“Ringo assumed it was now time to go home, but Paul said they should record his lead vocal. Ringo was tired and he was worried about whether he could hit the high note at the end of the song, so to support him, the other Beatles stood around him on the studio floor and silently conducted him as he attempted it.”
Ringo sang a song on most Beatles albums, apart from three of their movie albums: A Hard Day’s Night, Magical Mystery Tour, and Let It Be. As Beatles fans, we probably take that for granted, but none of the other British Invasion bands did the equivalent thing. There were no album tracks sung by Charlie Watts or Mick Avory and only one each in the 1960s by Keith Moon and Dave Clark.
Later on, of course, there were some very successful drummer/singers. I’m thinking of people like Micky Dolenz, Levon Helm, Karen Carpenter, Phil Collins, Don Henley, and Kevin Godley. But the difference is that they were all great singers, and Ringo wasn’t. Ringo is a reasonable singer, who can put his personality across in a song, but he obviously isn’t a gifted singer.
So that invites the question, why did the Beatles want him to sing. They had exceptional lead singers in the band, so why go out of their way to include tracks sung by a reasonably OK singer?
I think the answer lies in one of the things that made The Beatles so attractive– the way they operated as the closest possible group of friends: a gang of four, a four-headed monster, all for one and one for all. It’s one of the key things you take away from watching A Hard Day’s Night. We see that they are as tight as tight, and it’s really appealing. But it wasn’t an act. They really were the closest of close friends, until they weren’t. Even though Ringo was a relatively late addition to the gang, he fitted in perfectly and the others went out of their way to include him.
It’s not clear to me how often Peter Best sang lead vocals when he was in The Beatles, but we know he did so at least occasionally. Before the Brian Epstein era, he had sung songs such as “Matchbox” and “Wild in the Country”, but his singing spot had been dropped. Then Brian responded to pressure from Pete’s mother Mona and got the Beatles to give him font-of-stage time again, this time singing a song called “Peppermint Twist” (Lewisohn 2013). There’s a wonderful photo from a fan-club show in the Cavern in 1962 with Pete singing out front while Paul plays drums. So, we can see that the philosophy of getting the drummer to sing was at least partly in place even before Ringo joined.
And we know that Ringo also sang lead sometimes before he joined The Beatles, when he was with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes.
{extract of Ringo’s song, Rory and the Hurricanes}
Their shows regularly included “Starr Time”, when Ringo sang songs such as “Boys” or “Alley Oop” (Lewisohn 2013). Lewisohn described “Alley Oop” as “a guaranteed crowd-pleaser: part spoken, part sung and allowing for lots of audience participation. It was ideally suited to someone who could sing but didn’t have the greatest range” (Lewisohn 2013, p. 644).
{extract of “Alley Oop”}
Ringo’s willingness to put himself forward in “Starr Time” shows that he was already a bit of a showman, and that he would fit in well with The Beatles’ philosophy of getting vocal contributions from everyone in the team.
Another factor that may have contributed to the other Beatles agreeing to have Ringo sing some lead vocals was their thirst for variety. Ringo had a completely different voice and came across as a different personality in his songs. If you think through each of the Ringo songs, from “Boys” on Please Please Me to “Octopus’s Garden” on Ábbey Road, they really do add to the musical variety on offer.
Paul’s comment in Many Years From Now suggests that variety was a consideration. “We always liked to do one for him [Ringo] and it had to be not too much like our style” (Miles 1997, p.310).
Of the 11 songs Ringo did on The Beatles’ records, four were covers, five were Lennon and McCartney originals, with one of those including a token songwriting credit for Ringo, and two were written by Ringo himself. Some of the Lennon and McCartney songs given to Ringo were not their strongest material – “I Wanna Be Your Man”, “What Goes On”. Of the others, one was a song from John that didn’t want to sing himself – “Goodnight” – and one was a novelty song aimed at children – “Yellow Submarine”. There was really only one great Lennon and McCartney song that was written specifically for Ringo and conveyed something real and meaningful: “With a Little Help From My Friends”.
{extract from “With a Little Help From My Friends”}
As a song for Ringo, this could not possibly be improved upon. The message of the lyrics is a perfect fit for him, the melody is crafted to suit his vocal range, and the positivity and friendliness that come through in the music are just right.
In Can’t Buy Me Love, Jonathan Gould wrote that “From the first bar, there is a sense that Ringo’s entire career has been leading up to this moment.” (Gould 2007, 360). And indeed, it was a new high point for Ringo. From his earliest days of being a drummer, his mother’s best friend Annie Maguire used to predict that he would be a big star. She’s say, “See you on the Palladium son, see your name in lights!” (Lewisohn 2013, p 436). It was obviously a friendly joke because it was ludicrously unlikely given where Ringo was starting from, but of course Ringo and The Beatles played in the Palladium in late 1963, and went on from there. And here was Ringo in March 1967, in a position that far, far exceeded any level of fame and fortune the Annie Maguire could possibly have imagined. He was one of the four most-famous and most-loved people on the planet, he had already played on recordings that will outlast anything else recorded in the 20th century, and here he was singing lead on a song that would become the second track on an album that hit the music world, and the world in general, like a tsunami. Ringo must still be pinching himself every day.
Songwriting
We know more about the songwriting of “With a Little Help From My Friends” than most other Beatles songs. Unlike say “Strawberry Fields Forever” or “Get Back”, we don’t have audio recordings of the songwriting process, but we do have a very interesting first-hand account by a journalist for at least part of the process. That journalist was Hunter Davies, the author of the only authorised biography of the band. Davies was allowed to hang around with the band observing whatever they happened to be doing, and he was in the room on March 29, 1967 for the second day of John and Paul working on the writing of “With a Little Help From My Friends”.
