As I wrote some time ago, Ringo Starr is not just one of the greatest drummers of all time*, but at one point was likely the most loved human being on the planet. At the height of Beatlemania, “I Love Ringo” buttons outsold the other three by a significant margin.
That doesn’t mean he wasn’t afraid of copping the odd tomato. So much so that he demanded a change to the opening lines of “With a Little Help From My Friends”. It wasn’t quite why you’d think, though.
John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote the song specifically for Ringo’s limited but pleasantly distinctive vocal range. They even ribbed him about it when they first played the tune. Ringo took the teasing in good humour until they reached the second line.
“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.”
The line was duly changed to the far better (and safer) “Would you stand up and walk out on me?” Ringo’s caution was hard-earned.
Not because he was afraid of an audience hating him, but because they loved him a little too much. While the Beatles had retired from touring by the time of Sgt Pepper’s, it was only by a scant few months. There was no reason to think they mightn’t go back on the road again some time. And Ringo remembered quite well what had happened during concerts before.
It began innocently enough in 1963. George Harrison casually mentioned to a BBC reporter that John had pinched his beloved Jelly Babies. British fans took the remark as an invitation and began pelting the stage with the soft sweets at every opportunity.
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!”
It didn’t get any better, though, when the Fab Four famously conquered the USA not long after. A newspaper had garbled the original story, reporting that The Beatles liked jelly beans. It was on for young and old – and jelly beans are much harder than Jelly Babies.
Suddenly the musicians were being bombarded with projectiles that could actually do damage. Concerts had to be stopped. Fans were injured. The stage became a soft-target shooting gallery.
It only contributed to the absurdity of Beatlemania that eventually drove the band into retiring from live performances altogether. Packing stadiums, the noise reached deafening levels: the band couldn’t even hear one another play. So, even if anyone could have heard them, it would have sounded terrible. Especially for a drummer, for whom keeping time with the band is absolutely essential.
“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.”
Still, the possibility of going back on the road when the hysteria died down was always there – and so were the bad memories of jelly beans.
So when John and Paul offered him a lyric that practically invited tomato throwing, Ringo’s refusal was pure self-preservation. He had already spent years dodging confectionery missiles. He was not about to write the audience a formal invitation.
The change improved the song and probably spared him some potential splatterings. It also stands as a small, perfect reminder that even the most adored man on the planet still had to keep one eye on the crowd.
*Anyone who repeats the fake quote from a comedy routine, about “Not even the best drummer in the Beatles”, will be taken out back and thrashed soundly.
