With A Little Help From My Friends

Song facts

This was written out at John’s house in Weybridge for Ringo; we always liked to do one for him and it had to be not too much like our style. I think that was probably the best of the songs we wrote for Ringo actually.

Paul McCartney – From “Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now” by Barry Miles, 1997

From Wikipedia:

“With a Little Help from My Friends” is a song by the English rock band the Beatles, from their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney and sung by drummer Ringo Starr (as Sgt. Pepper singer Billy Shears), his lead vocal for the album. As the second track on the album, it segues from the applause of the title track.

A subsequent recording of the track by Joe Cocker became a success in 1968—topping the UK Singles Chart—and an anthem for the Woodstock era. In 1978, the Beatles’ recording, paired with “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”, was reissued as a single, and peaked at number 63 in Britain and number 71 in the United States. Starr has regularly performed the song in concert as a solo artist. The song was ranked number 311 on Rolling Stone‘s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

Background and composition

Lennon and McCartney finished writing the song in mid-March 1967, written specifically as Starr’s track for the album. McCartney said: “It was pretty much co-written, John and I doing a work song for Ringo, a little craft job.” In 1970 Lennon stated: “Paul had the line about ‘a little help from my friends.’ He had some kind of structure for it, and we wrote it pretty well fifty-fifty from his original idea.“, but in 1980 Lennon said: “This is Paul, with a little help from me. ‘What do you see when you turn out the light/ I can’t tell you, but I know it’s mine…’ is mine.” It was briefly called “Bad Finger Boogie” (later the inspiration for the band name Badfinger), supposedly because Lennon composed the melody on a piano using his middle finger after having hurt his forefinger.

Lennon and McCartney deliberately wrote a tune with a limited range – except for the last note, which McCartney worked closely with Starr to achieve. In The Beatles Anthology, Starr explained that he insisted on changing the first line – which originally was “What would you think if I sang out of tune? Would you throw ripe tomatoes at me?” – so that fans would not throw tomatoes at him should he perform it live (in the early days, after George Harrison made a passing comment that he liked Jelly Babies, the group was showered with them at all of their live performances).

After it was released in the United States, Maryland Governor and future Vice President Spiro T. Agnew lobbied to have the song banned because he believed it was about drug use.

Recording

The Beatles began recording the song on 29 March 1967, the day before they posed for the Sgt. Pepper album cover. They recorded 10 takes of the song, wrapping up sessions at 5:45 in the morning. The backing track consisted of Starr on drums, McCartney playing piano, Harrison playing lead guitar and Lennon beating a cowbell. At dawn, Starr trudged up the stairs to head home – but the other Beatles cajoled him into doing his lead vocal then and there, standing around the microphone for moral support. The following day they added tambourine, backing vocals, bass and more electric guitar. American TeenSet editor Judith Sims interviewed each Beatle separately on the 29th as they became available. Others in the studio at various times included roadies Mal Evans and Neil Aspinall, publicists Tony Barrow and Terry Doran, photographers Leslie Bryce and Frank Herrmann, and Cynthia Lennon.

Live performances

[…] McCartney and Starr performed this song for the first time together at the David Lynch Foundation Benefit Concert in the Radio City Music Hall, New York on 4 April 2009. McCartney and Starr also performed the song together on “The Night That Changed America: A Grammy Salute to The Beatles“, a commemorative show on 27 January 2014, that marked 50 years since the band’s first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, then again in 2015 at Ringo Starr’s induction in the Rock’n Roll Hall of Fame. […]

This was written out at John’s house in Weybridge for Ringo; we always liked to do one for him and it had to be not too much like our style. I think that was probably the best of the songs we wrote for Ringo actually. He was to be a character in this operetta, this whole thing that we were doing, so this gave him a good intro, wherever he came in the album; in fact it was the second track. It was a nice place for him, but wherever it came, it gave us an intro. Again, because it was the pot era, we had to slip in a little reference: ‘I get high!’