They were nearing the end of the recording sessions for Sgt. Pepper, and the pressure was on to get the last song written and recorded. There hadn’t been a Ringo song recorded for the album so far, so writing a new one for him was the obvious thing to do. On March 28, the day before Hunter Davies joined them, they had started writing the song. It’s not fully clear from Davies’ description which parts had been completed by the time they got together again the next day, but it sounds like they had chosen the title and written the chorus, and they had a draft of the music for the rest of the song but they needed to polish and finalise the music and write the rest of the words.
I don’t know if Davies was a musician himself but I’m guessing not because his description of their music writing process is interesting but superficial. “John started playing his guitar and Paul started banging on the piano. For a couple of hours they both banged away” (Davies 1985, p.345). I’d be surprised if John and Paul described what they were doing as banging.
Continuing Hunter Davies’ description, “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” (Davies 1985, p.345). That sounds similar to what we can observe of Paul writing the music for “Get Back” in the Peter Jackson documentary. He tries out various melody lines, going over and over the same chords in a trance-like state, keeping some parts of the melody, changing others, slowly moving towards a whole melody line that he’s happy with. That was Paul working on his own, but the process sounds similar to Hunter Davies’ description of how John and Paul created “With a Little Help From My Friends”.
When they get onto the words for the verses, it’s again a process of trial and error. Intuitively, they understand that the best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas and throw away the bad ones. To get them started, John sang “Are you afraid when you turn out the light?” It’s interesting that the words seemed to emerge in the act of singing. Paul sings it back and nods. John then feeds off this random line and suggests that they base the lyrics around a series of questions, which they proceed to do.
John sings again and comes up with “Do you believe in love at first sight?” He recognises straight away that this has too few syllables for the melody they’ve written. It needs one more. They consider ways of fixing this, including inserting a pause in the middle of the line, but then Paul suggests “Do you believe in a love at first sight?” John sings it back and then comes out with “Yes, I’m certain it happens all the time”. They sing these two lines to themselves. John changes it from “Do you believe …” to “Would you believe …”. They decide to make these the first two lines of the verse and go back to “Are you afraid when you turn out the light?” for the third line but they haven’t got a fourth line yet. They’ve now been going for about three hours. They seem to have finished off the music, and they’ve got three lines of lyrics, only two of which are actually finished.
Then Davies reports that they are joined by John’s wife Cynthia who hangs around reading, as does Terry Doran, a car dealer from Liverpool who had long been a friend of Brian Epstein, and who sold George his first car back in 1962. It was a second-hand, two-door, blue Ford Anglia 105E Deluxe with a radio (Lewisohn 2013). That’s the sort of amazing detail you can find out about The Beatles when Mark Lewisohn is on the case! In return for a good price, George appeared with John and Paul in a newspaper advertisement for the car dealership.
That brings us to the question of where John and Paul were doing their work on “With a Little Help From My Friends”. Hunter Davies said that it was in Paul’s top-floor work room in his house at Cavendish Avernue, St John’s Wood. He even described the room: “a narrow rectangular room full of stereophonic equipment and amplifiers” (Davies 1985, p.345). He said there were also some photos of Jane Asher and “a large silver piece of sculpture by Paolozzi”, the artist who mentored Stuart Sutcliffe in Hamburg. As usual in the Beatles’ world, everything is connected.
However, there’s something wrong with this story. It seems extremely unlikely that Cynthia would be just hanging around in Paul’s top-floor work room, especially on an evening when John’s plan was to proceed on to the recording studio for a very late night of recording. Much more believable is Paul’s version of the story in Many Years From Now (Miles 1997). The first thing he said was “This was written out at John’s house in Weybridge” (Miles 1997, p. 310).
More consistent with Hunter Davies’ account, Paul also said, “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.” (Miles 1997, p. 310).
Similarly, in The Lyrics he said, “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” (McCartney 2021, p.805).
Their efforts to make the song suitable for Ringo to sing included consciously constraining the range of notes used in the lead vocal line to line up with Ringo’s comfortable vocal range. In fact, apart from the final note, the entire song requires Ringo to sing within a range of just five notes (Lambley 2019), from E up to B. That seems to put a very challenging constraint on the songwriters, but they still managed to come up with a remarkably effective and catchy melody.
Let’s go back to the lyric writing process described by Hunter Davies. We’re at the point where they have the words for the chorus and much of what will turn out to be the third verse. They’ve been repeatedly playing and singing the three lines they’ve got, trying to land on a fourth. They know it has to rhyme with “time” from “it happens all the time”.
Cynthia suggests, “I just feel fine” but John responds, “You never use the word just. It’s meaningless. It’s a fill-in word.” This is ironic because the final version of the song includes the word “just” – not in that line but in “I just need someone to love”.
{extract of “I just need someone to love”}
At this point, John and Paul allow themselves to get highly distracted. Davies describes how they talk about birthdays, they sing “Can’t Buy Me Love”, Paul plays a 1950s instrumental called “Tequila”, while John calls out random words, some of them rude. Why are they wasting time like this when they’ve got a song they have to finish quickly? Because they hope it will help them get unbogged, and it does!
Davies observed, “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.”
Later, when it was time to go to the studio, they tried to ring Ringo to tell him that the song was finished, even though it wasn’t. His phone was engaged. If the account by Hunter Davies is accurate and complete and they hadn’t written words for the other two verses or the middle eights by this stage, it must have been done later that night, because at the end of the session, around daybreak the following morning, Ringo recorded the entire lead vocal. That means that the process of creating the rest of the lyrics must have been far more rapid and efficient than the verse Davies wrote about. I have a suspicion that they may have had at least some of those words in the bag already, but there is no way of knowing.
