Ringo Starr's Smart Edit Made Beatles Hit Even Better

Ringo Starr might have sung lead on just 11 Beatles songs, but he made sure those lyrics wouldn't get him hurt.

When John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote "With a Little Help From My Friends" for Ringo in 1967, they included a playful jab at his vocals. The original lyric asked, "What would you do if I sang out of tune? Would you stand up and throw tomatoes at me?"

Ringo immediately said no. "There's not a chance in hell am I going to sing this line," he recalled in The Beatles Anthology.

His reasoning wasn't about ego. It came from genuine experience with overzealous fans who took things literally.

Just four years earlier, George Harrison casually mentioned to a BBC reporter that John had stolen his Jelly Babies candy. That one offhand comment created a yearlong nightmare for the band.

Fans began pelting them with Jelly Babies at every U.K. concert. When American newspapers mistakenly reported the band liked jelly beans, things got dangerous.

The much harder American jelly beans rained down during performances, injuring fans and forcing the band to stop concerts multiple times. Harrison was even hit in the eye with a hard candy.

"Think how we feel standing on stage trying to dodge the stuff," Harrison wrote to a young fan. "It is dangerous."

So when Ringo heard the tomato lyric, he could easily imagine concertgoers bringing produce to shows just for the fun of acting it out. The line got changed to "Would you stand up and walk out on me?" A better lyric that audiences weren't likely to act on.

Why This Inspires

Ringo's decision shows the power of speaking up, even when you're not the loudest voice in the room. He knew his limits and set a boundary that protected both himself and the fans who might have gotten caught in a tomato crossfire.

The candy throwing wasn't the only challenge Beatlemania created. By 1966, crowds screamed so loudly that the band couldn't hear themselves play.

"No one heard us, not even ourselves," Ringo said in a 1977 interview. "That's when we decided to stop in '66 to go into the studio where we could hear each other and create any fantasy that came out of anybody's brain."

That studio time gave us Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which opened with the very song Ringo had wisely edited. Sometimes the best creative decisions come from knowing when to say no.