The fifth Beatle

An edited version appeared in the Indian Express Sunday Eye on November 1. This is how I wrote it, and felt it.


"Almost Famous ..."

Chinki Sinha
October 27, 2009

Pete Best almost made it.
For two years, when he was the drummer with the Beatles, he felt he was on his way to something, someplace out of the ordinary.
But then, on their way to fame and everything else that comes with it, the Beatles dumped him and replaced him with Ringo Starr. And for most fans, the Pete Best story ended in 1962.
And Best, 67, became the fifth Beatle, someone who could have been there, posing for the shutterbugs as the paparazzi chased the band, a legend like the rest. But he was forced to pick up the pieces and start all over again.
Although it was only from 1960 to 1962 that he played the drums for the Beatles, the tag, and the unfortunate split clung to his identity, overshadowing his own talent, and he could never completely shake it off. Forty-seven years later, he is still known as the “ex drummer for Beatles”. But there was never any bitterness, only sadness.
“No, I admired them for what they achieved. They took what we started to another level,” Best said.In their early years, when Beatles went by another name, they belted out some of their most memorable songs, including Love me do, My Bonnie , Ain't She Sweet , and Like Dreamers Do . When Best was the drummer, the band hadn’t signed any record deals.
On his tour to India this week, where he will play at the British Council as part of the Liverpool tourism promotion campaign for Visit Britain and The Beatles Story, it’s his connection with the Beatles that is the selling point. That he was the forgotten drummer for the band that then was only a start up band that began playing at Casbah, a basement café owned by Mona Best, Pete’s mother, is till date Best’s
claim to fame. When he plays for the first time in India decades after he left the country on the last troop ship out of India(his mother was planning a visit when she unexpectedly died of a heart attack and Best always wanted to come and relive the days when he was a child growing up in India), The Georgic, that carried the remainder of the British Major-General Gilmore Simms army, in 1945, it will be in a space that will be set up like Casbah where he first played with the Beatles, the
ceilings of which were painted by Paul McCartney and John Lennon. In another part of the city, at the Select City Walk Mall, the original wax works of Beatles from Madame Tussauds’ that were made in 1964, two years after Best was dropped, would be displayed. And Best would yet again be part of an association with Beatles.
“The Casbah Coffee Club is the Holy Grail of the Beatles trail. No true Beatle fan should miss seeing it. I'm happy it's open,” Best said.
Before the café closed in 1962, the Beatles were the last group to perform there. Three years ago Casbah reopened as a tourist attraction in Liverpool, one among a string of places the Beatles Story has taken over.
But years later, Best and many others including Bill Harry, the journalist who founded the Mersey Beat, a newspaper that focused on the city’s music scene for there was much going on, and the energy was infectious, and first featured the Beatles and introduced Brian Epstein to them in 1961, have themselves become a part of the story of the band, a piece in its history, an element of its legend. The band
itself is long gone. Lennon was killed, others moved on, but the ones
on the fringes got together to piece the story together, recounting
their moments with the Fab Four.
Best’s India ties date back to 1941. He was born in Chennai. His mother Mona Best was born in Delhi in 1924. Perhaps it was here in India, that he first began to experiment with the tabla.
“I remember playing with a tabla. I don't know if you would call it actually playing one, but they were around the house, the servants had them,” he said in an email. “I will get to see my mother’s birthplace which I'm very excited about.”
This is also Best’s first trip to India after he left for Liverpool from Bombay in 1945. Among the little treasures the family carried with it were a silver-christening rattle, a mini hand-carved sitar and a number of items Best inherited from his mother like Indian Buddhas, Tiger skins. Elephant tusks. Those are part of the family archives now.
And although he was too young at the time, Best remembers his long walks on the beaches with his nanny Lakshmi, and the lullabies she sang to him.
“I also remember Indian and Western music being played in the house. My mother had very cosmopolitan tastes,” he said. “My memories of the Indians we were with are of happy times. I remember them as hard working honest, happy people. Our house was always full of laughter. I'm expecting India to bring memories alive.”
Even at Casbah, where Best met the Beatles first in 1959, his mother’s nostalgia for her days in India was reflected in the Aztec ceiling studded with stars because it looked like a mosque.
“The name the Casbah was definitely something my mother remembered from India,” he wrote in an email.
The Casbah had closed on the 24th of June 1962 but became a tourist attraction three years ago. It started in the basement of Best’s house where Mona Best sold coffee, and sodas and sweets. The Quarrymen, the name Beatles went by at the time, helped decorate the café, painting its walls, drawing dragons, spiders and stars on them. They also played there on the opening night in 1960.
Cafes were important spaces then. That’s where people met, smoked, talked and played music.
“It was the start of Beatlemania,” Best recalled. “Nobody knew them at that time. They were a start-up band.”
In her café, Mona Best, who regaled the band members with stories of her India days, wanted an Indian element. She missed India and often talked about her happy days in the country. In fact she was planning a trip to India when she died of a heart attack in 1988.
“Yes, what memories I have are good ones and the stories my mother told us always left a yearning to return. I'm happy that I am returning and playing there,” Best said. “It was always one of her dreams to return. She would often get upset thinking about India because she had such happy time there.”

