Best of the Beatles (8 page)

Except perhaps Rory Storm. Lee Curtis: “Rory Storm told me that he’d got another drummer. I said, ‘Why another one? Gibson Kemp’s a knockout.’ He said, ‘I’ve lost Ringo and now I’ve lost Gibson as well as he’s joining the Dominoes.’ I said, ‘What’s going on, Rory? Why can’t you keep your drummers?’ He said, ‘What can I say? I make ’em and they take ’em.’”

“What do you call someone who hangs around with musicians?” “A drummer.”

Musicians’ joke.

In this chapter I discuss the possible reasons for Pete Best’s sacking and hopefully reach a satisfactory explanation. This is not as easy as it sounds because even Pete Best doesn’t know why. “I wish I knew the answer. It would put a lot of heart-searching to rest. I may have been getting too much attention but it didn’t matter a dicky-bird to me. They said I was anti-social and non-conformist but each individual member had his own following and, when you added it together, the following was fantastic.”

Gerry Marsden praises the Beatles throughout his autobiography;
I’ll Never Walk Alone
, except when it comes to the sacking of Pete Best. “I thought it was a tacky thing to do for no apparent reason. I was very annoyed that when I’d asked Brian Epstein for a reason, he couldn’t give me a proper answer. I thought it was a sour way to start a recording career for the Beatles, firing a drummer who’d been with them for 2 years. I told Pete Best – who wasn’t particularly a mate of mine, but was an honest feller who got a bad deal – what I thought, but by then it was too late. The deed had been done. Ringo proved perfect, but the
principle of Best’s sacking left a nasty taste in the mouth as the Beatles began their climb out of Liverpool to the world stage.”

The Ex-Files 1: Pete Best was a Lousy Drummer

First, the pro-Pete Best lobby. Excuse the repetition, but I want to emphasise that many musicians who heard Pete play with the Beatles had no reservations about his ability.

Johnny Guitar of Rory Storm and the Hurricanes: “I’d seen Pete playing for over 2 years with the Beatles and I’d never known anyone complain about his drumming.”

Brian ‘Noddy’ Redman, drummer with the Hillsiders: “There was no other group like the Beatles at the time and they were destined for the top all the way along. Pete Best was fine for the Beatles, but then nobody had seen any other drummer with them. At the time, we just accepted him so we were surprised when he was booted out.”

Wayne Bickerton, later to be part of the Pete Best Four: “Pete was a good drummer. All the stories of him not being able to play the drums properly are grossly exaggerated. There was nothing wrong with Pete’s drumming.”

John McNally of the Searchers: “I was surprised by the story that the record company didn’t think Pete was good enough. I somehow doubt it because he was superb. He was doing what all the punk bands did later – he was the first to do fours on the bass drum, bom, bom, bom, bom, which gives more power, as opposed to ba-bom, ba-bom, the jazz type drumming. It was powerhouse drumming with loads of cymbals and he was great. Ringo and Chris Curtis also did similar things and, if you listen to the Star-Club albums, you can hear that bass drum thump through everyone’s act.”

Chris Curtis (drummer with the Searchers): “You could sit Pete Best on a drum kit and ask him to play for 19 hours
and he’d put his head down and do it. He’d drum with real style and stamina all night long and that really was the Beatles’ sound – forget the guitars and forget the faces, you couldn’t avoid that insistent whack, whack, whack.”

Earl Preston: “The Beatles had a unique sound and Pete contributed a lot to it. It was very, very raw rock ’n’ roll, a very fast driving beat that other drummers tried to emulate but never could. He had a unique style; he used both hands at the same speed. Most drummers play four with the cymbals and then one with the snare, but he doubled up so that both hands were doing the same rhythm which was a very effective, terrific sound.”

Beryl Marsden: “I didn’t see why the Beatles had replaced their drummer. When Pete joined our band, his drumming was great and he was also a great bloke.”

Steve Fleming of Mark Peters and the Silhouettes: “Although we knew the Beatles well, they weren’t very intimate or forthcoming about internal matters. All of a sudden when Brian Epstein took over, Pete Best disappeared. It was a tragedy as the Beatles sounded better with Pete Best than they did with Ringo.”

We’ll dampen this praise with a note of caution from Brian Epstein’s personal assistant, Alistair Taylor. “Brian told me that the other Beatles had come to him and told him that they wanted a different drummer. It was hard for Pete who had gone through all those years of rather dodgy venues with them, but I always told Brian that Pete’s drumming was a touch uneven and that he didn’t quite fit into the group.”

