"Yesterday," by the Beatles, had the working title, "Scrambled Eggs."  Would the beautiful song had been as popular if the lyrics remained absurd?  Is beauty in art marred by silliness?  Paul McCartney wrote beyond the rough draft of "Yesterday," saving us from the wounding our ears may have suffered had nonsensical poetry prevailed over the moving artistic expression of the song's final version. 
     Still, my argument above is challenged by the chorus in John Lennon's Dada lyrics for "I Am the Walrus": 
   
     I am the Eggman
     I am the Eggmen
     I am the Walrus
     Goo goo a' joob

     Another memorable Beatles song, lacking the sentimental prettiness of "Yesterday," but a hard piece of musical candy, probably meaningless beyond Lennon's own personal viewpoints.  "I Am the Walrus," however, will enhance the mood of a cannabis experience.  Much of their released music, after 1966, goes well with being stoned.  The same can be said of Jefferson Airplane and many other bands of the period.
     One curious thing about weird lyrics is how the ears, not always picking up on exactly what the singer sings, substitutes words, fills in, tries to make sense out of the misheard.  When I was very young one of my sisters owned the Simon and Garfunkel album featuring "Scarborough Fair."  I liked the song and the album quite a bit, and was puzzled and deeply intrigued by the refrain,

     Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme

     I knew nothing of herbs, although I recognized parsley, since I tried to avoid eating it whenever it was on my dinner plate.  What I heard of that line was this:

     Parsley, saydrills, Mary, and time

     I wondered about that every time I heard the song.  For several years of my young life I believed Simon and Garfunkel were singing about saydrills (whatever that might be--I looked it up in the Dictionary without success), a girl named Mary, and time, as well as parsley.  The four elements seemed very strange to me as a group.  A girl, time itself, something unwanted on my dinner plate, and the mysterious saydrills. 
     I didn't ask anyone about this, I didn't try to look up the lyrics, I can't remember if the album had the lyrics printed, and in any case, I didn't look at them.  The peculiar verse remained with me.  In the pre-Internet era, finding out things was more of a task than it is now.  At about seventeen, another song came along with a vocal moment that baffled me, and still does, since I haven't yet try to find out what Chrissie Hynde sings during a blizzard-like flow of words in the song, "Precious."
     I'm content to let those few seconds of "Precious" be mysterious, but with "Scarborough Fair" I finally discerned they were singing the names of four herbs.  By not knowing the answer, I managed for years to believe there was a word, saydrills, that wasn't in any Dictionary, a word sung in a popular song--nonsense, perhaps, but real in my mind, like "Goo goo a' joob" was real in John Lennon's mind, and then he put it in his listeners' minds. 
     The Information Age is a fascinating time, but always having knowledge at one's fingertips can eliminate beautiful illusions sprung from the imaginations of children and adults, misinterpreting meanings, but even now, with new knowledge, we can call yesterday scrambled eggs.

                                                                            Vic Neptune