Love Me Do?!

There’s a lot of buzz right now about the upcoming official remix of the Beatles’ Revolver. Producer Giles Martin has applied new technology — developed by Peter Jackson’s team for last year’s “Get Back” documentary — to the four-track Revolver master tapes, isolating previously inseparable instruments and voices and enabling a 21st-century upgrade to the fidelity and clarity of the iconic 1966 album.

Revolver is considered by some to be the best Beatles LP and it has topped more than one ranking of the greatest albums of all time. But we’re going to turn the clock back a little further right now — about 45 months — as a way of illuminating not just the Beatles’ astonishing evolution, but how that evolution must have come across to fans and musicians alike.

This coming week — October 5 — marks the 60th anniversary of the release of Love Me Do, the Beatles’ debut single. The recording, featuring the just-joined Ringo Starr on drums, was made on September 4, 1962 and would achieve moderate success on the British charts, breaking into the national Top Twenty and peaking at Number 17. Another recording of Love Me Do — the one most people are familiar with, as it was the version on the Beatles’ first LP and would become a Number One single in the U.S in early 1964 — was taped a week later, September 11, with Ringo on tambourine this time and studio drummer Andy White, copying Ringo’s original part virtually beat for beat, on drums.

We will not here concern ourselves with the history of these historic first Beatles recording sessions, in particular the convoluted story of which drummer played on which session and why.

Instead we’ll look at the surprising (shocking?) reactions to Love Me Do and what that reaction says about the popular music standards of the day and the light-speed advances that would soon follow.

I’m going to go out on a limb and assert that probably 99% of us (and that may be understating things) would agree that Love Me Do, while not without its charms, is a primitive piece of pop pablum — and certainly provided little clue of the energy and musical invention that would burst from practically every subsequent Beatles single.

Get ready to be amazed.

It turns out that Love Me Do was hip. It was a game-changer. In fact, in 1962 Britain it was downright radical.

Love Me Do!

This is almost impossible to understand from a 2022 perspective (or hell, even a 1972 perspective). But it’s how many future stars have described its release.

• Peter Frampton says it changed his life.

• Sandie Shaw considers it a historic milestone. “Love Me Do. . . signified when everything changed.”

• Allan Clarke calls it his favorite Beatles record.

• Peter Gabriel remembers it being “so rough” that he saved up his money to buy it, the first record he ever bought with his own money.

• Ray Davies picks it as one of his favorite early British records. “I thought it was a new American group.”

• Jon Anderson drove all the way to Southport to see the Beatles perform just on the basis of hearing Love Me Do on the radio.

• Bryan Ferry remembers hearing it and simply thinking, “God, that’s different.”

• Andrew Loog Oldham, manager and producer of the Rolling Stones, says, “The first time I heard Love Me Do I was 18 years old and I thought the record was amazing. It had space, mood and sex.”

• Joe Cocker has a vivid memory of hearing it and thinking “I wonder who the hell that was?” He was especially struck by the singing style, in particular Paul McCartney’s soul-inspired phrasing of the title refrains. “I’d never heard any other singer do that on a pop record.”

Here is the coda of the 1962 UK version of Love Me Do, featuring the vocal stylings that Cocker found so different and appealing:

Meanwhile, however, the reaction to Love Me Do by those who knew the Beatles as a powerhouse rock ‘n’ roll band in the clubs of Hamburg and Liverpool was quite different. Most of them did consider Love Me Do to be shallow fluff. In fact, many thought it was an embarrassment.

Tony Sheridan, probably the biggest star on the Hamburg scene, who played countless gigs with the Beatles and used them as his backing band for several German recordings, was highly disappointed:

We were amazed when they cleaned up and did Love Me Do. We all thought, “What’s this? From being one of the best rhythm and blues groups around, they’ve suddenly gone to pleasing the teenies.”

Brian Griffiths, guitarist with Liverpool group Howie Casey and The Seniors — whose leader Howie Casey would go on to a major career as a sax player, including several world tours with Paul McCartney — agreed:

It was bloody awful.  I said, “What is that crap? It’s like a country and western song.”

Even Billy J. Kramer, part of Brian Epstein’s stable of Liverpool acts who had a string of hits during the early days of the British Invasion and who idolized the Beatles, acknowledged its shortcomings:

When Love Me Do came out, I was disappointed because I’d seen the Beatles do Twist and Shout, Money, you know, the Chuck Berry and Little Richard stuff.  So when I heard their first single, I thought it was a bit timid. 

Beatles producer George Martin himself was not particularly enamored of Love Me Do. He always made it clear that he knew it wasn’t the hit record he was looking for.*

*In fact Love Me Do was almost not put out. Martin instead wanted to issue “How Do You Do It,” a Mitch Murray composition which the Beatles reluctantly recorded during the same September 4 session as Love Me Do. While the group made it clear they preferred that their first record be one of their own compositions, Martin was skeptical. The main reason he eventually agreed to issue Love Me Do is that EMI, which at the time owned Beatles copyrights through their publishing arm Ardmore and Beechwood, pressured him to release a Lennon-McCartney original.

At the same time, Martin recognized right from their first meeting that the Beatles had a special magnetism. Not long after Love Me Do’s release he and his engineer Norman Smith traveled to Liverpool to see the Beatles perform at The Cavern Club, where he witnessed the tremendous impact they had on audiences. (Including himself: Martin said that while he didn’t think much of their songs when he first met them, he fell in love with them as personalities. “Sparks flew off of them when they played or when you talked to them.”)

So it seems pretty safe to say that by every conceivable benchmark, Love Me Do failed to capture the musical excitement the Beatles normally generated.