It’s fascinating to see how much their songwriting approach depended on intuition and spontaneous randomness, at least for this song. They had no specific plan or starting idea for the verse we heard about in detail. They just thrashed around and tried things out until they chanced upon ideas that felt right to them. The approach is consistent with what John advised George to do to get over an impasse when he was writing the words for the second line of “Something”. “Just say whatever comes into your head each time – ‘attracts me like a cauliflower’ – until you get the word.”
In his later book, Beatles Lyrics, Hunter Davies commented on their approach. “It was a method they had used for some years – messing around together, very often with a little audience of friends around that they could use as a sounding board, though the audience knew not to interrupt unless their opinion was asked, which it very often was. … What was interesting was that they [John and Paul] seemed to know instinctively when a suggestion would work, sensing that it would fit in with what was already floating around in their minds” (Davies 2014, p.195).
In terms of the relative contributions of John and Paul to the songwriting, Paul remembered it as a joint effort, and so did John, initially. In 1970 he said, “Paul had the line about ‘little help from my friends’, I’m not sure, he had some kind of structure for it, and we wrote it pretty well 50/50 but it was based on his original idea” (Wenner 1971). But in an interview in 1980 he’d forgotten this, saying “That’s Paul with a little help from me” (Sheff 2020, p.206). Obviously, that understates John’s contribution.
Music
“With a Little Help From My Friends” is the first song we’ve covered that has a swing feel. The rhythm of the song is not one-ah-two-ah-three-ah-four [said in straight time], it’s one, ah-two, ah-three, ah-four [said in swing time]. This makes the song bounce and probably gives it a more positive, optimistic feel, which suits the subject matter.
The combination of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and “With a Little Help From My Friends” is the first medley of original songs released by The Beatles. It was not their first medley. That honour goes to “Kansas City/Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey”, written by Lieber and Stoller, and Little Richard, respectively.
{extract from “Kansas City/Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey”}
They also played medleys of their hits on one of their BBC sessions and on the Around The Beatles TV special. There was one more notable medley to come later: The Long One on side 2 of Abbey Road.
Unlike parts of “The Long One”, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and “With a Little Help From My Friends” were recorded separately and edited together later. It was obviously planned because the key transition between them works to well. The start of “With a Little Help From My Friends” is the point where they switch from straight 4/4 time in “Sgt. Pepper” to triplets in “With a Little Help …” and they sing “Billy Shears”. There is screaming and cheering audience noise at the point of the transition, although it comes in slightly early in the stereo mixes.
{extract of the transition from “Sgt. Pepper” to “With a Little Help …”}
The song is structured as follows: intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, middle eight, verse, chorus, middle eight, chorus, ending. It’s a very common structure in pop music generally but not one The Beatles used all that often. By my count, only 20 of their songs included verses, choruses and middle eights in the same song (Pannell 2023).
There is some nice symmetry between the intro and the ending. They both use a sequence of chords that doesn’t occur elsewhere in the song: the flat 6th chord, C, to the flat 7th chord, D, to the 1 chord, E.
{extract of ending}
As we heard in the last episode, they had first used this chord sequence in “P.S. I Love You”, back in 1962.
{extract of “You, you,you” part of “P.S. I Love You”}
Of course, the chord changes occur four times faster in “P.S. I Love You”, but it’s essentially the same chord sequence.
After a descending guitar part in the second half of the intro, we’re into the first verse, and we hear Ringo’s terrific vocal performance.
{extract of isolated Ringo from first verse}
Under his vocal, the verse has a backing track consisting of piano, electric guitar, bass, and drums. In the original mixes, the piano and guitar merge together and are hard to distinguish. What really stands out in the backing is Paul’s wonderful bass part.
{extract of full backing from first verse}
As he did on most Sgt. Pepper tracks, Paul overdubbed his bass after the rest of the instruments had been recorded, allowing him to take his time and come up with the best bass part he could.
{extract of bass isolated from first verse}
Then the chorus has the same instrumentation as the verse plus some percussion: a cow bell and a tambourine, although they’re not very prominent. What is prominent is the change in the sound of Ringo’s snare drum between the verse and the chorus. He’s hitting it much harder in the chorus and getting a notably sharper sound.
{extract of drums in verse and chorus}
It doesn’t get louder in the mix, it just sounds different. I presume that’s thanks to a compressor.
We’ve already had some chords in the intro that don’t fit the key of E naturally, and now we’ve got another one in the chorus. It goes D, A, E, and it’s the D that stretches us.
{extract of backing for chorus first two lines}
If you just focus on that chord sequence, you might recognise it from a later song where it is very prominent.
{extract of the turnaround from “Get Back:}
Obviously it’s in a different key and it’s played twice as fast in “Get Back”, but again it’s basically the same chord sequence.
The melody line in the chorus spends more than half its time on one note, E.
{extract of chorus vocal isolated}
That makes me think that this part of the melody could have been created by John, who often sat on one note while the chords changed underneath him. But that’s just supposition. Paul did it too sometimes, including on the “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” the song.
At the end of the first chorus, there is another falling guitar line and then a wonderful solo tom-tom fill from Ringo.
{extract of tom-tom at end of first chorus}
The tom-toms sound amazing, which is a credit to sound engineer Geoff Emerick. He removed the bottom skins off Ringo’s tom-toms to achieve that sound, just like he had for “A Day in the Life”. Gould described it as, “A jewel of a drum fill. Two bars of booming asymmetry, impossibly round and deep” (Gould 2007, p.398). That two-bar drum fill is actually one of the longest pieces of solo Ringo in the whole Beatles catalogue.
It’s so great and it follows so naturally from the chorus that you’d expect them to do it again after the other two choruses, but they don’t. It’s another of The Beatles’ little musical surprises that keep our musical brains on their toes.
The next surprise is about to occur as we go into the second verse. Instead of singing all four lines of the verse, Ringo just sings his questions in the first and third lines, and he’s answered by John and Paul singing questions in unison in the second and fourth lines.
