Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  They rehearsed it all the same—and, uniquely, John didn’t play guitar but maracas, from Ringo’s kit. It was added to the stockpile of EMI-ready songs and they played it on stage: “Tip of My Tongue” was in the Beatles’ set for a few weeks from the start of September.§ Another addition, though for days rather than weeks, was “How Do You Do It,” which they rehearsed here one last time, ready for its (ugh) next-day recording.

  The big day dawned wet and windy, and it wasn’t far past sunrise when the Beatles had to be up, out and gathered at Speke for their first-ever flight from Liverpool Airport. This was still the same unimproved strip where Paul (and probably George) had spotted planes as a child and where John worked the 1958 summer holiday as a kitchen assistant, spitting in the sandwiches. Brian had promised to write a Mersey Beat report about the recording session and started off by taking a photo of the Beatles on the runway. The combination of the wind, the rain, the appallingly early hour (8:10AM), the old Viscount propeller plane they were about to board, Ringo’s strange hairstyle and gray streak, George’s unmissable shiner, bad haircut and particularly protruding ears, and four distinctly unsmiling faces waiting for Eppy to get on and take the bloody thing, makes for one of the least flattering but most intriguing of all Beatles photos. If every picture tells a story, this one’s an exhibition.38

  Neil had driven down overnight with the van, so Brian guided the Beatles from London Airport to the Royal Court Hotel in Sloane Square—they’d stayed here two nights in June and now were back for one, again putting the twin-bed philosophy into practice. Their attitude was to dress up for an engagement, so they changed into their stage suits, with white shirts and dark ties, grabbed a quick bite to eat, then set out to join with Neil at EMI.

  RECORDING SESSION

  Tuesday, September 4, 1962. Number 2 studio, EMI, London.

  RECORDING: How Do You Do It; Love Me Do.

  The Liverpool group scanned the posh avenues of Maida Vale and St. John’s Wood from the windows of their London black cab and arrived ready for the 2PM start. As it was in June, so it was again: all heads turned to look at them. The four northern lads with the strange group name and weird haircuts were considered rough scruffs on their first visit—now they had a different drummer with a big hooter and what looked like gray dye on one side of his head, and the lead guitarist had been in a fight.

  They were booked in for two sessions, not one. Three hours of unrecorded rehearsal in Number 3, the smallest studio, between two and five o’clock; three hours of recording in Number 2 between seven and ten—during which, according to the EMI studio “red form,” they were expected to record four “sides,” four completed masters. Two of them would be taken for their debut 45, to come out the first Friday in October, a month distant.

  Two consecutive sessions was an irregular arrangement, but the Beatles’ early relationship with EMI was abnormal. The June 6 session had been mentally written off, so this was a clean start for everyone. The afternoon rehearsal gave George Martin and Ron Richards—the pair of them here together—the opportunity to reevaluate this beat group who’d become Parlophone artists; it was a chance to assess material and musicians, including the new drummer. Brian had notified the change to Judy Lockhart Smith, so no session player was present; but would the old drummer’s replacement be any better suited to recording?

  The primary account of the day’s events is Brian Epstein’s report for Mersey Beat. He didn’t write everything, and not everything he wrote was right, but it seems mostly reliable, and he says that six numbers were rehearsed during “a long and hard afternoon’s work.” He didn’t specify titles and no EMI document preserves them, but—taking all indications into account—the following list (in any order) is likely to be correct: “How Do You Do It,” “Tip of My Tongue,” “Ask Me Why,” “PS I Love You,” “Love Me Do,” “Please Please Me.” If this is right, it’s obvious that the Beatles’ and Brian’s push for Lennon-McCartney songs could not have been stronger. That they promoted all five of their new numbers at the expense of any other they did so well—“Soldier of Love,” “Some Other Guy,” “Baby It’s You,” “Twist and Shout” and the like—is the strongest indication of their wanting a uniquely new take on success: earned on their own terms with their own sound and music.

