Before There Was Ringo...

“Sorry mate, you’re out of the band.” That’s what Beatles manager Brian Epstein said to drummer Pete Best in 1962, right before the recording of their first originally-written single, “Love Me Do”. Pete was out, Ringo was in… it went something like that, anyway.

Attending the Pete Best show a week ago at Rhythm and Brews, in many ways, was a dream come true for me.

As a teenager, I was a Beatles fanatic. Ask anyone and they can tell you. Not only did I own all of their albums on cassette (not the Capital versions but their British counterpart Parlophone) but I devoured every book I could about the band and especially, it’s murdered genius, John Lennon as well. I had twenty-two Beatles posters lining my bedroom walls. I could answer any piece of trivia that was thrown at me and I had memorized every lyric of every song they ever wrote as well as their track listings on each album. They were the reason I started playing guitar. Yeah, I was a little obsessed.

History had all but forgotten Pete Best, the “cute” Beatles drummer that toured with the band through their now-legendary Hamburg, Germany phase, playing clubs like The Dresden and the All-Star Club.

Clad in their black leather jackets, black jeans, and greasy, slicked back hair, the Beatles were far from their clean-cut, mop-top image eventual manager Brian Epstein would plan for them, causing fans all over the world to fall in love with them. Theirs was a life of booze, pills, and whores.

The six to eight hour sets they played every night involved loud, fast, edgy guitar-driven music and hordes of drunken sailors, merchantmen, and easy women; all of this opened up a whole other world for the young lads, all under the age of 21. Then, as fast it came, Pete Best was replaced by Ringo Starr and the Beatles began their long journey into rock and roll history. Pete Best, for the most part, became a piece of pop culture trivia that became the stuff of legends.

To be honest, I didn’t expect much from the show. After all, he was kicked out of the band. According to Beatles producer George Martin, the guy couldn’t really keep a beat.

I was wrong. It was actually worse than I had expected. I knew the Pete Best Band would be playing mostly Beatles covers, or at least songs that the Beatles played around the time Pete was still in the band. I thought maybe there would be some songs Best had written on his own. Not so much. To make matters worse, he mainly stayed behind his drum kit and occasionally came out to the front of the stage to address the audience. Expecting old stories from his days with the Pre-Fab Four, stories that not many people knew except the people who were there at the time, I was sorely disappointed when the few words he spoke were to thank the audience for coming out to see him.

The other band members did more talking than he did and in fact, the ex-Beatle did no singing at all. I didn’t expect that he would but for someone who has a band named after him, I thought he would have taken a bigger part in its performance. I mean, there was another guy on drums next to Pete, which puzzled me, because the guy played the exact same thing he did. This only re-enforced the popular opinion that perhaps he really wasn’t such a good drummer after all. The show was entirely gimmick-driven to cash in on Beatles fame.

That said, do I have any regrets going? On the contrary. The band played some of my early Beatles favorites and in fact, sounded very reminiscent of how fast and raw the Beatles sounded before they gained worldwide fame. Not only did I get Pete Best’s autograph but I got my picture taken with him as well.

Even though I didn’t gain more of an insight into the mythology of the early Beatles’ career, I still got to shake the hand of the man who once knew John, George, and Paul intimately. Even if poor Pete Best was within an inch of becoming a household name, forged into the files of music history as part of one of the greatest rock bands of all time, he still left enough of a mark so that Beatles geeks like me could tell his kids that he once met one of the Beatles.