{extract of second verse}
In the third verse it’s different again, with John and Paul singing the initial questions, this time including a harmony, and Ringo providing answers.
{extract of third verse}
Ringo also plays a ride cymbal throughout the third verse, which he doesn’t do anywhere else in the song.
After the second chorus we have the first of two middle eights. John and Paul sing their questions in sparkling harmonies, “Do you need anybody? Could it be anybody?”, before Ringo responds in his Ringo voice.
{extract of middle eight}
They are superb middle eights that give the song a huge lift. They are possibly the most catchy and memorable parts of the song.
Lyrics
We can see the original lyric sheet, hand-written by Paul, in various places: in Hunter Davies (2014) book Beatles Lyrics, in Paul’s book The Lyrics, and in the book that comes with the Super Deluxe edition of Sgt. Pepper.
From the account of how the lyrics were written, we know there was no clear planned message for the song. John and Paul were using their strategy of generating lines spontaneously and keeping the ones they liked. But clearly, the anchor for the lyrics was the song’s title. Early in the process, they had been calling it “Bad Finger Boogie” because John was apparently playing piano with a sore finger. That title is preserved on the hand-written lyric sheet, but it’s in brackets, making it clear that it’s secondary to the real title. Hunter Davies tells us that the final title was already in place by the start of the second and final day of writing it (Davis 1985).
I think we can largely take the song’s lyrics at face value. It is about the Beatles’ affection for Ringo and their willingness to support him. He was the Beatle they all got on with best and had the fewest arguments with.
The idea for adopting this theme could perhaps have been prompted by the very fact of them writing the song for Ringo. In doing so, they, Ringo’s friends, were helping him. They were giving him a song to sing and a place in the spotlight as lead singer, even though his abilities as a singer were distinctly below theirs.
They acknowledge his limitations as a singer right at the start of the song.
What would you think if I sang out of tune?
Would you stand up and walk out on me?
Lend me your ears and I'll sing you a song
And I'll try not to sing out of key
In The Lyrics, Paul said, “Poking a little fun at Ringo was actually a lot of fun. ‘What would you do if I sang out of tune?’” (McCartney 2021, p.805). It was quite good natured of Ringo to sing that, really. And it’s ironic that Ringo’s pitch for the first note or two of his vocal is bit off.
There was originally another part of that verse that he refused to sing. It’s the story he most commonly tells about the song. The version in the Anthology book goes like this.
“They had one line 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 I am 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 Beatles 2000, p. 242).
We can see the original tomato line on the hand-written lyric sheet. It was “Would you throw a tomato at me?” – a little different from what Ringo remembered. “Throw a tomato at me” is crossed out and the replacement line, “stand up and walk out on me”, is written in. There are also a couple of other minor changes. Paul had originally written “I’ll try not to go out of key” instead of “sing out of key”, and he’d written “Yes, I’m certain that it happens every day”, instead of “happens all the time”.
The chorus gives us the key message of the song.
Oh, I get by with a little help from my friends
Hmm, I get high with a little help from my friends
Hmm, gonna try with a little help from my friends
My feeling is that the song is really broader than just friends helping Ringo. At least implicitly, it’s a celebration of all the friendships within the Beatles. It reflects their closeness as a gang and their “all for one, one for all” philosophy.
The “I get high” line was an intentional nod to their fondness for drugs. Paul said, “because it was the pot era, we had to slip in a little reference: ‘I get high!’” (Miles 1997, p.310). It wasn’t the main point of the song, but some people extrapolated from that line and concluded that the “friends” referred to in the song were drugs. For example, Spiro Agnew was Vice President of the US in 1970 when he said, “It’s a catchy tune, but until it was pointed out to me, I never realized that the ‘friends’ were assorted drugs.” He tried to get the song banned. Later that same year, John asserted that Agnew’s interpretation was not correct. “It’s really about a little help from my friends, it’s a sincere message” (Wenner 1971, P.87 of the 2000 reissue).
The second verse gives us four more questions to ponder.
What do I do when my love is away?
(Does it worry you to be alone?)
How do I feel by the end of the day?
(Are you sad because you're on your own?)
Ringo says he’s not worried or sad, thanks to his friends. Or, at least, John and Paul put those words into his mouth, but it’s completely believable.
Lyrically, the middle eights are a bit of a departure.
Do you need anybody?
I need somebody to love
Could it be anybody?
I want somebody to love
We have to use our imagination to connect those to the lyrics we’ve had so far. Maybe it’s about platonic love between friends. Or maybe it’s implying that good friends support each other in their search for romantic love. The second question, “Could it be anybody?”, seems to be asking, are we your important friends, or would someone else be just as good. They don’t require Ringo to answer that.
The final verse is the one whose writing Hunter Davies observed and described for us.
Would you believe in a love at first sight?
Yes, I'm certain that it happens all the time
What do you see when you turn out the light?
I can't tell you, but I know it's mine
In the context of the rest of the song, these lines seem relatively disconnected. Their relevance to the song’s title is much less obvious than the other two verses. Perhaps that’s a result of the spontaneous, random approach used to generate them.
I always took the last line, “I can’t tell you but I know it’s mine”, as referring to Ringo’s wife Maureen, especially given the earlier line about his love being away. But Paul says it was an intentional rude joke referring to Ringo’s own body. “I remember giggling with John as we wrote the lines” (Miles 1997, p.310). I wonder if they referred to it as a “bird”, a la Frank Sinatra, or maybe as a “Beatle piedel”, as mentioned by John on the second Beatles Christmas record.
On reflection, asking what Ringo can see doesn’t make complete sense, since Ringo wouldn’t see much of anything once the light was out. Perhaps it’s really asking about what he thinks about rather than what he physically sees.
