Ringo Starr is the Beatle least lauded for his vocals, having sung lead on only 11 of the band’s more than 200 songs. Two of those, “Don’t Pass Me By” and “Octopus’s Garden,” he wrote himself. John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote the beloved Beatles single “With a Little Help From My Friends” for Ringo to sing—with a little help from Ringo himself on one particular lyric.
As reported by Ultimate Classic Rock, John and Paul kept Ringo’s limited vocal range in mind while writing the melody and structure of the song. They even teased him about it when they introduced it to him. Ringo took those friendly jabs in stride, but when the songwriting duo shared the original line that followed “What would you do if I sang out of tune?” he firmly put his foot down.
He didn’t want fans to throw tomatoes at him
“They had one line that I wouldn’t sing,” Ringo shared in the band’s autobiography, The Beatles Anthology. “It was ‘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,’ because we still had lots of really deep memories of the kids throwing jelly beans and toys on stage – and I thought that if we ever did get out there again, I was not going to be bombarded with tomatoes.”
He probably wasn’t wrong. Beatlemania had calmed down a bit by 1967, but when you’ve experienced fans throwing things at you, you tend to get wary. Imagine concertgoers bringing tomatoes just for the fun of taking a lyric literally. Yikes.
So, the line got changed to “Would you stand up and walk out on me?” No question, it’s a better lyric. It’s also one audiences weren’t likely to act on.
The Beatles had already dealt with a dangerous jelly bean throwing craze
It might sound funny, but Ringo’s fear of having tomatoes thrown at him came from real experience. In 1963, George Harrison made an offhand comment to a BBC reporter about John stealing his beloved Jelly Babies (a British candy similar to gummy bears). That one casual remark sparked a yearlong problem for the band on tour.
Fans started bombarding the band with Jelly Babies at their U.K. concerts. Harrison hated it, even writing in a handwritten letter to a 15-year-old fan:
“Think how we feel standing on stage trying to dodge the stuff, before you throw some more at us. Couldn’t you eat them yourself, besides it is dangerous. I was hit in the eye once with a boiled sweet, and it’s not funny!”
But the situation got worse when the band toured the U.S. A newspaper mistakenly reported that The Beatles liked jelly beans. Soon, American fans started pelting the musicians with the much harder candy during performances. It was genuinely dangerous. Fans were injured, and the band had to stop concerts multiple times.
Beatles fans were so intense that the band couldn’t even hear themselves play
Ringo joined The Beatles just as they were beginning to rise to fame in their hometown of Liverpool. Not long after he joined, the band’s popularity exploded worldwide.
Fans went wild everywhere they went, and by the time they toured the U.S., performing live had become nearly impossible. The crowd was so loud that the band couldn’t hear themselves play.
“That’s the truth. I mean, it’s the great truth,” Ringo said in a 1977 interview. “No one heard us, not even ourselves. I found it very hard. I mean, I’m looking at amplifiers thinking the sound is going to come through my eyes instead of ears, but it’s like—I couldn’t do any fills because I’m just there just to hold it together somehow, you know. So if I go off for a ‘fill’ which isn’t as loud as all your force on an off-beat it would get lost anyway. And the timing usually went all to cock. And that’s why we were bad players. That’s when we decided to stop in ’66. Everyone thought we toured for years, you know, but we didn’t. I joined in ’62, and we’d finished touring in ’66 to go into the studio where we could hear each other… and create any fantasy that came out of anybody’s brain.”
Ah, the irony of audiences being so loud that they eventually stop you from performing live altogether. It certainly makes Ringo’s insistence on changing the tomato-throwing lyric seem like a very wise choice.
