With a Little Help from My Friends
"
With a Little Help from My Friends" (original title:
A Little Help from My Friends) is a song written by
Paul McCartney and
John Lennon, released on the
The Beatles album
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in
1967 . The song was written for and sung by Beatles drummer
Ringo Starr.
Lennon and McCartney insisted that Starr sing the song, including the high note at the end. Ringo Starr agreed on one condition: they must change the introduction to something other than
"What would you do if I sang out of tune? Would you throw ripe tomatoes at me?" His reason for the change was so that fans would not actually throw tomatoes at him should he perform it live. What raised his concerns was likely that in the early days, after George made a passing comment that he liked
jelly babies, the group was pelted with them at all of their live performances.
The song reads like a conversation between the singer and a group of people. For example,
"Would you believe in a love at first sight/Yes I'm certain that it happens all the time". In the preceding quotation from the lyrics, the other three Beatles sing the first line, with Starr answering in the following one.
The band finished recording the song the same day that they posed for the Sgt. Pepper album cover.
An early working title for the song was "Badfinger Boogie", which later became the inspiration for the name of the band
Badfinger.
The song has been number one on the British singles charts three times; once when it was recorded by
Joe Cocker in
1968, a second time when it was covered by
Wet Wet Wet in
1988 and finally when it was sung by
Sam and Mark in
2004. A second recording of Cocker singing the song was made at
Woodstock in
1969 and can be seen in the
documentary film about the concert, "3 Days of Peace and Music". The drummer on the 1968 Joe Cocker hit single version of the song was
Procol Harum's
B.J. Wilson.
It became well-known in the late
1980s and early
1990s when Cocker's cover version was the theme song for the
television series,
The Wonder Years. See also the album,
With a Little Help from My Friends by Joe Cocker.
Billy Shears was
Ringo Starr's alias on the
Beatles 1967 album
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Billy Shears is mentioned in the
title song and, implicitly, as the singer of the segued-into "
With a Little Help from My Friends."
* Song Lyrics [
1]
* Page about B.J. Wilson and Joe Cocker's recording of the song [
2]
