Paul McCartney Removed a Line From The Beatles’ ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ Because It Made Him ‘Cringe’

One of the most famous classic rock songs of the early 1960s is The Beatles’ “I Saw Her Standing There.” Paul McCartney and John Lennon disliked a line in an early version of the song. Subsequently, the duo wrote one of the most famous lyrics of The Beatles’ early years.

1 lyric made The Beatles’ Paul McCartney and John Lennon groan

In the 1997 book Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now, Paul discussed writing “I Saw Her Standing There.” “‘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,” he said. “It gave you the subject matter, a lot of the information, and then you had to fill in.”

Paul and John disliked one of the lyrics that was part of an early version of “I Saw Her Standing There.” “I had, ‘She was just 17, she’d never been a beauty queen,'” Paul remembered. “So we went, ‘Ugh, this is one of these.'”

How Paul McCartney and John Lennon rewrote The Beatles’ ‘I Saw Her Standing There’

Paul and John decided they had to improve their lyrics. “And by then we’d written a couple in the little book and we’d started to realize that we had to stop at these bad lines or we were only going to write bad songs,” Paul added.

“So we stopped there and both of us cringed at that and said, ‘No, no, no. ‘Beauty queen’ is out! There’s got to be another rhyme for 17,'” he continued. “So we went through the alphabet: between, clean, lean, mean; ‘She wasn’t mean; you know what I mean; great! Put that in.'” Ultimately, the duo decided on the line “She was just 17/If you know what I mean.”

How ‘I Saw Her Sanding There’ performed on the charts on the United States and the United Kingdom

“I Saw Her Standing There” became a modest hit in the United States. It peaked at No. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed on the chart for 11 weeks. It appeared on the album Please Please Me. The album reached No. 155 on the Billboard 200 for a single week.

“I Saw Her Standing There” was far less popular in the United Kingdom. According to The Official Charts Company, the song hit No. 90 there and remained on the chart for one week. Meanwhile, Please Please Me topped the chart there for 30 weeks. The album stayed on the chart for 70 weeks altogether.

“I Saw Her Standing There” is a classic song — even if it took Paul and John a few tries to get it right.