  From the Parlophone point of view, the most important number was “How Do You Do It”: George Martin and Ron Richards needed to hear how Mitch Murray’s demo had been progressed … and, in spite of themselves, the Beatles had actually done good work with it, turning an adequate acetate into an appealing song, albeit one that remained way too light and white for their liking. Parlophone’s A&R men had no doubts: it would be the A-side and quite possibly a hit. They’d record it in the evening session.

  George and his assistant were less impressed with the other songs, one of which they’d be choosing as the B-side—with two more after that, maybe, selected for the evening’s third and fourth recordings. They felt the arrangement of “Tip of My Tongue” needed work (John again played maracas on this); “PS I Love You” and “Ask Me Why” they’d heard before and didn’t particularly enjoy; and, while the “skip beat” in “Love Me Do” was gone, George remained impervious to the song’s merits, liking the harmonica and little else. “Please Please Me” didn’t excite him either: “They played me “Please Please Me” but it was very slow and rather dreary. I told them if they doubled the speed it might be interesting.”39

  One further piece of George Martin criticism would help retool John’s song into something more dynamic—“I told them what beginning and what ending to put on it”—but he said they were to make such improvements in their own time, not EMI’s. “We were a bit embarrassed that he had found a better tempo than we had,” Paul says … and this wasn’t the only embarrassment arising, because during this “Please Please Me” rehearsal Ringo suddenly had a moment of madness. “I was playing the bass drum and the hi-hat, and I had a tambourine in one hand and a maraca in another, and I was hitting the cymbals as well, [like] some weird spastic leper, trying to play all these instruments at once.”40

  It was all too much. Ringo felt pressured to outperform his predecessor and not let down his bandmates; it was his first time in anything like a proper studio, it was his first time in London in two years and his first meeting with the schoolteacherly George Martin, whose voice seemed even more upper-crust and intimidating than Brian’s. In an uncharacteristic panic, Ringo lost his head and started hitting everything with everything. It did not go unnoticed. There are no supporting quotes from the studio staff, but they must have ridiculed such amateurishness; the Beatles’ last drummer hadn’t uttered a word, this new one was crazy. Five years later, carefully measuring his vocabulary to outline his initial view, George Martin conceded, “I didn’t rate Ringo very highly.”41 His opinion was formed for at least one other reason too: the producer discerned that Ringo couldn’t play a drumroll. There would be unhappy repercussions.

  Recording started at 7PM in Number 2. Ron Richards had gone, it was just George Martin, assisted by balance engineer Norman Smith and a tape operator. The red form says the session was to be recorded in mono and stereo but only mono was used and George decided on a safety-first approach, getting the Beatles to make a good rhythm track before adding the vocals; this was achieved by doing a tape-to-tape “bounce”—superimposing voices as the tape was copied from one deck to another. The Beatles would record this way at EMI only one other time.42

  The most important recording was done first. The red light went on inside and outside the studio, Norman Smith’s voice gruffed “How Do You Do—Take 1” into their headphones, and they were On. Information is scant, but they seem to have had little difficulty getting it right. John played a borrowed acoustic, Paul bass, George the Gretsch (most audible on the twangy solo he created, which passed muster but barely taxed his ability), and Ringo drummed well from an opening cymbal sizzle to the dying beat. It lasted a shade under two minutes and was done in two takes. Th
en, as the tape was bounced to a second spool, John sang the lead vocal and Paul the harmony, and they did some handclaps in the middle-eight. It wasn’t difficult, just disagreeable … they’d advanced to the brink of release a song they strongly did not want out. (Nothing is known about if or how they showed this—yet.)

  George Martin selected “Love Me Do” as the B-side. It was the most developed of the five Lennon-McCartney numbers and, chiefly because of its harmonica, had the most appealing sound. He didn’t see much merit in it or consider it A-side material (“Love Me Do, I thought, was pretty poor”), but it was fine for the B-side.43 Flip-sides, as they were also called, hardly ever picked up airplay and many record buyers ignored them completely, playing only the song they knew and liked. The Beatles thought differently, knowing that B-sides could pack gems.

