Empty Mirror

a literary magazine

  • About
    • About Empty Mirror
    • Get in Touch
    • Support EM
    • Colophon
  • Submit
  • Contributors
  • Essays
  • On Literature
  • Poetry
  • Reviews
  • Art
  • Interviews
  • Beat
    • Beat Generation
    • Ted Joans Lives!
  • +
    • Fiction
    • Music & Film
    • News
    • On Writing
    • Book Collecting

Book Review – Love Me Do: Behind the Scenes at the Recording of the Beatles’ First Single

Craig Enck

Bill Harry’s chronicle of the Beatles road to their first single release may not get any awards for journalistic style, but it is still a fascinating rundown of the lucky breaks, perseverence, and machinations it can take to get even a talented band signed. Harry’s e-book is great for the little insider details of how Beatle manager Brian Epstein had to work through others to get to producer George Martin and even had to threaten to pull EMI product off of his record store shelves to get a signed contract.

Most illuminating is the segment that details how common it was to replace a drummer in the studio. Many producers did it to save money, as an experienced studio drummer could get the track down more quickly. In light of this practice Pete Best’s ouster from the Beatles comes off as more of a personality issue than as a replacement by a supposedly superior drummer.

Fans who want the low-down on just how the sessions that produced “Love Me Do” went down will enjoy the fine details of who played what, whose speaker was buzzing, whose amp had to be taped together, and how George Martin may not have wound up as The Beatles producer save for his being interrupted by an enthusiastic sound engineer.

Love Me Do: Behind the Scenes at the Recording of the Beatles’ First Single, by Bill Harry. Published by Miniver Press, 2012. Available at Amazon.
Share on TwitterShare on Facebook

Craig Enck

Craig Enck is a researcher in religion, science, and esoteric knowledge.

Author: Craig Enck Tags: George Harrison, John Lennon, music book reviews, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, The Beatles Category: Music, Music & Film April 4, 2013

You might also like:

The John Lennon Letters
Review – The John Lennon Letters
Beatles 1967 Christmas
The Beatles – Christmas Time (Is Here Again)
The Ghost Sonata - Vincent Zangrillo
The Ghost Sonata
Reaching Out with No Hands - Reconsidering Yoko Ono
Review – Reaching Out with No Hands: Reconsidering Yoko Ono by Lisa Carver

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

I accept the Privacy Policy

 

DONATE TO BLACK LIVES MATTER

BLACK LIVES MATTER

The EM newsletter

Receive fresh poetry, reviews, essays, art, and literary news every Wednesday!


Empty Mirror

Established in 2000 and edited by Denise Enck, Empty Mirror is an online literary magazine that publishes new work each Friday.

Each week EM features several poems each by one or two poets; reviews; critical essays; visual art; and personal essays.

Subscribe Submissions Support

Recent features

  • My Father’s Map
  • On Waiting
  • Seeing Las Meninas in Madrid, 1994
  • Visual poems from 23 Bodhisattvas by Chris Stephenson
  • Historical Punctum: Reading Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia and Native Guard Through the Lens of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida
  • Panic In The Rear-View Mirror: Exploring The Work of Richard Siken and Ann Gale
  • “Art has side effects,” I said.

Books

Biblio
© 2000–2023 D. Enck / Empty Mirror.
Copyright of all content remains with its authors.
Privacy Policy · Privacy Tools · FTC disclosures