He wasn't the first drummer but he played in the band before they went "commercial", back in their "savage" days; when they played the dives and played as long as the juke jointers back in the States.
Posted on 08/16/2006 10:34:06 AM PDT by weegee
COLONIE, N.Y. -- As the live beat of Beatles classics begins bouncing off the walls of the Elks Lodge, a man with a gray mustache stands before his drum set and speaks up in a Liverpool lilt.
"Let's take you back," he tells the crowd, "to the days when I used to play with a bunch of guys by the names of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison."
Ringo Starr's playing the Elks club?
No.
Meet Pete Best, the drummer booted from the band just before Beatlemania exploded. John, Paul, George and new guy Ringo went on to become voices of a generation, musical and cultural history.
Best became a civil servant.
If there was bitterness -- and Best says there was not -- he doesn't show it. In fact, the 64-year-old drummer immerses himself in his Beatles past. He regularly bangs out the same beats he played as a young man in the seamy clubs of Hamburg and the crammed confines of the Cavern in Liverpool. Only now he plays with his self-named band in clubs and parks and places like this lodge in suburban Albany, N.Y.
"I was strong enough to put it behind me," Best says. "You wake up one morning and say 'What's that use of crying over spilled milk?"'
The Pete Best Band is a six-piece outfit that rips through chestnuts like "Roll Over Beethoven," "Please Mr. Postman," and "P.S. I Love You." Sets center around music the Beatles cut their teeth on from 1960-62, when the band featured Best, whose mother owned a Liverpool club called the Casbah. Just like the old days, Best leaves the singing and harmonizing to his bandmates, content now to split drumming duties with his brother Roag.
He also stages more intimate shows in which he tells anecdotes from the old days and takes questions from the audience. The most common question, of course, is: Why were you replaced?
"A mystery," Best says during an interview. His mates never told him, he says, and they left the unpleasant deed to the group's manager.
"Lo and behold, after playing the Cavern one day, Brian Epstein called me into his office and told me that was that," Best recalls.
The consensus among Beatleologists is that the other three and the band's new producer George Martin felt Best's drumming was simply not up to snuff. Personality issues may have played a part, too. Best was reserved and displayed little of the trademark Beatles cheekiness. He never got a mop top. Maybe worse, Best was very popular with the Liverpool girls. As Bob Spitz recounts in his exhaustive 2005 book "The Beatles," Paul in particular noticed the "orgasm of shrieks" when Best was introduced on stage.
Best shrugs off reasons offered over the years as "conspiracy theories," though he insists the criticism of his drumming "doesn't hold water," since he had a crackerjack reputation in Liverpool.
Best is grayer and a tad heavier than the leather-clad looker in old Beatles pictures, but he retains the unassuming manner ascribed to him as a young man. At the Elks Lodge show, he slips back behind his drum set after his introductory remarks and spends the set knocking out a beat with his head bowed down. If he had stayed a Beatle, he would have given George a run for his money for the "quiet one" tag.
A few hours before the gig, Best shows up in sweats and sneakers for a meet and greet at the local veteran's hospital. Introduced to patients as the Beatles' original drummer, he genially shakes hands and answers questions he's heard again and again.
"So, you know George Harrison and Paul and all those guys?" one patient asks.
"Yeah, played with them for two years," Best says.
"You know Pete Townshend?" the patient asks.
Not really, Best says.
Another patient in a wheelchair, who keeps two Beatles posters by his bed, acts thrilled to shake Best's hand. Still another asks him about being replaced by Ringo.
"It was a long time ago," Best says, "a lot of things have moved on since then."
After his sacking, Best landed a gig playing with another Liverpool band, Lee Curtis and the All Stars. He saw his old mates when the All Stars played on the same bill as the Beatles, but they never spoke.
"We passed like ships in the night," he says.
He quit show business in 1968 for a job with Britain's civil service and worked his way up to training manager, a job in which -- ironically -- he prepared workers for new jobs. He returned to the stage around the end of his government career in 1988 for what he thought would be a "one-off concert" and pretty much has been going ever since with his own band.
