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Love Me Do
Recorded: September 11th, 1962
Released: April 27th, 1964
Number One for one week, May 30th, 1964
"Love Me Do" had an unusual recording and chart history. The song was cut three different times with three different drummers. The Beatles first performed "Love Me Do" in the studio on June 6th, 1962, during their audition for the British record company EMI with producer George Martin. On hand was drummer Pete Best, who was subsequently fired in mid-August. His replacement was, in Martin's words, "this guy with a long nose, called Ringo Starr." After signing to Parlophone (an EMI subsidiary), the Beatles recorded "Love Me Do" twice: with Starr on drums and with session drummer Andy White. The Ringo version, released as their British debut single in October 1962, reached Number Seventeen in the U.K. The better-known take, with White, wouldn't see release as a U.S. single for another year and a half, when it was licensed to Tollie, an independent label. With Beatlemania in full effect, it went to Number One.
Martin's use of White in place of Starr, an attempt to make the Beatles sound more professional on record, caught the group off guard. "Ringo may be very good," Martin explained to the off-put Liverpudlians, "but we're paying good money for this guy, and I've already booked him, so tough. You sit out, Ringo. We're having Andy White." In fact, Starr did get to shake a tambourine, though he still felt slighted. "Ringo still says from time to time, 'You're a rotten devil,'" Martin says, laughing. "He's never forgiven me for it. I do apologize to him publicly." Incidentally, the version with Starr on drums went unreleased in the U.S. until the 1980 Rarities album, while the audition take with Best remained unheard until 1995, when it appeared on Volume 1 of Anthology
PARKE PUTERBAUGH
From Me to You
Recorded: March 5th, 1963
Released: May 25th, 1963
Rereleased: January 30th, 1964
Number One in the U.K. for seven weeks, May 2nd-June 19th, 1963
Peaked at Number Forty-one in the U.S.
"From Me to You" was released twice in the States - once as an A side and once as the B side of "Please Please Me" - but it never actually entered the Top Forty. The story was quite different in Britain, where "From Me to You" became the Beatles' first Number One hit on all four published British charts. The Beatles even recut the song as "From Us to You" to use as the theme for four of their BBC radio sessions, broadcast from late 1963 to the summer of 1964. (You can hear "From Us to You" on the 1994 collection Live at the BBC.)
At this point, the Beatles were beginning to demonstrate their mettle as songwriters, according to George Martin. "I asked them for another song as good as 'Please Please Me,'" Martin writes in his autobiography, All You Need Is Ears, "and they brought me one - 'From Me to You.' . . . There seemed to be a bottomless well of songs."
Both "From Me to You" and "Love Me Do" featured the distinctive harmonica work of John Lennon, who was playing in a style he had learned from Delbert McClinton. At that time, the Texas R&B singer was playing harmonica for Bruce Channel, who was riding high with "Hey! Baby" - so high, in fact, that he headlined over the Beatles when they shared a bill. "It's chiseled in stone now that I taught Lennon how to play harmonica," McClinton says, laughing. "The truth is, during the short time we were together, John said, 'Show me something.' I was in a pretty unique position, because there just weren't a lot of people playing harmonica in popular music." McClinton himself had learned from master bluesmen like Sonny Boy Williamson, Junior Parker and, especially, Jimmy Reed, who McClinton often backed up in the early Sixties. "I loved the way he played: very simple and very profound," says McClinton. Without realizing it, Lennon was absorbing Jimmy Reed's harmonica playing through Delbert McClinton. "It all comes from somewhere," McClinton says.
PARKE PUTERBAUGH
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She Loves You
Recorded: July 1st, 1963
Released: September 16th, 1963
Number One for two weeks, March 21st and 28th, 1964
One of the Beatles' recording engineers, Norman Smith, was setting up for a session in July 1963 when he spied a lyric sheet for John Lennon and Paul McCartney's latest composition. He was not impressed. "She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah"? "But when they started to sing it - bang, wow, terrific, I was up at the mixer jogging around," Smith says in Mark Lewisohn's The Beatles: Recording Sessions.
Smith's reaction was not all that much different from young listeners who heard the opening seconds of "She Loves You," which came blasting out of the box behind a Ringo Starr drumroll and Lennon-McCartney harmonies so exuberant it was impossible not to shake your imaginary mop top to them. The momentum never flags, the band punctuating the line "and you know you should be glad" with ecstatic woooo harmonies borrowed from the Isley Brothers.
It has "a trashy garage-band energy," says Butch Vig of Garbage, because the quartet recorded the track in a single day, and yet for all the raw immediacy of its sound and the brute simplicity of its lyrics, the song also signaled an upswing in sophistication for the band as songwriters and arrangers. "She Loves You" opens with the chorus instead of the first verse for extra punch; the lyrics introduce a third person to shake up the typical I-love-you formula then dominating the pop charts; and George Harrison throws in guitar voicings that owe more to jazz than rock & roll.
"The harmonic and melodic combinations that are going on are just sick," raves Billy Corgan, formerly of the Smashing Pumpkins. "They're so ahead of the game in pop at that moment. If that's all they ever did, you'd still hear 'She Loves You' on the radio."
GREG KOT
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