And yet. . .

Context.

Note again that those who were dismissive of Love Me Do had something important in common: they had already experienced the Beatles in person. Love Me Do was tame in comparison.

But the general record buying and radio-listening public had no such preconceptions. Most were completely unaware of what was happening in the dives and dance halls of northern England and Hamburg. Their reference point for pop artists wasn’t Merseybeat or the Reeperbahn or the London underground blues scene; it was the BBC Light Programme and the previous generation’s big band crooners.*

*The seminal American R&B and rock and roll pioneers had made a brief impact in the mid to late 1950s but had largely disappeared, to be replaced by Svengali-created teen idols with hilarious names like Billy Fury, Marty Wilde, Vince Eager and Johnny Gentle.

And thus is illuminated both the moribund musical landscape of 1962, and the special Beatles quality that shone through even banal early incarnations. Love Me Do was simultaneously a toothless sellout to the few who knew the Beatles in their natural state, AND possessed of enough Beatle originality and charisma to be completely unlike anything on the hit parade. . . and unforgettable to many who first heard it.

Sting: “It changed my life”

Mick Jones: I was just stricken. . . it was a cathartic, kind of incredible experience just hearing that first [record] — Love Me Do, in my case. It got me right away, completely.

Geezer Butler: As soon as I heard Love Me Do on the radio, I was just completely taken over by it. . . it was a whole new thing. We realized English musicians could have their own sound.

Chris Thomas: The Beatles came out and completely blew me away. I remember the first time Love Me Do was played on Radio Luxembourg — you just knew it was going to change your life.

Painter Rita Donagh: At Newcastle there was an art history lecture once a week. If you were late you were very conspicuous – the lecturer had to stop and so on.  We were gathered there and in came [future writer and broadcaster] David Sweetman.  He had great charisma – that theatrical quality which some people have.  He opened the door and he had this record in his hands.  And he held it aloft and said, “I’ve just bought this incredible record! You’ve all got to listen to it.”  The record was “Love Me Do.”  It was the first time that any of us had heard of the Beatles.

Justin Hayward: “I’d never heard anything like it. . . it changed everything”

Donovan: I first heard the Beatles on a trip back home from my wanderings as a beatnik folk singer.  The house was empty and I went upstairs to my bedroom. The radio was playing a pop single, yet I had left “pop music” behind when I embraced folk, jazz, blues, classical and bluebeat.  When I heard the two acoustic guitars, drums, bass, vocal harmonies and a harmonica I was stunned and fell into an altered state. “Yes, pop pickers,” chimed the DJ, “that was The Beatles with Love Me Do.”  I slumped down on the stair-carpet and heard a voice in my head say: “That’s exactly what I’m going to do”. . .

Isn’t it interesting, by the way, that both Sting and Justin Hayward, in the audio clips above, use almost the exact same terminology to describe the effect of hearing Love Me Do for the first time: “the world was going to be completely different.”

It’s also interesting that in his autobiography of his early life (Broken Music, Simon & Schuster), Sting takes his memory of Love Me Do even further, pointing out that it wasn’t just him feeling the impact: (emphasis added)

I remember being in the changing rooms of the swimming baths.  We were drying ourselves off and, as was our custom, flicking towels at each other’s genitals.  It was at this point that we heard the first bars of Love Me Do from a transistor radio in the corner.  The effect was immediate.  There was something in the sparseness of the sound that immediately put a stop to the horseplay. . . I recognized something significant, even revolutionary, in the spare economy of the sound, and the interesting thing is, so did everyone else.

“So did everyone else.” It’s astounding. While Sting’s experience with his friends might not be a perfect proxy for the rest of the country — it only got to Number 17, after all — remember that we’re talking about Love Me Do here. If the list of artists who had visceral responses to this particular record was limited to one or two, it might still be mind-boggling. In fact, we’ve only covered some of them. In addition to those above, other British stars who have described their reactions include Ian Gillan, Paul Rodgers, Russ Ballard, Barry Gibb, Dave Mason, John Lodge, Roger Glover, Ian McDonald, and more.

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From the vantage point not only of the rest of the Beatles’ staggering catalogue but of 60 years of subsequent rock history, it seems almost beyond comprehension that Love Me Do could have elicited such a response. Reconciling what our ears seem to tell us with these changed-my-life testimonies is the embodiment of cognitive dissonance. Love Me Do?! This excited people? This blew them away?

But then again, we’re not living in 1962 England.* However surprising it may be to us, the testimony is real, and it comes from people who were there, hearing Love Me Do in real time.

*It’s important to note here that it wasn’t just 1962 in Great Britain. More than a year later, Americans responded as well. People like Smokey Robinson (“I was captured by the rhythm and the feeling of Love Me Do. The rhythm and the feeling got me”), Gregg Rolie (“I don’t know if anybody knew who they were at that time, but I remember how I felt like I was the one who discovered them”), and Little Steven van Zandt (“I’d never heard a record that sounded like it before it — and haven’t heard anything like it since”).

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The most revealing takeaway from all these recollections of Love Me Do? It might be the vivid story they implicitly tell about the impact of the next Beatles releases and the evolutionary path the Beatles were on from Day One. Revolver was less than four years away, but it may as well have come from another species in another century. Before then, Beatlemania would circle the globe as fast as any pandemic, spread by music filled with a joyous energy that overcame all defenses. And a small part of appreciating Beatlemania might be to imagine the musical and cultural landscape that preceded it — and then to listen to records like Please Please Me, She Loves You and I Want To Hold Your Hand and imagine how they must have sounded in a world where even Love Me Do could be a revelation.