This Beatles Member Refused to Sing One of the Lyrics in Iconic 'Sgt. Pepper' Album Track

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' is considered The Beatles' masterpiece. "With A Little Help From My Friends" originally had a line Ringo refused to sing. Ringo objected to it, fearing real audience reactions.

The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is often regarded as the best album of all time. The album, released in May 1967, saw the band—John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr—take Beatlemania in a new direction, with a new influx of sonic styles and experimentation.

But it almost didn’t have one of its most important moments, all because of one line.

The line was in “With A Little Help From My Friends,” which Lennon and McCartney wrote together. “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,'” McCartney said in Barry Miles’s biography, Many Years From Now, per Far Out Magazine. But after Ringo scanned the first draft of the lyrics, he made a demand.

“The song ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’ was written specifically for me, but they had one line that I wouldn’t sing,” Starr said in The Beatles Anthology, the 1995 docuseries that was recently added to Disney+. And what line did Ringo refuse to sing? “It was, ‘What would you do if I sang out of tune?’ Would you stand up and throw tomatoes at me?'”

The Beatles began working on Sgt. Pepper’s in December 1966, months after wrapping up their final tour. Though they never formally announced that they were retiring from the road, the intense Beatlemania they experienced that year made them decide they’d be a studio-only band.

Starr clearly suspected that the band would eventually play live again, and he didn’t want to give the audience any ideas by singing a line about flying produce.

“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,” Starr said in Anthology (h/t Far Out), “and I thought that if we ever did get out there again, I was not going to be bombarded with tomatoes.”

Anyone who has ever heard “With A Little Help From My Friends” (or heard Joe Cocker’s version open up an episode of The Wonder Years) knows that the line goes “What would you do if I sang out of tune? Would you stand up and walk out on me?” Lennon and McCartney changed the line, resulting in a much better song—one that has endured in the decades since.

Source: Jason Brow/parade.com