On October 5, 1962, Love Me Do was released in Britain, and it was the first single the Beatles put out under their own name. It got to number 17, helped by their manager Brian Epstein ordering 10,000 copies for the NEMS record shops he owned. It cost about 400 pounds to make.
The song was written by Paul McCartney, mostly when he should have been at school, in 1958 or 1959, and it is a simple thing: a harmonica riff, a blues turnaround, and a two-note jump on the words love me that everyone who has heard it remembers. John Lennon wrote the middle. George Martin, who had signed the group to Parlophone in May after Decca turned them down, produced it. He was not convinced.
The drumming was the problem. Martin had signed the group without hearing them and had decided at the first session, on June 6, that Pete Best was not good enough for the studio, and he told Epstein he would use a session drummer on any record. The other three had already decided to get rid of Best. Best went in August, and Ringo Starr, from Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, joined. Best heard it from Epstein on August 16.
There were three versions of the drumming. The June session had Best. The September 4 session used Ringo, and Martin was still unhappy, so Andy White was brought in on September 11 for the takes used on the single, with Ringo on tambourine. The drumming on the album version, and on most pressings of the single from later runs, is Ringo's.
Two years later they were the most famous group in the world, and Love Me Do was reissued in 1982 for the twentieth anniversary and reached number 4. This is not the single that made them. Please Please Me, released in January 1963, is. It is the one they recorded when they were a Liverpool band with a residency in Hamburg and no idea what came next.