Before Ringo, Pete Best was drummed out of the Fab Four
By David Segal
Washington Post
In the long history of near-fame experiences, is there any tale as wrenching as Pete Best's? Really, who's even close? The guy is booted from the Beatles right before the band shakes into history, a few months before "Love Me Do" sends a few million teens into shrieking fits. While his former band mates are recording "Back in the U.S.S.R." in 1968, Pete is slicing bread in a bakery.
Best Family photo via LATWP
So close. Best drummed behind John, Paul and George for two years starting in 1960, in Liverpool and Hamburg, where the Beatles played seven-hour shows to drunken Germans in the city's red-light district. Best was behind the kit for that anxious audition that persuaded Parlophone Records to sign the quartet.
The pre-Fab Four: Pete Best, second from left, with Paul, George and John. Best was dropped in 1962 in favor of Ringo. He recounts that time in a new book, "The Beatles: The True Beginnings."
And then one day — Aug. 16, 1962 — he's out. Ringo Starr is in. The next year, Brits alone would spend more than $12 million on Fab Four vinyl. Best's cut was nil. None of the other Beatles, he says, ever spoke to him again.
"I suppose the frustration is the fact that this was very much a case of it had been done behind your back," Best says on a recent evening. "The lads weren't there at the actual dismissal. They'd left it up to Brian. If they were there, maybe we could have resolved the problem. You know, 'OK, what is wrong, what is your hang-up?' That never happened."
Now 61, Best has bushy gray hair and a mustache. Wearing bluejeans and a sweater, he looks more like the kindly owner of a pizzeria than the heartthrob of the Beatles.
Everyone wants to know, "Hey, what's it like to almost rule the world?" It's a question Best will surely answer this week, during a New York visit to promote "The Beatles: The True Beginnings," a coffee-table volume he co-wrote with his half brothers, Roag and Rory.
In it, the Bests tell an under-exalted chapter in the story of the Beatles' rise: the tale of the Casbah Coffee Club. Before they became local sensations at the downtown Cavern Club, John, Paul, George and Pete were regulars at the Casbah, crammed into a low-ceilinged room big enough for about 25 fans.
The Casbah was in the basement of the Best house. His mother, a free-spirited beauty named Mona, decided in 1959 that the neighborhood kids needed a place to listen to an American import called rock 'n' roll. Then she handed them paintbrushes. On the walls, John Lennon painted potbellied figures, Paul McCartney painted a rainbow, and George Harrison and a drummer named Ken Brown painted stars. Pete joined the group a year later, when it was known as the Silver Beatles.
Pete Best stumbled into the greatest rock band ever, a job that, by many accounts, he was ill equipped to handle. Today he's financially set. He finally received a pile of money in 1995, when the Beatles put together the first of their three-part "Anthology" series of albums, which includes 10 early songs with Best in the band. And if you catch him in a quiet moment, he'll tell you all about playing "Long Tall Sally" with three men who changed pop culture for good.