  It turned out to be more difficult than anyone could have imagined. Something derailed them, and it isn’t fully clear what, but the recording took hours. Instead of the session finishing at ten, when the studio typically shut down for the night, it went way over. The red form gives the finishing time as 11:15, Brian’s report said midnight. Just when the Beatles had seemed to be hitting their stride in the studio, they were stumbling again.

  Despite the struggle, though, it was good. Compared to everything that followed, “How Do You Do It” and “Love Me Do” would inevitably sound “first session”—a bit simplistic, even quaint. However—emerging in its context, September 1962—here, undeniably, was something new. Apart from all their other attributes, the Beatles sang and played the instruments they put down on tape, and so would be able to perform their record the same way for live audiences, and this made them highly unusual in 1962. With “Love Me Do,” they were among very few acts even trying a blues groove in a British studio. This was not the rock and roll sound that defined the Beatles on Merseyside or in Hamburg, but one single element of their stage act, one they’d chosen to represent themselves on record. All they needed to do was relax, tune in to the studio environment, establish what they wanted to achieve, and progress to a more proficient level …

  Except there was one more thing. They didn’t want “How Do You Do It” released. And someone had to tell George Martin—right here, right now, last chance.

  The way it’s mostly related, the Beatles went together to register their protest. All the quotes about it (and, given the import, there are many) start with “We said …”—but George Martin is sure only John did the talking. “When the dirty work came, I had to be leader,” John would say. “Whatever the scene was, when it came to the nitty-gritty, I had to do the speaking.”44

  As George Martin would describe it, “John came to me and pleaded with me. He said, ‘Look, I think we can do better than this.’ ”45

  John himself remembered the moment in an interview twelve years later (saying “we” throughout): “They forced us to do a version of ‘How Do You Do It.’ We wouldn’t let ’em put it out. We said, ‘We’d sooner have no contract than put that crap out’—all the tantrums bit. We thought it was rubbish compared with ‘love, love me do.’ We thought ours had more meaning.”46

  “I suppose we were quite forceful really, for people in our position,” Paul says. “We said we had to live or die with our own song, ‘Love Me Do.’ We knew it wasn’t as catchy [as “How Do You Do It”] but that was the way we had to go. We couldn’t face the people back in Liverpool laughing at us. We were trying to keep the integrity—a blues group with harmonica on our records.”47

  It was an extraordinary situation. Artists did not stand up to their producers, they had to do and accept what they were told. The Beatles had no rank at all to challenge George Martin’s authority, and the risk was huge. Their future hinged on his reaction, which they certainly couldn’t presuppose; it could even have spelled the end of doing this for a living instead of having “a proper job.” John stood strong and said what needed to be said.

  But it appeared to be futile. George Martin dismissed his protests out of hand. “I said, ‘If you write something as good as that song, I’ll let you record it, otherwise that’s the song that’s going out.’ ”48 And since he felt they hadn’t written a song as good as Mitch Murray’s, the dialog ended there, as did the session, and four low Beatles left EMI and walked out into the St. John’s Wood night.

  The Beatles’ “How Do You Do It” was ditched between the following (Wednesday) morning and Friday afternoon. They would always believe George Martin had graciously yielded to their request, sympathetically accepting that the song wasn’t really them. Having already decided he was a great bloke, they now knew he was: he wasn’t stubborn or pig-headed, he was someone they could work with, and forever had their gratitude. But “How Do You Do It” was scrapped for reasons the Beatles knew nothing about.