There’s a book by Ilse Niccolini (2021) called How The Beatles Knew, which puts forward the radical view that Paul’s song writing during The Beatles years was strongly influenced by ideas and findings from psychology. Her idea is that Paul would have become familiar with psychology by reading things from the bookshelf of Dr Richard Asher, Jane Asher’s father, when Paul lived in their family home. I think she claims too much for her theory, but her perspective on “With a Little Help From My Friends” is interesting. She observes that the song, with its question-and-answer format, is like a group therapy session. Ringo is confiding in us and we hear his inner feelings. The listener hears that help can come not just from a single person, as was sought by John in the song “Help!”, but from a group of people. That’s nice to contemplate, but it’s not really any different to what I take from a face-value reading of the lyrics.
Recording process
“With a Little Help From My Friends” was recorded over two nights, March 29/30 and 30/31, 1967 (Lewisohn 1988). The first night was devoted to recording the backing track and Ringo’s lead vocal, and on the second night they applied a series of overdubs. It was almost the end of recording the Sgt. Pepper album, with only two more sessions to go after that before it was wrapped up, apart from mixing.
The backing track included drums played by Ringo, a piano played by Paul, an organ, just in the introduction, played by George Martin, a rhythm guitar, and a cowbell. We can hear this lineup in takes 1 and 2, which were released on the Sgt. Pepper Super Deluxe box set in 2018. Mark Lewisohn (1988) in the Complete Beatles Recording Sessions said that the cowbell was played by John, but the Beatles’ roadie Mal Evans wrote in his diary that it was himself. Mal presumably wrote this close to the time. Is he telling the truth? He might be.
If it is Mal, then it could have been either George or John on rhythm guitar. Most sources say it was George, which would be uncontentious if John was playing cowbell. But one clue that makes me wonder whether it could have been John is a snippet of conversation between Paul and John in between takes 1 and 2. Paul says something like, “After you play, John, play what you play”,
{extract of Paul-John conversation}
which doesn’t seem to make sense, but John knew what Paul meant because he said “OK”. Paul’s comment certainly seems to imply that John is playing something. And as obscure as it is, the comment feels to me more like something he’d say to a guitarist than a cowbellist.
John’s reply comes from a slightly different position in the stereo field than the cowbell taps we can hear during that snippet, suggesting that the microphone he was closest to was not the one recording the cowbell.
Also, when I listen to the isolated rhythm guitar part, there’s even a wrong chord in one place.
{extract of the rhythm guitar wrong chord}
That also makes me lean towards it being John on the rhythm guitar rather than George. On the other hand, the timing of the cowbell is spot on. When we see Mal playing the anvil for “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” in the Let It Be movie, his timing is definitely not spot on. So you can see that I’m not confident either way. Both theories about who plays the cowbell have things in favour of them.
Take 1 broke down after the intro.
{extract – take 1}
Take 2 was a complete take, and it sounds good. The arrangement is fully in place. They just need to play it to their satisfaction. They took another eight takes to achieve that. They chose take 10 as “best” and did a reduction mix to prepare it for overdubs. According to Geoff Emerick it was almost dawn by this time (Emerick 2007). Presumably, finishing the lyrics occupied some of that time.
Ringo assumed it was now time to go home, but Paul said they should record his lead vocal. Ringo was tired and he was worried about whether he could hit the high note at the end of the song, so to support him, the other Beatles stood around him on the studio floor and silently conducted him as he attempted it (Emerick 2007). I find that absolutely delightful. The image of the three other Beatles lending Ringo their strong support by their physical presence is pretty special.
Ringo later said, “I’m insecure when I do the vocals. It took a lot of coaxing from Paul to get me to sing that last note. I just felt it was very high, but we finally got that last note” (Howlett 2018, p.53). It was high for Ringo, much higher than the rest of his vocal in the song, and it required an octave jump from “a little help from my” up to “friends”, but he got there.
{extract – Ringo’s high note}
Reading the various accounts of the song, it’s standard to say that it’s probably Ringo’s best vocal performance on a Beatles song. And I agree, it is.
I think the backing vocals were added later, probably when they reconvened the next night. In the intro they did three-part harmony vocals saying Billy Sheers.
{extract Billy Sheers}
After the intro, there are at most two vocal harmony lines on top of Ringo’s lead vocal and it sounds to me like it’s just John and Paul singing. In the verses, Paul takes the higher harmony as usual. Their backing vocals are doubled (Hammack 2023), although Ringo’s lead vocals aren’t. In the middle eights, it sounds like John and Paul both do both harmonies. They sing the lower harmony together in one overdub and they sing the higher one together in another overdub. As far as I’m aware, this is not an approach they used often, since it was so much easier for Paul to hit high notes.
{extract of vocals and harmonies}
John and Paul sing the questions in the second verse in unison, without harmonies.
{extract of question with no harmony}
In the third verse, where they ask questions first, they do include a harmony.
{extract of question with harmony}
They overdubbed some additional instruments to beef up the intro, with Ringo adding snare drum and Paul playing timpani,
{extract of timpani}
Someone played an additional organ part, perhaps George.
Next, Paul recorded his wonderful bass line,
{extract of bass from second verse}
Ringo added tambourine and George added one short burst of lead guitar just before the second verse.
{extract lead guitar}
The arpeggiated guitar at the end of the intro was not overdubbed. It was played by whoever played rhythm guitar and it was part of the backing track. And that was it, apart from mixing.