Pete, of course, wasn’t a lousy drummer as he could hold his own on stage with the Beatles as they were in 1962 even if not in the recording studio. However, if somebody’s personality fits, then they may be kept in the group even though they contribute little. The most famous example
would be Gary Walker, who rarely played drums on the Walker Brothers’ recordings, and also there is Stu Sutcliffe with the early Beatles. But, with Pete Best, it is clear that the personality didn’t fit and so the quality of his drumming became another irritation.

The Ex-Files 2: Pete Best was not a Versatile Drummer

So far, we can conclude that Pete Best was not a lousy drummer, but there are indications that he was not a versatile one. He was a one-trick pony and Jackie Lomax of the Undertakers puts it succinctly, “Pete Best could only play one drum beat, either slowed down or speeded up.”

Brendan McCormack, classical guitarist, formerly with Rikki and the Red Streaks: “The role of the drummer wasn’t clear at that time. The vocalists were the important people, the bass didn’t really count and it is only in the 1980s that the bass came into focus. Drummers simply had to keep the band playing in time. It’s changed now, it’s changed radically. You should not view the sacking from today’s perspective.”

Fred Marsden, drummer with Gerry and the Pacemakers: “Pete Best was excellent for the Beatles – I don’t think you could have found a better drummer for the material they were doing, which was mostly Coasters-type stuff. But as they advanced, I don’t think he was technically good enough. I felt sorry for Pete Best because he was an excellent drummer in his field.”

Billy Hatton of the Fourmost: “His bass drum technique was four to the bar – bom, bom, bom, bom – which initially gave them that thumping sound, but when they started doing stuff that required more sophisticated drumming techniques, they needed a better drummer.”

There was no doubting the ability of the Beatles’ bass player. Bob Wooler: “Paul McCartney was the outstanding
bass player on Merseyside. Perhaps Johnny Gustafson had the edge on him, but Paul was exceptional.”

Paul’s ability contributed to Pete’s downfall. Garry Tamlyn: “There was a very close association between the drummer and the bass guitarist in rock ’n’ roll bands. A bass guitarist would tend to base what he was doing on what the drummer was doing and forge a very close ensemble with the drummer, so Paul would pick up any fluctuation in tempo very quickly.”

This could cause friction. Bob Wooler: “The Beatles used to play the Cavern at lunchtime and sometimes they would stay behind and rehearse and just myself and the cleaners would hear them. One day, Paul showed Pete Best how he wanted the drums to be played for a certain tune and I thought, ‘That’s pushing it a bit.’”

Maybe, but it was typical behaviour. Ritchie Galvin: “Sometimes after a lunchtime session in the Cavern, we would spend the afternoon in the Mandolin Club in Toxteth. Paul was showing Pete the drum pattern that he wanted on a particular song. Pete tried to do it but he didn’t get it. He did argue quite a bit with Pete, and Paul was a frustrated drummer, which is unusual as so many drummers are frustrated front-liners. He always made for the drums on jam sessions at the Blue Angel – Gerry Marsden would be singing and Wally Shepherd would be playing guitar.”

From this we conclude that McCartney was the Beatle who was most aware of Best’s limitations and, unfortunately for Pete, he was also the Beatle who wanted to expand their repertoire. While the Beatles remained a rock ’n’ roll band – and John Lennon, to some extent, was always a rock ’n’ roller – there were no problems with Pete Best’s drumming. A contrast can be made with the drummers who worked in New Orleans for Little Richard and Fats Domino. They
came from a jazz heritage and weren’t allowed to produce ornate drumbeats.

If Pete Best was not a good enough drummer, could he have taken lessons and improved? Garry Tamlyn: “Rock ’n’ roll drumbeats are quite simple in comparison with jazz beats, for example, and so, given time, it doesn’t automatically follow that a rock ’n’ roll drummer would be able to do that. From what I’ve heard, I can’t gauge how talented Pete Best was, so I don’t know if he would have been able to cut things as well as a practised session drummer.”

It is argued that Pete Best would not have been suitable for what the Beatles did later; the strange time signatures of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ come to mind, but that was new music and who’s to say what’s right and what’s wrong? Ringo, as it were, wrote the book and became a very stylistic player. However, in 1962, Lennon and McCartney had no idea that they would be writing songs as innovative as that. Their musical aspiration was to be the next Goffin-King, i.e. to produce carefully-crafted pop songs along the lines of the Brill Building writers in New York. As Kingsize Taylor says, “There was no big change in their repertoire when Ringo joined, at least not at first, and so it was still the same songs.”

