The Beatles cut their debut single Love Me Do three separate times in 1962, each session with a different drummer as the band locked in its sound.
On June 6, 1962, the group walked into Studio Two at EMI’s Abbey Road studios with Pete Best on drums. They taped four songs that day: “Besame Mucho,” “Love Me Do,” “P.S. I Love You,” and “Ask Me Why.” None of those takes went out at the time. Only two of the recordings even survived in EMI’s vaults.
That first Abbey Road date was only the start. Over the next three months the band would record “Love Me Do” again, twice more, with two other men behind the kit. Mental Floss laid out the full run of sessions, the firing that cleared the way for Ringo Starr, and the session pro who still drew a paycheck on the finished single.
Ten weeks after the June session, Best was out. On the morning of August 16, 1962, road manager Neil Aspinall drove him into Liverpool and dropped him in Whitechapel. At 10 o’clock, manager Brian Epstein called him into the office above the NEMS record shop.
Epstein did not soften the message.
"The boys want you out and Ringo in."
He added the reason the band and the producer had settled on.
"They don’t think you’re a good enough drummer, Pete,"... "And George Martin doesn’t think you’re a good enough drummer."
That was the end of Best’s run with the Beatles. Ringo Starr came in. The band had already moved past sentiment. They wanted the take that worked.
September 4, 1962, was Ringo’s first studio session with the group. They ran through roughly fifteen takes of the backing track for “Love Me Do.” By then, Paul McCartney later said, the paperwork was real.
"By this time we did have a contract,"
Parlophone A&R man George Martin also made a practical call on the vocal. John Lennon opened the song on harmonica. Martin decided Lennon could not sing the title line with the harmonica still in his mouth, so that line went to McCartney. McCartney’s nerves can still be heard on the finished record.
Even with Ringo in the chair, Martin was not done. A week later he brought in a professional.
On September 11, 1962, session drummer Andy White sat down at Abbey Road. Ringo, four weeks into the job, was handed a tambourine and told to shake it. The Beatles’ own Anthology notes later said the substitution “came as quite a shock” to the band, and especially to Ringo. It was the only time in the group’s career he was replaced that way in the studio.
White did the work and took the money that was on the table. He was paid a flat fee of £5 15s. He collected no royalties then or ever. He later described the session in plain terms to the Daily Record.
"Ringo and I didn’t have much between us, all my time was taken up learning the routines, and he was playing the tambourines so he was only there for the take,"
The band’s official account put the whole odd sequence in one sentence.
"The Beatles recorded Love Me Do three times in 1962, on 6 June, and 4 and 11 September 1962, on each occasion with a different drummer."
Parlophone released “Love Me Do” backed with “P.S. I Love You” on October 5, 1962. The first pressing carried a red label and used the version with Ringo on drums. Later pressings switched to a black label and the September 11 take with White. That White version also landed on the Please Please Me album.
The single reached No. 17 in Britain. For a Liverpool band in 1962, that was a breakthrough. Aspinall put the result in workingman’s language.
"They’d sold a lot of records for ‘Love Me Do’ to get to Number Seventeen, which was great for a Liverpool band, they’d made the charts!"
Best’s June version stayed locked away for decades. It turned up in 1994 and finally reached the public on Anthology 1 on November 20, 1995. Even the anniversary market got messy. In 2012, EMI pressed a 50th-anniversary replica single with the White album version instead of the original red-label Ringo take. Apple withdrew the mistake and ordered the remaining stock destroyed.
Three drummers. Three dates. One debut single. The band kept the version that served the record, cut the player who did not meet the standard, and took the chart position that followed. Results beat loyalty, and the tape still tells the story.