Mo Best

"People will learn how it was that Mo threw the pebble, that made the ripple, that caused the wave that shook the world." – BEATLES: THE TRUE BEGINNINGS

Behind it all, the music scene and the Beatlemania that gripped the world, was a woman and her love for her son.
Mo, who had Irsih parentage, has more to her than just being the mother of the drummer who was sacked from Beatles. She was born in India during the Raj in 1924 and worked for the Red Cross. She married a army official Johnny Best who fell in love with her.
Later, when they left India, she carried back a lot of memories. She gave birth to her two sons – Pete and Rory.
The third brother, Roag Best, will be in India with Pete.
It was Mona Best who first made Casbah the Rock n’ Roll place, and let the Beatles play. Her son performed with the boys and those were good times. She had noticed his young friends who came over and started the café in the cellar first as a private club for him and later turned it into a café, which was also one of the first cellar clubs in Liverpool to play rock ‘n’ roll exclusively. It opened in 1959 two years after Mo Best bought the house in Haymans Green after winning a bet on a horse that was called “Never say Die”.
“Due to her upbringing in India she did attract a lot of attention, as many of her ideas were Eastern and not something that the people of Liverpool had come across before,” Best said. “Many of the Indian rhythms helped many years afterwards with my drumming. However, a larger influence with regards to the Beatles music came after my time with the group.”
The Beatles, then known Quarrymen, disbanded and George Harrison joined another band called the Les Stewart Quartet, but later got back to his friends and took up residency at Casbah and performed on the club’s opening night on
August 29, 1959. It was then that the Beatles were born.
When Pete joined the group as drummer in August 1960, his mother took up a more active role in his career and the band and helped them get bookings at other places.
When Pete was sacked, Mo tracked down George Martin, the recording manager for the Beatles to ask why her son was dumped.
Later, she told Beatles biographer Hunter Davies that she had helped the band get on its feet, even fed when, and was “far more interested in them than their own parents.”
In 1967, despite the unfortunate fallout, she lent John Lennon her father’s medals that he received in India after John Lennon asked her for it to wear them on the montage of the cover of the album ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.’