If you’d like to hear the individual instruments, there are at least two videos on YouTube that provide isolated audio for each of them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_FAk5hxgWc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rn_3wCzJPiI
There is also a video where musicians have reproduced the entire instrumental track with remarkable accuracy, using the same instruments as the Beatles, and you can see how the parts were played. The guitarist even reproduces the wrong chord that George or John played in the third verse. That’s impressive attention to detail. See if you can spot it. I’ll include links in the transcript.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LokzE_yIuA
Instruments
In the post-touring years, The Beatles moved away from their classic instrument lineups, although Ringo stuck with his Ludwig drums. The Hofner basses, Gretsch guitars and Rickenbacker guitars were largely put away as The Beatles used other makes and models to give them different sounds. This trend had already started on earlier albums but it was fully in place for Sgt. Pepper.
Another important change to their instrumentation in 1967 was a dramatic increase in their use of keyboards. In 1964, 65 and 66, they had used keyboards on around 40% of their songs, but in 1967 that figure jumped to 83% (based on the database from Pannell 2023).
On “With a Little Help From My Friends”, Paul played what was called a “jangle box” or “tack piano”, (Babiuk 2015, p.343). This was a Challen upright piano whose hammers had been brushed with cellulose to create a hard surface, and some of its strings were put slightly out of tune. It had a bright, percussive, jangling sound, and The Beatles had used is previously, including on “Paperback Writer” and “Penny Lane”. On the original mixes of “With a Little Help …”, both mono and stereo, the piano was hard to hear as it was obscured by the rhythm guitar, but it’s easier to hear in the two more recent stereo mixes, and of course in the isolated instrument tracks available on YouTube.
{extract of isolated piano}
Paul used his Rickenbacker 4001S bass. We’ve got an account of how it was recorded, from second engineer Richard Lush. “Ninety-nine percent of the time he used a Fender amp, but on this track Paul used an Altec loudspeaker. … I think it was the best bass sound on the album. I’m pretty sure he played the Rickenbacker in the control room and we sent the signal down into the studio through the Altec speaker, which we miked” (Babiuk 2015, p.399).
For the snatch of lead guitar after the first chorus, the bright sound suggests that George probably used his Fender Stratocaster. The rhythm guitar doesn’t sound much like a strat to me. Whether it was played by George or John, I suspect it was one of their Epiphone Casinos.
Mixes and versions
The song was first released on the Sgt. Pepper album on May 26, 1967 in the UK and June 2nd, 1967 in the US. Mono and stereo versions were both released on those dates.
It’s well known that The Beatles themselves played an active role in the mixing of the mono version of the album but not the stereo version, and most people involved considered the mono album to be the definitive one. However, in the case of “With a Little Help From My Friends”, there is not much difference between the mono and stereo versions, apart from the spatial separation of instruments and voices. The most noticeable difference is the crowd noise that helps cover over the edit point between the “Sgt. Pepper” song and “With a Little Help from My Friends”.
{extract of crowd noise}
The cheering and screaming is louder and starts a bit earlier in the stereo version.
As a medley, “Sgt. Pepper” and “With a Little Help from My Friends” were released as a single in August or September 1978. This was in the period when EMI was putting out various Beatles releases without Beatles approval, and it’s easy to imagine that they would not have approved of this single. EMI was trying to cash in on the release of an awful movie called Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, starring the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton. They were huge stars, but the movie was a dud. And the Beatles’ single failed as well, reaching only number 63 in the UK and 71 in the US.
Subsequently, there have been two stereo remixes of the song. The first was on the Yellow Submarine Songtrack album, released in 1999 to coincide with the release of a restored version of the Yellow Submarine movie. This was the first time any Beatles songs had been re-mixed in a modern style. George Martin had remixed Help! and Rubber Soul for CD release in 1987, but they still sounded like 1960s mixes, with instrument placements that don’t sound ideal to modern ears. The Yellow Submarine Songtrack mixes are more modern-sounding and they stand up very well. To my ears, they are just as enjoyable as the later remixes by Giles Martin. The Giles Martin remix came out on the Super Deluxe edition of Sgt. Pepper in 2017.
I enjoy both of these remixes of “With a Little Help from My Friends”. Relative to the original stereo mix, the main differences with the Yellow Submarine Songtrack mix are that all the vocals are centred, the bass is centred and the piano and rhythm guitar are placed left and right, rather than centred.
{extract of Yellow Submarine Songtrack mix}
The 2017 mix is fairly similar to the 1999 one, with the most noticeable difference being that the backing vocals are split left and right, which works really well.
{extract of 2017 mix}
The splitting of the piano and rhythm guitar left and right in both remixes makes it easier to hear the piano, which is hard to pick out in the original mixes.
Also released with the Super Deluxe Edition were recordings of takes 1 and 2, which I described earlier. They show that the arrangement of the backing track was already fully in place before they started recording. They must have spent time developing and rehearsing that arrangement before the recording started.
Two different surround mixes have been released: one is just a brief snippet of the song on the Yellow Submarine DVD soundtrack in 1999, and the other is included in the Super Deluxe Edition of Sgt. Pepper from 2017.
Then there are a large number of official releases of live version by Ringo on record and CD. It’s always the last song in his concerts, and sometimes a snippet of it has also been the first song, emphasising just how important the song is to him. I may have missed some, but in my collection I count 14 different officially released live performances, including snippets at the start of a concert, with various All Starr Bands,
{extract}
or with the Roundheads,
{extract}
or at the Prince’s Trust Concert from 1987. George was also in the Prince’s Trust concert, so I assume George provided a little help to Ringo for his song.
Listening through the various live versions from different time periods, one thing that strikes me is that Ringo’s singing has generally improved with age. There are fewer off-key notes in the later versions than in the earlier versions. I don’t think it’s auto-tune. It makes me wonder whether Ringo has had some singing lessons.
Live performances
The song was never played live by The Beatles, of course, but as I was just saying it has often been played live by Ringo. In fact, it is the song he has played more times than any other.
