Love Me Do

• 1. Introduction

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  "Love Me Do" by the Beatles arrived in British record shops on the 5th of October 1962, a date that marks one of the more consequential releases in the history of popular music. Built on just three chords and a wailing harmonica, it sounded nothing like what was filling the charts at the time. Where other acts relied on professional songwriters and polished Tin Pan Alley arrangements, here were four young men from Liverpool recording their own material. The song peaked at number 17 in the UK on its first run. But behind that modest chart position lay a story of competing recordings, a humiliated drummer, a stolen harmonica, and a producer who almost sent a completely different song to press instead. How did a modest debut become the starting point for the most successful run of chart hits in American pop history? And how did three separate recordings of the same song, each with a different drummer, come to co-exist across decades of releases?

• 2. Writing the Song

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  Paul McCartney wrote the verse and chorus, and John Lennon contributed the middle eight. The song predates the Beatles themselves. Lennon later recalled that McCartney had the song "in Hamburg, even, way, way before we were songwriters." McCartney described the co-writing process as the two of them sitting down without either having a particularly original idea, working through the craft of becoming songwriters. Their practice at the time was to scribble songs in a school notebook, writing "Another Lennon-McCartney Original" at the top of each page. The musical architecture is deliberately spare: G7 and C for the verses, moving to D for the bridge. Lennon opens with what has been described as a bluesy "dockside harmonica" riff, and then he and McCartney trade lead vocals, harmonising in a style drawn from the Everly Brothers during the held "please" before McCartney takes the unaccompanied title line. The song's plainness was the point. Writer Ian MacDonald described it as standing out "like a bare brick wall in a suburban sitting-room", its blunt northern working-class sound ringing what he called "the first faint chime of a revolutionary bell" against the smooth professional product that surrounded it. McCartney later noted with some satisfaction that "Love Me Do" and its B-side "P.S. I Love You" were among the few early songs the Beatles eventually regained control of, after EMI's publishing arm Ardmore and Beechwood took them on signing.

• 3. The Stolen Harmonica

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  Lennon's harmonica playing is inseparable from the sound of "Love Me Do", but the instrument he used had an unusual origin. As a child, his uncle George had given him a chromatic harmonica. The specific instrument he played at the EMI sessions, however, was one he had stolen from a music shop in Arnhem, the Netherlands, in 1960, during the Beatles' first road journey to Hamburg. The influence on his style came from an unexpected source. At a NEMS Enterprises show at New Brighton's Tower Ballroom in Wallasey on the 21st of June 1962, promoter Brian Epstein had booked American singer Bruce Channel, whose single "Hey! Baby" had charted in the UK in March of that year with a prominent harmonica intro. The Beatles were second on the bill. Lennon was so struck by Channel's harmonica player, Delbert McClinton, that he approached him afterwards for playing advice. Lennon also cited Frank Ifield's "I Remember You", a number one hit in the UK in July 1962, and its harmonica intro, saying: "The gimmick was the harmonica... and we started using it on 'Love Me Do' just for arrangements." The harmonica would go on to feature in the Beatles' early hit run, appearing also on "Please Please Me" and "From Me to You".

• 4. Three Sessions, Three Drummers

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  On the 6th of June 1962, the Beatles entered EMI Studios at 3 Abbey Road for their first recording session under contract. Pete Best was on drums. George Martin arrived partway through and immediately made a structural change: McCartney, not Lennon, would sing the words "love me do", because Lennon needed his mouth free to pick up the harmonica on that exact beat. McCartney recalled Martin saying: "Wait a minute, there's a crossover there. Someone else has got to sing 'love me do' because you're going to have a song called Love Me Waahhh." McCartney added: "God, I got the screaming heebie-jeebies. I can still hear the shake in my voice when I listen to it." Both Martin and producer Ron Richards concluded that Best's drumming was unsuitable for studio work. By the 4th of September 1962 session, Best had been replaced by Ringo Starr. Brian Epstein paid for the band to fly down from Liverpool to London. That evening, in Studio 2 from 7:00 pm to 10:00 pm, they recorded "Love Me Do" with Starr in fifteen takes. A week later, on the 11th of September 1962, the song was recorded a third time. Ron Richards, standing in for an absent Martin, booked session drummer Andy White, whom he had used previously. Starr arrived expecting to play and was instead handed a tambourine. "I was devastated that George Martin had his doubts about me," Starr later said. "I came down ready to roll and heard, 'We've got a professional drummer.' He has apologised several times since, has old George, but it was devastating." Engineer Norman Smith noted the difficulties with the drum sound, saying: "It was a real headache trying to get a good drum sound, and when you listen to the record now you can hardly hear the drums at all." The Starr version from the 4th of September was mixed with the bass drum low in the mix to hide timing issues. The quickest way to tell the two released versions apart: the White version has a tambourine, the Starr version does not.

