If you were to make a list of the easiest Beatles’ songs for an amateur drummer to play, “Love Me Do”, the A-side to the band’s first single, would have to rank high on the list. It lopes along at a leisurely pace and doesn’t require too many fancy fills.
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Why then did The Beatles use three different drummers on the three official studio versions of the song? It had nothing to do with difficulty. Instead, the somewhat chaotic circumstances surrounding The Beatles’ earliest recording sessions caused the rotating drummers.
Best’s Last Hurrah
The Beatles first took a crack at recording “Love Me Do” during their audition for EMI in June 1962. At that point, Pete Best was still their drummer, a role that he’d served for the previous couple of years. He joined the band during their time in Germany as they honed their live skills. And he helped them as they built a rabid following at The Cavern Club in Liverpool.
Unfortunately, George Martin didn’t think much of Best’s drumming skills. He agreed to sign The Beatles to the Parlophone label of EMI on one condition. Best would have to go. The Beatles had a choice to make if they wanted a record deal.
It might have been a tougher decision if the other three members of the group hadn’t been questioning Best’s ability for a while before that. On top of that, he was a bit of an outsider in the group. Luckily, the band had another option in mind once Best was sacked, a fellow by the name of Ringo Starr.
Uh-Oh Ringo
Starr checked a lot of the boxes that Best didn’t. The Beatles knew him from occasions where he had filled in for an absent Best, so they realized how skillful he was. He also proved to be a good fit chemistry-wise. When the group headed back into EMI on September 4, they did so with Starr in tow.
The only problem was that nobody had notified George Martin of the switch. Already a bit wary following his experience with Best, he didn’t think Starr set the world on fire when the group ran through a version of “Love Me Do” that day.
As a result, when The Beatles returned a week later to record again, a session drummer named Andy White was waiting to greet them. Martin had hired White as an insurance policy. That meant that Starr was relegated to playing the tambourine on the song that day, an insult that bugged him for years after the fact.
The Drummers’ Split
How did all this shake out in terms of the recorded versions of “Love Me Do”, which all, frankly, sound quite similar? Copies of both Starr’s and White’s versions were initially released when “Love Me Do” arrived as The Beatles’ first single in October 1962. But White’s version eventually won out on future printings of the single. It also appeared on Please Please Me, the first Beatles album.
You can hear the Starr version of the song on the Past Masters collection. That collection aggregates the songs that weren’t released on American albums. As for Best, The Beatles included his version of “Love Me Do” on their Anthology collection in 1995. This proved to be a financial windfall for him once the royalties were collected.
Don’t feel too bad for Ringo, though. That’s him handling the rapid pace of The Beatles’ second single, “Please Please Me”, a song that hit the top of the charts in the UK. After that, George Martin never had cause to doubt him again.
Photo by ITV/Shutterstock
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