As of August 2026, he’s performed it 851 times with his All Starr Band, 8 times with the Roundheads, and 21 other times in various other contexts. It’s really become Ringo’s signature song. In recent years he has often segued into the chorus of “Give Peace a Chance” at the end of the song. There have been at least two concerts where he’s performed it jointly with Paul, including for "The Night That Changed America: A Grammy Salute to The Beatles" in 2014, and Ringo’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2015. And I mentioned the Prince’s Trust performance that probably included George.
TV, radio and movie performances
There is a short excerpt of the song included in the Yellow Submarine movie, immediately following “Sgt. Pepper’s Longly Hearts Club Band”. Hence its inclusion on the Yellow Submarine Songtrack album.
Some of Ringo’s live albums with his various All Star Bands have been accompanied by live concert videos, and they all include “With a Little Help From My Friends”. It’s also been included on videos of various other shows, including VH1 Storytellers from 1998, Live at Soundstage from 2005, Ringo at the Ryman from 2011, and Ringo and Friends at the Ryman from 2025. The Prince’s Trust show from 1987 was obviously captured on video, but I haven’t been able to track down Ringo’s performance. In my view, the best live versions are the ones backed by the Roundheads. Mark Hudson’s attention to detail when putting together the arrangements was really impressive. It a shame that he and Ringo later fell out.
Cover versions
This is the first song we’ve explored to have a crazy number of cover versions recorded or performed live. It’s also the first song we’ve looked at so far to have a cover version that was a big hit.
In fact, three very different covers have made it to number 1 in the UK: Joe Cocker in 1968, Wet Wet Wet in 1988 and Sam and Mark in 2004. None of them were big hits in the US.
Three number 1 covers makes the song unique. Only five original songs released by The Beatles have had cover versions that made it to number 1 in the UK, and “With a Little Help From My Friends” is the only one of those to have had more than one cover make it to number 1. And it’s had three!
The three big covers are all completely different. Joe Cocker totally loses the original spirit of the song in his radical reworking in 3/4 time, with Jimmy Page on guitar and prominent female backing singers.
{extract of Joe Cocker}
It’s overblown, it’s heavy, it’s soulful, and it’s too serious for the sentiment of the song. But it does sound great. Paul was very positive about it. He told the story of how the record’s producer, Denny Cordell, rang him up explaining the ideas for a radical reworking of the song. “I said, ‘ Well, great, try it, and let me hear what you do with it. He came over to see us at Apple studios at Saville Row and played it and I said, ‘Wow, fantastic!’”
It’s not surprising that it was a hit in the UK. It’s very surprising it wasn’t a hit in the US. Much later, it was the theme song for a successful American comedy-drama series called The Wonder Years, and that’s how most Americans who know this version would have been introduced it. There is also a parody of this version by John Belushi that imitates Joe Cocker’s vocals and bodily movements uncannily well. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmjWO7oY8LU)
The number 1 version by Wet Wet Wet is completely insipid or, dare I say it, wet. I can’t bear to listen to it. Who would buy it? Lots of people apparently. It includes a number a small changes to the words and to the music that I find quite annoying.
{extract of Wet Wet Wet}
I had never heard Sam and Mark’s cover, or even heard of them, before researching this episode. They both did well in a TV talent contest series called Pop Idol, finishing third and second respectively. They teamed up and released this as their first single. It’s obviously 21st century disposable pop, but I really like the way it bounces along and I can see why it was the third number 1 version.
{extract of Sam and Mark}
There were also two cover versions released in 1967, trying to cash in on the fact that The Beatles had not released it as a single. That was a strategy that worked well for some acts, including The Overlanders covering “Michelle” and The Marmalade covering “Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da”, both of which went to number 1 in the UK. The cover by The Young Idea wasn’t quite that successful, but it got to number 10,
{extract of The Young Idea}
Another contemporary cover by Joe Brown, someone with strong Beatles connections, only made it to number 32.
{extract of Joe Brown}
Beyond that, there’s a huge list of cover versions released by many acts. Some names that stand out most to me are Barbra Streisand, The Beach Boys, The Bee Gees and Peter Frampton, Bon Jovi, Cheap Trick, Count Basie, Earl Scruggs, Herb Alpert, Ike and Tina Turner, Jeff Lynne, and Sammy Davis Jr. What a remarkably diverse list.
Setlist.fm lists 582 artists other than Ringo who have played the song live. Here are a few notable ones that I haven’t already mentioned: James Taylor, Donna Summer, Billy Joel, Queen, Jimmy Page, Prince, and Jackson Browne.
Other thoughts
A big part of my life has been spent working as a researcher in a university. A key achievement for a researcher is to get their research results published in a research journal. To do that, your work has to be reviewed and approved by several referees, who are established researchers themselves, and an editor. The system is designed to be quite strict in ensuring that high standards have been maintained in the research, and it can be really tough to meet the requirements. Most researchers avoid being flippant or light-hearted when selecting a title for a research article that is about to go through this challenging process – they probably worry about not looking serious enough. So I was surprised and delighted to see a new research paper that has just come out in September 2026 called “How science gets by with a little help from the Beatles: Detecting cultural wordplay in scientific literature using large language models” (Budel et al. 2026). The authors of this article went through every published journal article since the 1960s looking for examples where the authors of those articles had included a Beatles song title or some Beatles lyrics in the research article’s title. They included cases where the title or some lyrics were used word-for-word, and cases where they were alluded to using creative wordplay. If you’d asked me before what they’d find, I’d have guessed there would be dozens of articles, maybe 100, 200 tops. What they actually found was 2,237 articles that made exact use of a Beatles song title or some lyrics, and 963 that did so using wordplay. Over 3,000 altogether! I was astonished. The authors of this 2026 paper suggested that the motivation of researchers when referencing The Beatles was to get their paper noticed by other researchers, so it would be read. No doubt that’s true in many cases, but I also suspect that for some of them, this was a playful way of expressing their love for The Beatles. Beatles fans are everywhere, including in every research discipline. The broad disciplines with the most published articles referencing The Beatles in their titles were medicine; social science; biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology; arts and humanities; business, management and accounting; and engineering.
