In the experimental, psychedelic operetta that was The Beatles’ 1967 album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, drummer Ringo Starr got to don the role of Billy Shears, singer of the affable, tongue-in-cheek second track, “With a Little Help from My Friends”. (Shears was a subtle reference to the man who allegedly replaced Paul McCartney in the infamous “Paul is dead” conspiracy.)
McCartney, along with John Lennon, wrote the song specifically for Starr. The track was a little dopey, which was both a friendly tease of their bandmate and, from a performance standpoint, a character that Starr could portray well. “We always liked to [write a song] for him. It had to be not too much like our style,” McCartney explained to Barry Miles in Many Years From Now. “I think that was probably the best of the songs we wrote for Ringo, actually.”
Starr had no qualms taking up the mantle for novelty songs like “With a Little Help from My Friends”, “Yellow Submarine” the previous year, or “Octopus’s Garden” two years later. But there was one lyric from the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band track that he refused to sing.
Ringo Starr Refused to Sing One Lyric From This Line From “With a Little Help from My Friends”
Paul McCartney and John Lennon wrote “With a Little Help from My Friends” specifically with Ringo Starr in mind. But they clearly didn’t take his traumatic stage experiences into account when writing some of the lines.
Starr explained in Anthology that he refused to sing the line, “What would you do if I sang out of tune? Would you stand up and throw tomatoes at me?” “I said, ‘There’s not a chance in hell am I going to sing this line.’ We still had lots of really deep memories of the kids throwing jelly beans and toys on stage. I thought that if we ever did get out there again, I was not going to be bombarded with tomatoes.”
Lennon and McCartney changed the song’s opening lines to, “What would you think if I sang out of tune? Would you stand up and walk out on me?” And indeed, watching audience members get up and leave mid-performance isn’t exactly ideal for a musician. But it certainly beats getting pelted with projectile tomatoes.
As for the “singing out of tune” bit, Lennon and McCartney accounted for that. “John and I wrote this song within a vocal range that would cause no problems for Ringo,” McCartney later said. “We tailored it especially for him. And I think that’s one reason why it was such a great success for him on Sgt. Pepper.”
Photo by David Redfern/Redferns