift for channeling his own life and North Florida background. This came to fruition in the Southern Accents album, where he felt free to leave behind “good rock and roll songs…and push beyond.”

There’s a Southern accent where I come from/ The young-uns call it country, the Yankees call it dumb/ I got my own way of talking but everything is done/ with a Southern accent where I come from.

Don’t we all need to push beyond? Don’t we all need to write with our own accents? And if you’ll allow me, one more note about the song “Southern Accents.” In it, the bridge is a visitation in which his dead mother arrives to her grieving son:

For just a moment, I was dreaming/ For just a moment it was oh so real/ For just a moment she was standing there, with me.

That was the power of Petty’s poetry — its emotional universality. I relate to that song not because I am Southern. But because I once had a transcedent visitation from my mother not long after her death. And I used that feeling to write a scene in one of my books when my protagonist is trying desperately to come to terms with his mother’s passing.

Petty also had an uncanny habit of finding the right word. And I know we all struggle with that. We might slip in a “holding” word or phrase until we can get unblocked. We’ve all slipped some scrambled eggs into our books. But Petty didn’t like to settle,

The other night, my husband and I drove through a pouring rain to Elk Rapids to see yet another Petty cover band. They played a song I didn’t know called “You Wreck Me.” It’s an exuberant rocker that ends the show. Petty originally wrote it as “You Rock Me.”  He realized what a pathetic cliche that was and changed ONE WORD.

It completely shifted the emotional weight and meaning of the song into a raw ode to a turbulent, high-energy romance. He did something similar with his iconic song “Mary Jane’s Last Dance”

His original lyrics were: “Hey, Indiana girl, go out and find the world.” After coming to the conclusion that “Indiana girl” was too clunky and awkward, Petty changed the lyrics to “last dance with Mary Jane, one more time to kill the pain.” Is Mary Jane a forgotten love or something else that kills the pain?

Well, shoot, Enough about Tom Petty. Because, as you can see, I have become an acolyte. And there is nothing more boring than the newly converted.

Let’s have some fun. Here are other examples of songs that were saved from the scrapheap — and from themselves.

Little Richard was no stranger to potential censorship. He changed the original, hypersexual lyrics of his signature hit, “Tutti Frutti”, to be more modest and radio-friendly. The original lyrics were “If it don’t fit, don’t force it / You can grease it, make it easy” became “Tutti Frutti, aw rooty / Tutti Frutti / aw rooty.”

While working on the Let It Be album, Paul McCartney was disgusted by the racist rantings of a British politician Enoch Powell. He wrote his frustations into the song “Get Back”

“Meanwhile back at home too many Pakistanis/ Living in a council flat/ Candidate Macmillan, tell us what your plan is/ Won’t you tell us where you’re at?”. 

He wrote it as an attempt at satire, but the verse was cut and the song defanged into a vague track about a guy named Jojo. The episode illustrates how tough it was (still is?) for artists to navigate social commentary.

On a lighter note, McCartney and Lennon often clashed as collaborators. Paul could be cloyingly pop and John stubbornly obtuse. But John did, early in their partnership, save Paul some cringy embarrassment. Here’s Paul’s original opening from “I Saw Her Standing There:”

“She was just seventeen, she’d never been a beauty queen.”

John changed it to: “She was just seventeen. You know what I mean.”

Which is great, because we DON’T know what he means. Or do we? Again, ambiguity can be your friend.

I’ll give the last word to Petty’s biographer Zanes: “That’s a writer’s genius. Just change one word [or phrase] and the whole song opens up.”

Keep that in mind, crime dogs, as you go rewrite chapter 15.

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Postscript: The photo opening the post, as many of you will recognize, is the infamous “butcher” cover for The Beatles album Yesterday and Today. It was considered too grotesque at the time (Lennon wanted it as a statement against the Vietnam War). So they scraped it. If you happen to have a pristine sealed copy, it’s now worth $100,000.