At McCartney’s instigation, the Beatles had added some middle-of-the-road ballads to their act, which can be viewed as a throwback to dance-band days. Ritchie Galvin, drummer with Earl Preston and the TTs: “Pete was a very basic drummer and not very technical. The Beatles, particularly Paul, were singing songs like ‘Till There Was You’, ‘A Taste of Honey’ and ‘Fever’, songs that called for a little more from the right hand than ticky, ticky, ticky. The bass drumming needed for those songs is quite intricate.”

The big show song from the Liverpool groups has to be ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ from Gerry and the Pacemakers,
and how sophisticated is the drumming on that? Garry Tamlyn: “Even a show song like ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ when played by Gerry and the Pacemakers is only triplet rhythms on cymbals, and that’s no different from what Earl Palmer was doing in the 1950s with Fats Domino and Lloyd Price. Any competent drummer could play that. You’re only calling the song sophisticated because of the emotions it contains. It doesn’t require any complex drum beats.”

The Ex-Files 3: George Martin didn’t like Pete Best’s Drumming

Paul McCartney told Mark Lewisohn: “When we first came down in June 1962 with Pete Best, George Martin took us aside and said, ‘I’m not happy about the drummer.’ And we all went, ‘Oh God, well, I’m not telling him. You can tell him… Ooh God!’ and it was quite a blow. He said, ‘Can you change your drummer?’ And we said, ‘We’re quite happy with him, he works great in the clubs.’ And George said, ‘Yes, but for recording he’s got to be just a bit more accurate.’”

George Martin was unhappy with Pete Best’s drumming but he hadn’t suggested that Pete should be sacked. He could make the Beatles’ records with a session drummer and
no-one
need know – who knew, for example, that Gary Walker didn’t drum on the Walker Brothers but read comics in the control booth? Gary was kept in the Walker Brothers because he looked good, a reversal of the Pete Best situation. Then again, Dennis Wilson was forced into the family group, the Beach Boys, at the insistence of his mother. He was only a moderate drummer and was often replaced by session men, but he became essential as the heart-throb of the group.

However, the very fact that it was George Martin who said Pete Best wasn’t good enough may have been a deciding
factor. The Beatles were desperate for a UK recording contract and George Martin was a London-based authority figure with an impressive CV as a producer. His opinions would carry more weight with the ambitious Beatles than Brian Epstein’s. George Martin’s views were, at the very least, the catalyst for the sacking of Pete Best. Hamburg record producer Paul Murphy: “I believe Pete Best was a casualty of George Martin. Getting that record contract was like getting the Holy Grail. It was like ‘We are not worthy’ when they went in the doors at EMI, so I do think George Martin had a lot to do with it.”

Ironically, there could be another dimension to this. Was George Martin good enough for Pete Best? Playwright and Cavern dweller Willy Russell: “I don’t think the recording industry could cope with the weight of the beat that the Beatles were capable of in those days. When we did
John Paul George Ringo… And Bert
, we included the Beatles’ recording of ‘Long Tall Sally’, but we overdubbed another bass line to try and capture the powerful bass sound that they had at the Cavern. George Martin never got near the way they could do rhythm ‘n’ blues, and even ‘Twist and Shout’ sounds thinner than it did live. I get irked when people say the Rolling Stones was the great rock ’n’ roll band; for me, the Beatles’ beat section – the bass and drums – was much stronger live than the Stones.”

Harry Prytherch of the Remo Four is of a similar mind. He feels that George Martin may have found a dominant bass drum seeping through the mikes of the other performers. Garry Tamlyn: “Charles Connor, who was in Little Richard’s touring band, wasn’t allowed to record with him for that reason, but that was in the 1950s. The studios were more advanced by the early 1960s. The drums in the Pete Best tracks for Parlophone are fairly mixed back, although the timbre of his executions suggests
he was hitting the drums pretty hard. He was a hard and forceful drummer.”

The Ex-Files 4: Ringo Starr was a Better Drummer than Pete Best

Actually, Pete Best was given a reason for his sacking, but he chose not to believe it. “Brian Epstein said it was because I was not a good enough drummer, but that has never held water with me. Most of the drummers in Liverpool copied the style I had brought back from Germany. I was faster than Ringo but otherwise we were similar.”