FEATURE:
I'll Always Be True
An Iconic Moment in Music History: The Beatles’ Love Me Do at Sixty
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IT may sound quite simple…
compared to their later work, but The Beatles’ Love Me Do was a seismic moment in Pop! In fact, you can argue that the Liverpool band’s debut single changed the world. Indeed, if people rank The Beatles’ best singles, maybe Love Me Do comes low. It charted outside the top ten so, in context, it could be seen as minor and a merely promising start. That is not the case. Love Me Do is undoubtedly one of the most important songs ever. The song turns sixty on 5th October. It reached number one in the U.S. in 1964, yet it only got to seventeen here in the U.K. I think people did not know too much about The Beatles in 1962, and it was before Beatlemania. The band’s debut album, Please Please Me, was released in March 1963 and reached number one. Love Me Do is essentially a Paul McCartney song (with John Lennon contributing the middle eight), but it was a case of the young songwriters sitting together and working on this hit. I will come to a couple of features that celebrate and highlight the importance of Love Me Do. One of the most interesting aspects of the song is its percussion and how Ringo Starr fits in. Although the standout instrument on Love Me Do is Lennon’s harmonica, there are three recorded versions of the song, each with a different drummer. The first attempted recording from June 1962 featured Pete Best on drums. A second version was recorded three months later with Ringo Starr. This was used for the original Parlophone single. The third version, featuring session drummer Andy White, was included on Please Please Me.
I am going to bring in a couple of features. This Day in Music went deep with Love Me Do (apologies for recycling any information that I used in the last feature about the song). They consider it to be a moment that changed history and the course of music. It is hard to argue against that:
“On the evening of 5th October 1962, with its powerful transmitter broadcasting to the UK on 208 Meters on the Medium Wave band (AM to our US readers) Radio Luxembourg played a new song, a simple song, in which the singers sang the word ‘love’ a total of 23 times. It was raw, it was sexy, and an almost complete rebuttal of the saccharine, over-produced pap prevalent at the time.
It was “Love Me Do”.
Beatles producer George Martin said when The Beatles “Love Me Do” was released, on Friday 5th October 1962, it was the day the world changed, and the world has consistently agreed with him ever since.
Liverpool, in the North West of England, was approaching the winter of 1962 with rocketing unemployment rates and the worst slums in Europe, and yet it was also the world’s biggest port. Even as the deadly game of bluff, played with nuclear weapons, was enacted as The Cold War between East and West, some of Liverpool’s’ youth had been reaching out across the oceans to pursue the rock ‘n’ roll dream, inspired by the groundbreaking efforts of Elvis Presley in the USA, and, closer to home, the example of do it yourself music as led by British singer / banjo player Lonnie Donegan.
Amidst a bleak economic backdrop, five young men from Liverpool had been slowly learning their craft in Hamburg, Germany as a rock ‘n’ roll band (they left one behind). The unbeatable Hamburg apprenticeship of 4-hour sets, 7 days a week, meant that when the leaner, and certainly hungrier, quartet returned to their home city, they were able to whip up excitement in audiences inspired by their musicianship, showmanship and sheer enthusiasm.
Label head and producer George Martin wasn’t initially bowled over by the lads’ musicianship or compositions, but he was impressed with their self-confident insouciance, and something in his gut told him to take a chance.
Even when the band had signed, they were determined to be individual, refusing to release a song suggested by George Martin, even though he assured them it would be a hit. (It was – the song was ‘How Do You Do It?’, a chart-topper in 1963 when recorded by Gerry & The Pacemakers. History shows that The Beatles’ instincts were correct, though).
George Martin does deserve credit for his control of the recording session for ‘Love Me Do’, in which he made a vital change to the arrangement. It was a very early Lennon–McCartney composition, principally written by the 16-year old Paul McCartney while playing truant from school, with John Lennon later adding the middle eight section (starting with “Someone to love…”) to complete the song, Their practice at the time was to scribble songs in a school notebook, and, in their dreams of future respect as professional songwriters, to always write “Another Lennon-McCartney Original” at the top of the page.
Having been promised a deal by George Martin in the spring, The Beatles formally signed to Parlophone on June 4th 1962 and had their first recording session at London’s EMI Studios in Abbey Road on 6th June with Pete Best on drums. After Martin expressed concern over Best’s level of technique, The Beatles returned to London three months later, on 4 September, with their new drummer, Ringo Starr, formerly of Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. A controversial decision at the time in Liverpool, since Best had his own coterie of personal fans, the band’s decision has been more than vindicated by the excellent rhythm parts of Ringo since then, but also by a perusal of the original recorded version of ‘Love Me Do’: Ringo adds the final ingredient to The Beatles’ mix of originality, the swinging new version sounding like a completely new song.
“Love Me Do” kicks off with John Lennon playing a bluesy dry harmonica riff, having learnt to play as a child after his Uncle George introduced him to the instrument. The actual harmonica being used at this time was one stolen by the light-fingered Lennon from a music shop in Arnhem, the Netherlands, in 1960, as the Beatles first journeyed to Hamburg. It has been much reported that Delbert McClinton, who supplied the distinctive harp riff on Bruce Channel’s ‘Hey Baby’, taught Lennon to play, but this isn’t strictly accurate. ‘Hey Baby’ was already in the Beatles’ repertoire, and The Beatles did open for Bruce Channel when he appeared at Liverpool’s Tower Ballroom, but that was on June 21st, so McClinton merely gave Lennon a few pointers.
The song features Lennon and McCartney on joint lead vocals, in their best Everly Brothers style, harmonising during the beseeching “please” before McCartney sings the unaccompanied vocal line on the song’s title phrase, ‘Love Me Do’. Lennon had previously sung the title sections, but this change in arrangement was made in the studio under the direction of producer George Martin when he realised that the harmonica part encroached on the vocal, allowing McCartney’s solo voice to act as a contrast to the harmony work elsewhere.
After first checking into their Chelsea hotel on September 4th, The Beatles arrived at EMI Studios early in the afternoon where they set up their equipment in Studio 3 and began rehearsing six songs including: “Please Please Me”, “Love Me Do” and “How Do You Do It?”.
Maybe a bit more basic and less complicated than some of the band’s songs, Love Me Do is a vital piece of music history that introduced the iconic band. On 5th October, the world marks the U.K. release of the single. It turns sixty and, all these years later, it sounds incredible and soulful. This is what The Guardian wrote int their fiftieth anniversary feature from 2012:
“In contrast, Love Me Do is, once you get past the primitivism, is soulful and bluesy. There is a swing and drive to the harmonica playing and the harmonies that belie the impression of tentativeness. The lyric, while entirely within period romantic cliches, is both slightly awkward – "love me do": who ever says that when they're chatting someone up? – and direct ("someone like you"). Which makes it a pretty faithful expression of teen courting rituals, with their mixture of uncertainty and desire.
As the first Beatles' hit, this unassuming but forceful record has had a long after-life. The second version was included on several best-selling UK EPs and LPs and went Top 5 when rereleased in 1982 as a single. Right at the end of the first flush of Beatlemania, in late May 1964, it hit No 1 in the US – a strange turn of events for an 18-month old song. This in turn ensured its place as the opening track on the 1 album, which has sold over 31 million copies during this century”.
Undoubtably one of the most important songs in history, The Beatles’ Love Me Do is a song that is historic but also underrated. I think that we will be talking about it on its hundredth anniversary too, such is its significance and impact. It did not worry the charts too much when its release on 5th October, 1962, but Love Me Do soon…
CHANGED the course of popular music.