He could be excused for brooding over the life Ringo has led -- the riches, the Bond-girl wife, touring with all-star bands. But Best stresses his blessings. He's been married for going on 44 years, with children and grandchildren. Women still scoot near his drum set to take his picture. His band has an album of original material coming out next year.
"In hindsight, that was my karma," he says," he says. "I still have my health, I have a beautiful wife, a family, a band."
"I'm the happy one, no matter what happened."
And he finally showed up on a best-selling Beatles album in 1995, the first of three releases in the vault-clearing Anthology series. Though Anthology 1 deals Best yet another indignity -- he's beheaded in the main picture of the cover collage -- he still gets residuals for tracks that feature his work. He says the money will provide security for his family after he's gone.
Best also is happy that he got to tell his version of what happened during the band's formative days in the slyly titled "Best of the Beatles," which showed on PBS last year and is now out on DVD. And he gets to play the old songs to appreciative crowds like the Elks, a show that ends with a one-two punch of "I Saw Her Standing There" and "Twist and Shout."
Middle aged couples jam the linoleum in front of the stage, twisting, smiling and singing along to the ascending "Ahhhh"s of the final song's chorus. As Best pounds away with his head down, lead singer Chris Cavanagh raps over the big beat, "Ladies and gentlemen, Pete Best is the ORIGINAL drummer of the Beatles," drawing a cheer.
The scene brings to mind a really fun wedding reception more than Beatlemania, but it's enough to bring a smile to Best's face as he comes out from behind the drums to ask the crowd a question.
"Would you like another one?"
This guy must have had some bad karma stored up in '62.
I guess there are all sorts of ways to be famous...
He wasn't the first drummer but he played in the band before they went "commercial", back in their "savage" days; when they played the dives and played as long as the juke jointers back in the States.
Oh, I don't know: He's been married for going on 44 years, with children and grandchildren.
Actually, having avoided the drug scene, Yoko Ono and John Lennon's ego fueled decent into peace, love and all that crap, it seems Pete Best got the better deal. Sounds like he is happy and doing much better than Paul McCartney is right now. Sure he might not have the money or the fame, but a good solid career, and an even more solid family life, in my opinion Pete Best will die the happiest of all of them.
He has got things figured out a lot better than many do IMO.
Sometimes being more popular than Jesus can be bad for you.....Pete Best seems to have come out all right. My favorite drummers these days, however, don't include him, I'd rather hear Dennis Chmabers or Steve Gadd.
*Dennis Chambers
The times I've seen Pete Best on TV or in print, he seems genuinely happy. Sure he didn't get the money and fame the others did, but he also got to skip all the crap that the rest of them had to deal with.
FWIW, his replacement Ringo always seemed to be a lot more stable and low-key than John, Paul or George.
IMHO, the Beatles went straight downhill after they replaced Pete Best with Richard Starkey.
who is the fifth guy in that picture?
Well, he has some degree of fame. We all know who Pete Best is.
And he's much better looking than Ringo
:)
That was bassist Stu Sutcliffe, who was only in the band because he was Lennon's friend from art college. Stu wasn't that good and left the group and stayed in Hamburg with girlfriend Astrid Kirchnerr. He died in 1962 of a brain hemmorhage and there's a popular legend that Stu's death was caused from a beating in the head. Medical evidence indicates that it was either an aneurism or AVM.
I always thought George and Ringo were far more grounded in reality than the other two. Lennon thought he was some artistic genius and Paul was desperate to prove he was just as much an artistic genius as John was.
I remember a brief scene from the movie "let it Be" where Paul is dictating to an annoyed George Harrison how to play his guitar on a certain song. George replied somethign t the effect of: "I'll play whatever you want me to play, however you want me to play it. Let's just play!"
I think that summed up the relationship of the four. John and Paul always overthought and George and Ringo were there just for the music.
Like I said, I think Pete Best will die happiest of them all, with Ringo a close second.
Very true. Though he has more of a "Trivia Question Answer" fame, akin to Ava Braun. Not like someone who is famous for accomplishing or inventing something. And definitely not like Paris Hilton's fame. Why, again is she famous? And for what?
What's Steve Gadd up to these days? I always liked his playing.
Haha!
The first fifth Beatle.
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