It was pretty much co-written, John and I doing a work song for Ringo, a little craft job. I always saw those as the equivalent of writing a James Bond film theme. It was a challenge, it was something out of the ordinary for us because we actually had to write in a key for Ringo and you had to be a little tongue in cheek. Ringo liked kids a lot, he was very good with kids so we knew Yellow Submarine would be a good thing for Ringo to sing. In this case, it was a slightly more mature song, which I always liked very much. I remember giggling with John as we wrote the lines ‘What do you see when you turn out the light? I can’t tell you but I know it’s mine.’ It could have been him playing with his willie under the covers, or it could have been taken on a deeper level; this was what it meant but it was a nice way to say it, a very non-specific way to say it. I always liked that.

Paul McCartney – From “Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now” by Barry Miles, 1997

Poking a little fun at Ringo was actually a lof of fun. ‘What would you do if I sang out of tune?’ Actually, John and I wrote this song within a vocal range that would cause no problems for Ringo, who had a style of singing different to ours. 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.

The song was performed very much in the style of the Sgt. Pepper album as a whole – the style of a live show in which the song is sung by a certain ‘Billy Shears’. For those old enough to remember, Billy Shears was the name of the person who supposedly replaced me in The Beatles when I’d ‘died’ after a road accident in 1966. That was a crazy rumour that had been doing the rounds. Now Billy Shears showed up, large as life, in the guise of Ringo Starr! So, this song is Ringo’s intro as a character in this operetta.

‘Lend me your ears’ – well, you know where that’s from. The Bard’s four hundredth birthday had fallen in April 1964, and there’d been a production of Julius Caesar on television that year. It was still fresh in our minds. […]

The line I liked best in it was, ‘What do you see when you turn out the light?’ I was imagining turning out the light when you’re in bed, under the covers. You’re talking about your genitals; that’s what it is. Everyone does that: touching themselves when the light goes out. But I couldn’t say, ‘What do you see when you turn out the light? Your dick.’ It just doesn’t scan.

Paul McCartney – From “The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present“, 2021

Billy Shears is another name that sounds like a schoolmate, but isn’t. Ringo is Billy Shears. It just happened to turn out that we dreamed up Billy Shears. It was a rhyme for ‘years … band you’ve known for all these years … and here he is, the one and only Billy Shears.’ We thought, ‘That’s a great little name.’ It’s an Eleanor Rigby type name. A nice atmospheric name and it was leading into Ringo’s track. So, as far as we were concerned, it was purely and simply a devise to get the next song in.

Paul McCartney – From “The Beatles: Off the Record” by Keith Badman, 2008

The album was always going to have ‘Sgt Pepper at the beginning,- and if you listen to the first two tracks, you can hear it was going to be a show album. It was Sgt Pepper and his Lonely Hearts Club Band with all these other acts, and it was going to run like a rock opera. It had started out with a feeling that it was going to be something totally different, but we only got as far as Sgt Pepper and Billy Shears (singing ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’), and then we thought-. ‘Sod it! It’s just two tracks.’ It still kept the title and the feel that it’s all connected, although in the end we didn’t actually connect all the songs up.

Ringo Starr – From “The Beatles Anthology” book, 2000

‘A Little Help From My Friends’ was designed to flow out of the album’s title song, ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’. By the time [Paul and John] came to write it, the idea of an alternative Beatles, of a make-believe band in which they could be what they wanted to be, had taken firm hold. Their ‘Billy Shears’ character was another stab at making the whole Pepper idea a bit more real, giving it a bit of solid flesh. The obvious person to be this Billy Shears, then, was Ringo — it was somehow his kind of song.

George Martin – From “With A Little Help From My Friends: The Making of Sgt. Pepper“, 1995

The song ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’ was written specifically for me, but they had one line that I wouldn’t sing. 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.

Ringo Starr – From “The Beatles Anthology” book, 2000

Paul had the line about ‘little help from my friends’. He had some kind of structure for it – and we wrote it pretty well fifty/fifty based on his original idea.

