Off The Beatle Track

Overall, The Beatles enunciated their lyrics, especially when they sang the songs that they wrote. But when they–no, let’s be precise–when John sang some cover songs, he had a habit of amending some of the lyrics. It was almost as if he didn’t know all of the words.

In this post, we’ll examine one of those songs.

He’s a bad boy

The American singer Larry Williams released Bad Boy in 1958.¹ The Beatles recorded their version in May 1965 and released it first on the U.S. album Beatles VI in June 1965, but not in the U.K. until A Collection of Beatles Oldies in December 1966.

Williams’ version differs from The Beatles’ in its “He’s a . . . bad boy” refrain (shortened later in the song to just “bad boy”). Ditching the refrain was probably a wise decision on John’s part.

John makes other changes, too. In fairness, let’s remember that without access to the internet, The Beatles relied mostly on their memories to reconstruct the lyrics of cover songs.²

Sitting there looking so good

We might be able to chalk up some of John’s changes to The Beatles’ unfamiliarity with American references. For example, Williams sang, in the second line, “He won’t do nothin’ right, his report card don’t look so good.” John changes the “report card” reference to “just sitting there and look so good” (which he makes sound like “just in sittin’ there and look so good”), which makes little literal sense.³ John could have changed “so” to “no,” but that’s a quibble.

The words that John sings in the first chorus baffled me for 50 years. Williams sang, “He put thumbtacks in his teacher’s chair, put chewing gum in a little girl’s hair.” John appears to sing that the bad boy “puts some tacks on teacher’s chair,” and “thumbtacks” and “some tacks” are close enough, I guess.

I always heard John’s next line as “puts June young in Lily Gur’s hair.” Now that I know that the words after “puts” are “chewing gum,” I can hear John singing those words (though he does slur them), but I would never have been able to make out that he was singing “a little girl’s hair” without the internet’s help.

Shooting the canary

John sticks close to the script for the second verse and chorus, but the third verse contains another baffling change. Williams sang “He took your pet canary and he fed it to the neighbor’s cat.”⁴ But after hundreds of listens over dozens of years, I simply can’t make sense of the two sounds that John makes before singing “canary.”

The internet seems to believe that John sings “you shoot the canary” or just “shoot the canary.” I can’t argue with that interpretation, but I’m not convinced that John’s singing English words. The sound before “canary” sounds like “to,” but I wouldn’t testify to that in court. The wonderful Beatles Bible reports that John recorded only one vocal take, so let’s agree that whatever John sang on this track, The Beatles were moving too fast to fix it.

And I wouldn’t have wanted them to fix it. Bad Boy is a great track with a terrific lead vocal; I prefer The Beatles’ version to the Larry Williams version. It’s not perfect–hell, at times it’s not even understandable–but I wouldn’t want it any other way. Guess that makes me something of a . . . . never mind.

Send me your interpretation of the Bad Boy lyrics at beatletrack@gmail.com.

1. The B-side to Bad Boy was She Said Yeah, which Paul covered on 1999’s Run Devil Run. ↩︎
2. Although I guess someone could have listened to the record over and over again and written the lyrics down. But who had the time in 1965? ↩︎
3. He sits there and looks good. What a bad boy! ↩︎
4. To whom, I wonder, is Williams singing? Someone who didn’t know that the bad boy fed their canary to the cat? If so, it feels like that piece of info ought to be in the first verse. ↩︎