Missing Master Tape
The original master tapes of the 4 September version of "Love Me Do" are not known to exist. Standard procedure at Abbey Road Studios at the time was to erase the original two-track session tape for singles once they had been "mixed down" to the (usually monaural) master tape used to press records. This was the fate of two Beatles singles (four songs): "Love Me Do", "P.S. I Love You", "She Loves You", and "I'll Get You". However, at some point the mixdown master tape for this song was also lost, and apparently no backup copies had been made. Thus, for many years the only extant recorded copies were the red label Parlophone 45 rpm vinyl records pressed in 1962. This version was also issued in Canada as Capitol 72076.
By the time the tapes had disappeared, the song's 11 September 1962 remake featuring Andy White had been released. EMI would not have been too concerned about the loss of the 4 September take, therefore, as it was now considered obsolete, and they may not have anticipated ever having any use for it again anyway.
Around 1980, a reasonably clean, original 45 single from EMI's archives was used as the "best available source" for the track's inclusion on the Capitol compilation LP Rarities. A few years later, a new master tape was struck, this time using another, better-sounding 45 supplied by a record collector, and this has served as the official EMI master tape for the original "Love Me Do" ever since.
Read more about this topic: Love Me Do
Famous quotes containing the words missing, master and/or tape:
“We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But if that drop was not in the ocean, I think the ocean would be less because of that missing drop. I do not agree with the big way of doing things.”
—Mother Teresa (b. 1910)
“A penniless man who has no ties to bind him is master of himself at any rate, but a luckless wretch who is in love no longer belongs to himself, and may not take his own life. Love makes us almost sacred in our own eyes; it is the life of another that we revere within us; then and so begins for us the cruelest trouble of all.”
—Honoré De Balzac (1799–1850)
“We shall see but little way if we require to understand what we see. How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding! How many greater things might he be seeing in the meanwhile!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)