John Lennon – From “The Beatles Anthology” book, 2000

This is Paul, with a little help from me. ‘What do you see when you turn out the light/ I can’t tell you, but I know it’s mine…’ is mine.

John Lennon – Interview with Playboy, 1980

John and Paul always wrote a song for Ringo on every album. ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’ proved to be that song. Paul wrote that and wrote it beautifully simple with just five notes. Terribly simple and terribly effective.

George Martin – From “With A Little Help From My Friends: The Making of Sgt. Pepper“, 1995

At two o’clock in the afternoon John arrived at Paul’s house in St John’s Wood. They both went up to Paul’s work room at the top of the house. It is a narrow, rectangular room, full of stereophonic equipment and amplifiers. There is a large triptych of Jane Asher on the wall and a large silver piece of sculpture by Paolozzi, shaped like a fireplace with Dalek heads on top.

John started playing his guitar and Paul started banging on the piano. For a couple of hours, they both banged away. Each of them seemed to be in a trance till the other came up with something good and he would pluck it out of a mass of noises and try it himself.

They’d already got the tune the previous afternoon, a gentle lilting tune, and its name, ‘A Little Help From My Friends’. Now they were trying to polish up the melody and think of some words to go with it.

‘Are you afraid when you turn out the light,’ sang John. Paul sang it after him and nodded. John said they could use that idea for all the verses, if they could think of some more questions on those lines.

‘Do you believe in love at first sight,’ sang John. ‘No,’ he said, stopping singing. ‘It hasn’t got the right number of syllables. What do you think? Can we split it up and have a pause to give it an extra syllable?’

John then sang the line, breaking it in the middle: ‘Do you believe – ugh – in love at first sight.’

‘How about,’ said Paul, ‘Do you believe in a love at first sight.’

John sang it over and accepted it. In singing it, he added the next line, ‘Yes, I’m certain it happens all the time.’

They both then sang the two lines to themselves, la-la-ing all the other lines. Apart from this, all they’d got was the chorus. ‘I’ll get by with a little help from my friends.’ John found himself singing ‘Would you believe,’ which he thought was better.

Then they changed the order round, singing the two lines ‘Would you believe in a love at first sight Yes, I’m certain it happens all the time’, before going on to ‘Are you afraid when you turn out the light’, but they still had to la-la the fourth line, which they couldn’t think of. […]

They both stopped all the shouting and larking around, as suddenly as they’d begun it. They went back, very quietly, to the song they were supposed to be working on. ‘What do you see when you turn out the light,’ sang John, trying slightly new words to their existing line, missing out ‘afraid’. Then he followed it with another line, ‘I can’t tell you, but I know it’s mine.’ By slightly rewording it, he’d made it fit in.

Paul said yes, that would do. He wrote down the finished four lines on a sheet of exercise paper propped up in front of him on his piano. They now had one whole verse, as well as the chorus. Paul got up and wandered round the room. John moved to the piano. […]

From “The Beatles: The Authorised Biography” by Hunter Davies, 1968

From The Usenet Guide to Beatles Recording Variations:

[a] mono 31 Mar 1967. crossfaded 6 Apr 1967.
UK: Parlophone PMC 7026 Sgt Pepper 1967.
US: Capitol MAS 2653 Sgt Pepper 1967.

[b] stereo 7 Apr 1967. crossfaded 7 Apr 1967.
UK: Parlophone PCS 7026 Sgt Pepper 1967, Apple PCSP 717 The Beatles 1967-1970 1973.
US: Capitol SMAS 2653 Sgt Pepper 1967, Apple SKBO-3404 The Beatles 1967-1970 1973.
CD: EMI CDP 7 46442 2 Sgt Pepper 1987, EMI CDP 7 97039 2 The Beatles 1967-1970 1993.

The crossfade joins this to the preceding song, Sgt Pepper, but the songs do not overlap; rather, crowd noise runs from one through to the other. This song starts right before the announcement “Billy Shears!”, which is more readily apparent as a change in ambience in mono [a], since louder crowd noise covers the join better in [b].

Last updated on January 2, 2024

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