The reason I mention this here is that “With A Little Help From My Friends” is one of the Beatles songs used most frequently by researchers to brighten up the titles of their research papers. There have been 209 research papers with titles that include the exact song title, “With A Little Help From My Friends”, more than any other song except “The Long And Winding Road”. And there have been another 92 papers that include a wordplay version of the title – more than any other song except “All You Need Is Love”. Here are a few examples:
“With a little help from my friends: Mitochondria maintain redox balance for the endoplasmic reticulum” (Moulin 2022),
“With a little help from my friends? Asymmetrical social influence on adolescent smoking initiation and cessation” (Haas et al. 2014),
and an article about bacteria called “With a little help from my enemies” (Sanchez 2011).
This whole issue brought a big smile to my face. It really highlights how strong, enduring and widespread The Beatles’ cultural impact has been.
Speaking of re-utilising words out of Beatles songs, the name Billy Shears was co-opted by some of the idiots who contributed to the “Paul is dead” myth. They claimed it was the real name of the left-handed, supremely handsome, musical genius who The Beatles had just happened to find to replace Paul after he died. It wasn’t the only conspiracy theory concerning The Beatles, but it was surely the stupidest.
I mentioned how the song was originally titled “Bad Finger Boogie” because, at the time, John was struggling to play the piano due to an injured finger. Two years later, when a band called The Iveys was signed to Apple Records, it was decided that they needed a better name. The Beatles’ roadie and assistant Neil Aspinall somehow remembered the old song name “Bad Finger Boogie” and suggested Badfinger as the band name. This was accepted, and the band had a successful, if ultimately tragic, career. As well as being on The Beatles’ label, their first three singles were produced by Paul McCartney, Mal Evans and George Harrison, respectively. Their biggest success was writing the song “Without You”, which was a huge hit for Harry Nilsson in 1972
{extract of Nilsson}
and for Mariah Carey in 1994.
Finally, the facial hair report. We know that all four Beatles had moustaches and no beards during the recording of “With a Little Help From My Friends”, because the photo for the album cover was taken on March 30 (Lambley 2019), the day they recorded all the overdubs, apart from Ringo’s lead vocal. This combination of facial hair was only in place for quite a short time, during the Sgt. Pepper recording sessions and, as far as I am aware, not at any other time.
Conclusion
There are a number of things that make this song distinctive.
It was the last song written by John and Paul specifically for Ringo to sing. The three Ringo songs that came after this were written by Ringo himself, or by John alone.
It’s the Beatles song for which we have the most detailed eye-witness account of its composition. The account mainly covers part of the lyrics, but it’s still fascinating. It’s also broadly consistent with their songwriting process that we can observe ourselves in the Get Back documentary.
It includes one of Ringo’s very few drum solos. Although it’s only two bars long, that’s more drum solo than you can hear in almost any other Beatles song.
It was part of their first-released medley of original songs, and one of the few medleys they ever did.
It’s become Ringo’s signature song and the one he’s played live more than any other. This isn’t surprising since the message of the song, its melody and its spirit all fit Ringo so perfectly.
And it’s one of a handful of Beatles songs that had a cover version go to number 1 in the UK. It is the only one of those to have more than one cover go to number one. To have had three is amazing. It is such a great song that it can succeed even in the hands of mediocre performers.
Paul agreed that it was a good one. He said, “I think that was probably the best of the songs we wrote for Ringo, actually” (Miles 1997, p.310).
That’s it for this episode. Let me know what you think in the comments on everysoundthereis.net, where you can also find the transcript. Join me next time on Every Sound There Is for an in-depth exploration of another Beatles song.
Theme music by Marcus Phelan with Stefan Koch. Music in the section announcements by Stefan Koch, David Pannell, Marcus Phelan; and from the Gimme Some Truth podcast, Obadiah Jones and his mixing engineer Liam Narrie. Voice-overs by Michael Burton.
References
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The Beatles (2000). The Beatles Anthology, Chronicle Books, San Francisco.
Davies, H. (1985). The Beatles, Revised Edition, Jonathan Cape, London.
Davies, H. (2014). The Beatles Lyrics, The Stories Behind the Music, Including the Handwritten Drafts of More Than 100 Classic Beatles Songs, Little, Brown, New York.
Emerick, G. (2007). Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of The Beatles, Avery.
Gould, J. (2007). Can't Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America, Three Rivers Press, New York.
Hammack, J. (2023). The Beatles, Recording Reference Manual, Volume 3, Sgt Pepper’s Longly Hearts Club Band through Magical Mystery Tour (late 1966-1967), 5th edition, Gearfab, Ontario.
Lambley, S. (2019). And the Band Begins to Play: The Definitive Guide to the Songs of the Beatles, Slide, London.
Lewisohn, M. (1988). The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, Hamlyn, London.
Lewisohn, M. (2013). All These Years, Volume 1: Tune In, Extended Special Edition, Little, Brown, London.
McCartney, P. (2021). Paul McCartney: The Lyrics, 1956 to the Present, Allen Lane.
Miles, B. (1997). Paul McCartney, Many Years from Now, Henry Holt, New York.
Niccolini, I. (2021). How The Beatles Knew: A Theory of How They Wrote Their Songs, Tonal.
Pannell, D.J. (2023). Quantitative analysis of the evolution of the Beatles’ releases for EMI, 1962 – 1970, The Journal of Beatles Studies, Spring/Autumn, 65-90. https://doi.org/10.3828/jbs.2023.5
Sheff, D. (2020). All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, 40th Anniversary Edition, Pan, London.
David Pannell
October 2026