He knew that I was into kids’ songs and he knew I could help. It was a very small part and I just went into the other room and put together ‘ sky of blue, sea of green.’ They had always asked other people for help with a line or two, so I helped with that line. He walked away from the car and came up to my apartment and played me ‘ Eleanor Rigby’ with different lyrics and he also said that he had another song that was missing a verse. “I helped Paul with the lyrics for ‘Yellow Submarine.’ He came round to my apartment and parked his Aston Martin in the middle of the road with the doors open and the radio blaring. Good friend Donovan Leitch relates his input in writing the song. I helped with the lyrics too…Paul’s idea, Paul’s title – so I count it as a Paul song…written for Ringo.” I helped with the blunderbuss bit.” In 1980 he described the song as “Paul’s baby. John concurs, stating in 1972: “Paul wrote the catchy chorus. I think John helped out the lyrics get more and more obscure as it goes on but the chorus, melody and verses are mine.” He wasn’t that keen on singing.”Īs to who wrote what, Paul states: “It’s pretty much my song as I recall, written for Ringo in that little twilight moment. I thought also, with Ringo being so good with children – a knockabout uncle type – it might not be a bad idea for him to have a children’s song, rather than a very serious song. So it didn’t seem uncool to me to have a pretty surreal idea that was also a children’s idea. I just made up a little tune in my head, then started making a story, sort of an ancient mariner, telling the young kids where he’d lived and how there’d been a place where he had a yellow submarine…I quite like children’s things I like children’s minds and imagination. He continues, “I was thinking of it as a song for Ringo, which it eventually turned out to be, so I wrote it as not too rangey in the vocal. I remember thinking that a children’s song would be quite a good idea and I thought of images, and the color yellow came to me, and a submarine came to me, and I thought, ‘Well, that’s kind of nice, like a toy, very childish yellow submarine,’” “I was laying in bed in the Ashers’ garret,” Paul remembers in his “Many Years From Now” book, “and there’s a nice twilight zone just as you’re drifting into sleep and as you wake from it I always find it quite a comfortable zone, you’re almost asleep, you’ve laid your burdens down for the day and there’s this little limbo-land just before you slip into sleep. The result became the only British Beatles single to feature Ringo as lead vocalist, a track that the singer would forever be linked with as his ultimate "claim to fame." And with the song eventually becoming the title track of their highly successful animated motion picture, “Yellow Submarine” will probably always be known as the singer’s most noteworthy accomplishment. They even enlisted friends and loved ones to help in the recording process. In fact, enthusiasm was high (quite possibly in the chemical sense as well) while it was being recorded, much time being spent in getting it just right. Who would ever have thought that the “Lennon / McCartney” songwriting team would compose a song for Ringo to sing that was deemed good enough to be released as a single. The resulting ‘Ringo track’ would be buried somewhere on the album to satisfy the demands of fans who desired to hear their favorite Beatle at the microphone. The time spent in the recording studio working on the song would always be minimal as well.
When the third option was chosen, the composition was admittedly never at the caliber of one they would sing themselves and definitely not one that would be intended for release as a single. Sometimes a cover song was chosen for him, sometimes he himself chose a cover song to perform, and sometimes a song was written especially for him by John and/or Paul.
Supplying a song for Ringo to sing on every Beatles album was not ever much of a priority.
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