Liverpool - the city, the man, and Beatles' music

It was in Liverpool, the family’s hometown that Best began his music career, at first wanting to play guitars but later settled on drums and at 16 years he started to drum in his bedroom above the Casbah.
“I saw the famous Gene Krupa playing drums and that was it, I wanted to be a drummer,” Best said.
He first started playing with Ken Brown and formed a band called the Black jacks.
Then the Beatles discovered him, and he went on to Hamburg for a tour that tested the band’s limits, the gigs often lasted for eight hours at a stretch. That was the start of something.
If the impossible had happened, it’d be a story of success, loads of it. But instead it became a story of hopes that crashed, of resignation and of a life in an “almost” phase. He was not where he was supposed to be.
“There has only ever been six (Stuart Stucliffe who played the bass guitar but left Beatles shortly after their Hamburg tour) members of The Beatles and I was the fifth member. I am very proud to wear that tag. Who wouldn't be,” he said. “The shadow of The Beatles hasn't left any former Beatle. None of us could shake it off. Who'd want to? It is what it is.”
In the later days, people told stories, put in their bits and came out with their conspiracy theories. They said Best was so good looking that others in the band felt insecure, felt he could easily overshadow them, that Best was never a Beatle, he was a loner, and he didn’t fit in. But who knows what really happened in the August of 1962. He was told the group had decided to let him go, and he drove back home and
broke the news to his mother Mo Best and girlfriend Kathy. It had hurt. The dumping he could have taken, but not the way it had been done. The manager had called him and said the group had decided to replace him.
“I was hurt because I felt I had been let down by my friends,” he said. “Ringo was a good drummer, not a great drummer.”
“It is one of the most difficult things we ever had to do,” Paul McCartney said in Anthology, a collection of Beatles’ compilations.
For days after the split, there were times when Best looked at Beatles as they walked up the stairs to the stage, and as he descended those steps in one of the cafes at Liverpool, the place where it all started, but never a word was exchanged. No explanations came his way.
“I saw The Beatles on two occasions after I was dismissed, but we didn't talk. Everyone looked embarrassed,” he said.
When Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager, told Pete he was sacked, that the boys didn’t want him anymore, Best went to a pub, downed a few drinks and drove home to break the news to his mother and girlfriend Kathy.
“I just went off and had a few pints - numb, I'd been cut and dried and hung out on the line,” he later said in an interview.
Ringo even alleged Best was on drugs, Best sued him and won.
"It was nonsense," Best said.
The original members of the band were John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Pete Best and a painter Stuart Stucliffe who left shortly after the Hamburg tour and died soon after.
It wasn’t easy moving on when the world was going crazy over Beatles.
When a man falls, only the dark phases of his life resonate, and live long in public memory. That’s what happened to Best. In all his appearances on television, he was asked about the fallout. The uncomfortable truths never left him. All the years that he had worked through long hours to survive, he had witnessed the rise of the
Beatles. He never met them again, though he said John Lennon was his closest friend.
Best, after all these years, has left the door open. After all he shared memories with the band members and of the Fab four, only Paul McCartney is alive.
“I want to talk to him about our families and life,” he said.
Best tried to get on, but there was his young family and they had to be taken care of. After he was sacked, Best stayed home for weeks and then joined Lee Curtis & the All Stars, which then broke off from Curtis and became Pete Best & the All Stars. They signed to Decca Records , and released the single "I'm Gonna Knock On Your Door”.
Best moved to United States and the Pete Best Combo toured America with a combination of 1950s songs and original tunes and eventually released the Best Of The Beatles ; which wasn’t a complilation of Beatles’ songs but was a play on Best's name.
Best married Kathy in 1968. The couple had two daughters, Babs and Bonita. The only job he could find was of a baker on the loading dock of a large bakery in Liverpool, where he worked long hours and often during the nights.
And so Best lived, within the limits, with no higher destiny to chase.
He didn’t play drums for almost 20 years. All these years, he refused to talk about Beatles. He was never bitter, only sad.
In fact John Lennon once said in an interview that the band’s best works were in Liverpool and in Hamburg and other dance halls.
“I had to start again, which I did. I finally hung up my drum sticks because I had children and needed to provide for them,” he said.
“Because I had been a musician for so long nobody would employ me. They felt because I had been a Beatle that I would go back to show business. They were scared to employ me. The Baker job was all I could get.”
Later, the Civil Service employed Best.
He had made his choices and was making the best of what remained.
In 1988, he returned to his drums, trying to get back to what he loved doing best and formed the Pete Best Band, and gave interviews on television.
“I had been asked for about five years to do a one off date in Liverpool, I always refused, eventually my mother persuaded that one date wouldn't hurt. What about my fans. So, I agreed,” he said.
In 1995 when Beatles’ Anthology released, it included some of the tracks that had Best on the drums in those early days.
“The money was nice, but it was better to receive the recognition for
the years I played as a Beatle,” Best said.
Although it was a rough ride in the beginning, Best put it all together, bit by bit. A grandfather who adores his three grandchildren, Best has got back to music, drumming and writing songs yet again, touring the world with his band that includes his younger brother Roag on drums and percussion, Phil Melia, Paul Perry, and Tony Flynn, the lead singer. Haymans Green, the band’s latest release, has songs that Best and the rest of the band composed.
But even the decades that had come in between, didn’t really distance him from the music he once played with a band that moved on, and left him behind. His days with the band permeate his music. Perhaps those were the days when Pete discovered his own style of Rock n' Roll. But even now, his music is reminiscent of his Beatles' days.
“My current group captures my time with The Beatles. However, the group is a force in its own right. If you like The Beatles, you'll like this group. We are not a copy band. How could I copy myself,” Best said.
So, the man will once again go back in time, and beat on the drums. And in between, he will perhaps look at the ceiling with the stars, and wonder yet again. He is reconciled, has even expressed a wish to speak to the living Beatles’ member, is happy they made it that big, but he can’t help but go back to the old days and think why it happened, and why he became the fifth Beatle that was left behind. But
even in his tragedy, it was the Beatles’ who eventually resurrected him. The world will always know him as the shy, good looking drummer who played with Beatles and never said a word against those who left him to figure out his own life.

About the fifth Beatle

Pete has released various Cds after he got back to music including Back to the Beat, Once a Beatle Always, Casbah Coffee Club, and his latest Haymans Green, the name of the place where Casbah is located.
Her also co-authored two books, including The Beatles, The True Beginnings that traces the band’s beginnings and his mother’s influence on Liverpool music scenes. Best recorded several demos with group, which feature on the Beatles 1995 anthology album.
In 2007, Best was inducted into the All You Need Is Liverpool Music Hall of Fame as the debut Charter Member. Haymans Green was released on last year in the USA.


Back to Casbah

"I think it's a good idea to let people know about the Casbah. They know about the Cavern…but the Casbah was the place where all that started."
– Sir Paul McCartney forward in BEATLES: THE TRUE BEGINNINGS

Casbah, a café that Mona Best started after she pawned her belongings, and operated from the basement of their house in Haymans Green, was also the place where the Beatles first performed. The coffee club is now part of The Beatles Story, a visitor attraction that seeks to recreate the life, times, culture and music of the Beatles.
It was here the Beatles when they returned from Hamburg honed their talents honed.
Visit Britain and the Beatles Story are organizing a festival called "Imagine Liverpool" at Select CITYWALK, Saket District Centre,Saket, New Delhi.
The festival will showcase Liverpool as a destination and will see musical performances, beatles memorabilia, souvenirs travel information on Liverpool etc.
Liverpool, home to 'The Beatles' and the famous Liverpool Football Club was voted the '2008 European Capital of Culture.'