  The first gainsayer was Ardmore and Beechwood. The Beatles wouldn’t have had a recording contract without Sid Colman and Kim Bennett, two men whose professional interest was set in obtaining one or more Lennon-McCartney song copyrights. They weren’t remotely in the frame for “How Do You Do It” and signaled their anger at being fobbed off with its B-side.49

  Dick James heard the Beatles’ acetate of “How Do You Do It” in George Martin’s office and didn’t like it at all. In view of Colman’s objection, George then played “Love Me Do” and asked James if he’d allow the Mitch Murray song to be its B-side. The publisher said no, the song was too good for that. He felt sure Murray wouldn’t let it be buried in such a fashion, and, as he still hadn’t secured the copyright, he didn’t want to be seen advocating it. “Love Me Do” itself? No, the publishing was already locked up.50

  On the Friday, Mitch Murray heard the B-side request—and the acetate—and that was the end of the matter: he refused to allow it out. He felt sure “How Do You Do It” was hit material, he had a publisher interested and a record producer interested, so he didn’t want it lost on a B-side. He also didn’t like what the Beatles had done to his song.

  It was pointless progressing it any further. George Martin remained certain the song had hit potential and intended to push it forward again as the Beatles’ second record—but, with regret, for their first, it couldn’t be the A-side and it couldn’t be the B-side. He was stymied, and displeased: against his better judgment, he had to let a Lennon-McCartney song be the Beatles’ first single—two songs in fact, both sides—and he washed his hands of it, not of the Beatles but of their troublesome first record. They’d done two sessions, recording four songs and then two, and all he had to show was one side of a 45 he didn’t think good enough. Now they’d have to come in again to record a B-side, and Ron Richards could finish the job. Tuesday was the Beatles’ next free day and they were booked back in for a half-session, 4:45 to 6:30PM.

  The Beatles rehearsed in the Cavern on Sunday (before their evening session) and/or Monday (after their lunchtime session), intent on being at their sharpest. Since arriving home from EMI, John and George had taken delivery of their expensive new Jumbo Gibson guitars, shipped to Liverpool all the way from Kalamazoo, Michigan. These became integral to the faster, harder reworking of “Please Please Me” and also figured in whatever other songs were rehearsed, perhaps including “PS I Love You.” Only one number was needed for the B-side, but, as usual, the Beatles had alternatives.

  The new week began like the old. Neil drove to London on Monday night and the Beatles were at the airport again Tuesday morning, though catching a later flight. Brian took another photo on the tarmac—not for any particular purpose, more to complete the circle. Only John is smiling, sort of; George, his black eye not quite gone, looks deeply disgruntled. After their plane bumped its way to London, they checked back into the Royal Court, changed their clothes and headed off once more to Abbey Road. Twice in a week, three times in three months—it was becoming familiar.

  RECORDING SESSION

  Tuesday, September 11, 1962. Number 2 studio, EMI, London.

  RECORDING: PS I Love You; Please Please Me; Love Me Do.


  As the four Beatles stepped into Number 2 studio, they saw a kit all set up and a drummer ready to roll. The specter of being forced to work with “a session man”—one they thought they’d banished with Pete’s sacking—returned to haunt them, with Ringo the casualty. They were shocked, and he was devastated.

  George Martin and Ron Richards held Ringo at least partly accountable for the problems of the previous week, and were taking no more chances—the recording of this first single had to be completed within the next hour and three-quarters and it would be done by John, Paul, George and Andy. This was Andy White, proficient in all styles, a proper pro drummer who held the sticks through his fingers and wasn’t fazed by the studio red light.51

  Ringo took it badly. “I was highly upset—highly upset. It blew my brain away.” He bristled at the fakery of it all: the record business was such a sham, just like he’d heard, with anonymous musicians creating the sounds others pretended were theirs. He would neither forgive nor forget, and pinpointed George Martin as the cause of his misery. “I was devastated [he] had his doubts about me … I hated the bugger for years.”52 In most respects, it wouldn’t take long for Ringo and George Martin to strike up a harmonious, enduring and genuinely warm give-and-take working relationship, but—on a deeper level—Ringo never excused George for causing him such heartbreak and would rarely pass up an opportunity to remind him of it. Regardless of all Ringo’s positive experiences in the subsequent years that could have obliterated the ache of September 11, 1962—and despite all the apologies, acknowledgments and explanations—he continued to hurt, and made sure George knew it.