The Beatles BibleRingo Starr’s vocal contribution to With The Beatles, ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ was also recorded and released in 1963 by The Rolling Stones as their second single.
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WikipediaIn their early days as a live act in Liverpool and Hamburg the Beatles had alternated the lead vocals between John, Paul and George fairly systematically. I guess this made sense as they would play long and energetic shows. Fans had their favourite Beatle, who they wanted to see in the “spotlight”.
When Ringo joined the band he would also take a slot from time to time, building on the “Starr-time” segment he had developed in his previous group Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. Even then he had been a charismatic live performer who added far more than the typical anonymous drummer.
When they later began making albums, the Beatles continued with the rotation of lead vocals, and this would have been pretty distinctive at a time when most bands had a single lead singer and bands were often named “X and the Ys”. (The Beatles also made more use of backing vocals in the style of American girl bands – IMO the combination of 4 people playing and with 3-4 also singing was a probably big part of their early appeal).
Anyway, the Beatles wanted to make sure their albums and setlists included songs for Ringo, and I Wanna Be Your Man was one of the first originals written for this purpose.
Lennon was fairly disparaging about the song, describing it (in 1980) as “a throwaway”. But I take his comments with a pinch of salt because he often contradicts himself and is dismissive about earlier work.
People say Ringo is not the greatest singer, and needed songs (covers or originals) where the melody was simple and within a narrow range. IMO he sings with a lot of character and commitment and some of his songs are highlights for me (e.g., Boys, With A Little Help From My Friends). That’s not the case with I Wanna Be Your Man, where maybe they went too far with flattening out the melody! Still I imagine hearing him sing it live from behind the drums would have been pretty amazing.
It’s not the strongest Beatles song, but they thought it was good enough for the Rolling Stones who recorded and released it first. They had a number 12 UK hit with it. It was the first song ever on Top of the Pops.
This gives a yardstick to measure the weaker Lennon-McCartney songs – even songs that they considered disposable could be hits for other artists. So even being 208/213 in my (rather bizarre) ranking system would still have put them around the top 20 at the time.