• 5. How Do You Do It

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  The song that nearly replaced "Love Me Do" as the Beatles' debut single was "How Do You Do It?", a Tin Pan Alley number written by Mitch Murray and originally composed for Adam Faith. George Martin pushed hard for it, telling the band that unless they could write something equally commercial, they would be recording songs by professional writers like everyone else. At the 4th of September 1962 session, the band dutifully recorded it. Martin had a mastered version prepared for release, and it still exists in EMI's archives. What ultimately stopped it was pressure from EMI's own publishing arm, Ardmore and Beechwood, who wanted a Lennon-McCartney composition as the first A-side. Murray himself also disliked the Beatles' version. McCartney put the Liverpool perspective plainly: "We knew that the peer pressure back in Liverpool would not allow us to do 'How Do You Do It'." Martin later reflected: "I looked very hard at 'How Do You Do It?', but in the end I went with 'Love Me Do', it was quite a good record." The song did not disappear. It came back as a contender for the Beatles' second single before Martin finally assigned it to Gerry and the Pacemakers, who took it to number one. Martin was candid about his own limitations in assessing the Beatles early on: "It wasn't a question of what they could do, they hadn't written anything great at that time. But what impressed me most was their personalities. Sparks flew off them when you talked to them."

• 6. Chart History and Reissues

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  "Love Me Do" reached number 17 in the UK in November 1962, a result that surprised Martin, who had doubted its commercial appeal. In Australia, it reached number 1 on the 14th of February 1964. It reached number 1 in New Zealand on the 4th of June 1964. Early US copies were imported from Canada, pressed by Capitol Records Canada in a run of 170 singles released on the 4th of February 1963 with catalogue number 72076. These featured the Starr version. The US commercial release came on the 27th of April 1964, via Vee-Jay Records on the Tollie label, using the Andy White version. "Love Me Do" was the fourth of six Beatles songs to hit number one in the US within a single year, a record for the American charts. In order: "I Want to Hold Your Hand", "She Loves You", "Can't Buy Me Love", "Love Me Do", "A Hard Day's Night", and "I Feel Fine". A 1982 re-release as part of EMI's Beatles 20th anniversary pushed the song back to number 4 in the UK. The 50th anniversary in 2012 brought a separate complication: EMI pressed a limited-edition replica single intending to use the Ringo Starr version, but the pressings were recalled when it emerged they contained the Andy White version instead. The corrected version with Starr on drums was reissued on the 22nd of October 2012. On the 2nd of November 2023, a new stereo mix by Giles Martin, using de-mixing technology developed by Peter Jackson's WingNut Films, was released as the flip side of the "Now and Then" double A-side single. That version, featuring Starr, finally reached number one in the UK, more than sixty years after it first charted at 17.

• 7. Later Life of the Song

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  In 1969, during the Get Back sessions, the Beatles returned to "Love Me Do" in a slower, more bluesy form. Lennon played no harmonica on this version, and McCartney sang it in the same vocal style he used for "Lady Madonna". The recording circulated on bootlegs without official release. McCartney revisited both sides of the debut single in 1989 when he blended them into a medley he called "P.S. Love Me Do" for dates on his 1989-90 World Tour. A studio version appeared first on a Special Package edition of his album Flowers in the Dirt, released in Japan for his 1990 tour. A live version later appeared as a bonus track on the 12-inch and CD single of "Birthday" from the double live album Tripping the Live Fantastic. On the 3rd of July 1973, David Bowie performed a medley of "Love Me Do" and "The Jean Genie" at the Hammersmith Odeon, with Jeff Beck on guitar. The performance was left out of D. A. Pennebaker's concert film Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars but later appeared in Brett Morgen's documentary Moonage Daydream and on its soundtrack. On the 1st of January 2013, recordings of "Love Me Do" published in 1962 entered the public domain in Europe. The CD single issued on the 2nd of October 1992 remains one of the few places where both the Starr and the White versions appear side by side, allowing listeners to hear the tambourine difference that has served as the definitive tell between the two recordings for decades.