Remember When: The Beatles Required Three Drummers To Finish Their First Single in 1962
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.
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.
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.
Source: americansongwriter.com/Jim Beviglia
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.
