On September 4, 1962, an unknown band arrived at EMI's recording studios in London to make what they hoped would be their first hit single.
They had strange haircuts, were trying to write their own songs and their lead guitarist was sporting a black eye from a recent fight.
The band had changed its name a number of times but were now called The Beatles.
As they set up their instruments that day, they had a major problem that wasn't going to be easily resolved.
They didn't like the song their producer, George Martin, had asked them to record — a piece written by a young musician named Mitch Murray called How Do You Do It?
The band thought it was too light and too white.
Not surprisingly, the session didn't go well. In fact, it ran over time and although they recorded four songs, including How Do You Do It? as well as Love Me Do and P.S. I Love You, part of the problem was new drummer, Ringo Starr.
Unnerved by the recording studio, he had been overcome in the moment: "I was playing the bass drum and the high hat, and I had a tambourine in one hand and a maraca in another… I was hitting cymbals ... trying to play all these instruments at once."
Producer George Martin wasn't sure they had produced a song they could release.
What annoyed him most was the feeling they weren't taking How Do You Do It? seriously.
A bold risk
It got worse. In the wake of the recording session the band, with John doing all the talking, came to him and said, We don't want you to release the Mitch Murray song, we want to go with our own material. They argued it wasn't representative of what they were doing and that they could do better.
It was a bold move. The Beatles at this point had been turned down by virtually every record label in Britain. Significantly, EMI had only contracted them to record six songs, and they had done that.
At that moment, The Beatles' recording career might well have been over.
What happened next was interesting. The mythology suggests George Martin had a change of heart and decided to back the group's decision. In fact, as the group's biographer Mark Lewisohn tells it, it was music publisher Dick James who made the decision. When he heard their version of How Do You Do It? he didn't like it at all and decided they couldn't release it even if they wanted to.
George Martin was left with little choice. If a single was coming out, Love Me Do had to be the song.
As Lewisohn writes: "[Martin] was stymied and displeased: against his better judgement, he had to let a Lennon-McCartney song be The Beatles' first single."
The troubles with this first song weren't yet quite over. Martin, believing he could get a better take from the band, made them come back again but this time he had employed session drummer, Andy White. Ringo was incensed and would later admit it left him wary of trusting Martin.
"I hated the bugger for years," he said. "I still don't let him off the hook."
The first step to Beatlemania
When the single (with Ringo on drums) was released on October 5, The Beatles began a hectic round of promotion to support it and, that month, the band heard themselves for the first time on the BBC.
The choice of song and the hard work paid off, with Love Me Do making its debut at number 49 in the charts and steadily climbing into the top 20, much to George Martin's delight and amazement.
It would be the first step towards Beatlemania.
The question is, though: What was it about that first song, with its harmonica intro, that made the band stand out so clearly?
In part, if you look at the top 40 that year — with songs like I Remember You by Frank Ifield, Moon River by Andy Williams, along with Speedy Gonzales by Pat Boone high on the list — the question seems to answer itself. The Beatles song had rhythm and it had life.
It also, unusually, featured a harmonica.
Written by Paul in 1958 but then slowed down and given a new middle section by John in the year of its release, it clearly gives a musical nod in its instrumentation to another song from 1962 called Hey Baby!
The song, sung by Bruce Channel, also featured harmonica played by Delbert McClinton.
It turns out John had met him earlier in the year and McClinton had given him a few tips on playing the instrument.
The Beatles themselves always claimed it was their take on the blues.
Just one week after the song's release, the band played on a bill with Little Richard. He loved them as they did him. His words about their music are telling: "Man, these Beatles are fabulous. If I hadn't seen them, I'd never have dreamed they were white. They have a real authentic Negro sound."
High praise, indeed, from one of the kings of rock and roll and one of The Beatles' favourite artists, whose songs they would cover on later albums.
In playing music with "a black sound" the Beatles certainly stood out from the crowd. It also began the process of shifting pop music away from America to Britain, paving the way for the British invasion of 1964.
Wannabe pop stars like Fabian and Frankie Avalon in the US, with their white-bread image and film-star looks, would be swept aside in the British tide.
In effect, The Beatles had taken the music America had ignored, including the blues, R&B and soul, and sold it back to them.
Taking back power from publishers
Perhaps ironically or happily, How Do You Do It? did become a national number one hit for Gerry and the Pacemakers in 1963. However, The Beatles' decision to stick with their own material would not only change their careers but also alter the entire music business and the way pop records were made.
Until that time publishers, with the co-operation of the record companies, effectively ran pop music. They would have their staff writers. They would choose the songs and the band or the solo singers to record them and then rake in the royalties each time a song was played. They were the kings of the music business.
In one swift move The Beatles' decision to write their own material and record it began to remove the publishers' power. On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Bob Dylan and The Beach Boys would do much the same thing. The decision would lead the way for artists to write their own material and have a bigger say in their songs' subject matter, recording and promotion.
Sitting here in 2022, it is easy to forget how much The Beatles changed the music industry. As the making of Love Me Do demonstrates, it wasn't easy. At their last ever concert on the roof at Apple Corp in London, John said: "I'd like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we passed the audition."
At the time there was much laughter. It does, however, show the extraordinary pressure The Beatles lived under. It also shows how deeply the events of that day in 1962 were indelibly written on the band's psyche.
It's difficult to imagine what the 1960s might have been like without The Beatles. The 60s still would have been the 60s. Without The Beatles, there still would have been assassinations, anti-Vietnam war demonstrations, demands for equality and the expanding use of psychedelic drugs. The soundtrack for that decade, though, would have been very different.
Thank heavens for their insistence that they record their own material. Oh yes, and thank you, Dick James, for making sure they got their way.
When John Lennon's Aunt Mimi first heard Love Me Do, she told him: "If you think you're going to make a fortune with that, you've got another thing coming." Happily, he clearly wasn't listening.
The Beatles may not have made a fortune from Love Me Do but that evening in 1962, as they made their way out of the studio into the London evening, they had a top 20 hit ready for release and a recording of what would, in time, become their first British chart topper in the can.
1962 was quite a year.
