When They Were Boys

by Larry Kane

  Pete is far more than an asterisk. In reality, before and after Brian Epstein’s arrival, Pete Best was the most popular Beatle in Merseyside, Manchester, and Hamburg. Although some historians, and the boys themselves, would revise his role in history, Pete was a catalyst to their early success, and can truthfully take much credit for the rise of the band that, unashamedly, left him behind.

  Even in their own Anthology, which Pete was paid handsomely to assist with, the Beatles insisted that he was replaced because they found a better drummer. Decades after he left the band, Pete spoke with Beatle Brunch radio broadcaster Joe Johnson:

  IT’S VERY MUCH A CASE OF, YOU KNOW, AS THEY WANTED IT TO BE. YOU KNOW, IT’S ONE OF THOSE ONES, THERE’S BEEN SO MANY DIFFERENT RUMORS AND ASSUMPTIONS AS TO WHAT THE DISMISSAL WAS. I THINK EVEN TO THIS DAY, THE REAL FACTOR TO WHAT’S BEHIND IT HAS NOT COME OUT. WHETHER IT EVER DOES, I MEAN, I DON’T KNOW, NONE OF US MIGHT BE ON THE PLANET WHEN IT DOES SURFACE. [LAUGHS] THEY KEPT VERY MUCH TO THE LINE, WHICH THEY’D ALWAYS SAID, WHICH WAS THAT THEY FOUND A BETTER DRUMMER. BUT TO ME, THAT’S NEVER HELD UP WATER BECAUSE I WAS ALWAYS REPUTED TO BE ONE OF THE BEST DRUMMERS IN LIVERPOOL.

  Sitting with him, as I have on panels at the Fest for Beatles Fans, has been fascinating. He is shy and soft-spoken as he talks about the Casbah, his mother’s coffeehouse in the cellar of their home in suburban West Derby near Liverpool.

  “It was,” Pete tells me, “the real beginning. It was where we rehearsed, entertained. . . . It was a very special place. Coffeehouse during the week, entertainment on the weekend; it never stopped moving with people, you know. . . . We had snacks, hot dogs, soda, and coffee, and a lot . . . a lot of smiling people. My mother, I called her Mo [for Mona], was in heaven. So was I. . . . It was a place for me to pound the drums.”

  The Casbah, a triumph in the life of Best, opened its doors on August 29, 1959, to a crowd of three hundred people, mostly friends of the Best family and some school buddies of the ever-changing Quarrymen. The cozy nightclub was really the first venue and rehearsal hall for the future Beatles, but it became known for who was in the audience as well as who was on stage. John, George, Paul, and local guitar sensation Ken Brown were on stage that first night, playing as the Quarrymen. Brown would inspire another future Beatle, Pete Best, to form his own group, the Blackjacks. Pete, of course, ever the trouper in helping his mother open the club, was also in the audience, along with Alan Caldwell and his band, the Hurricanes.

  As Pete views it, it was an irony that Caldwell, aka Rory Storm, would entertain on Mona Best’s stage in the beginning.

  “True, Ringo was there for many performances with Rory. Who would know that I would become a drummer in a short while, and that someday he would replace me in the Beatles? It is amazing that Rory would be there with Ringo.”

  Caldwell had just renamed his band Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, and as of March 1959 they were backed by the quiet, sometimes solemn (in those days) drummer, Richie Starkey—Ringo Starr. Caldwell watched curiously; he was a good student from the beginning of his career. He watched the young Beatles and admired their spunk. He sat a few feet away from a young man named Neil Aspinall, who rented a room in the Best home. Fate would have it that Mona Best’s lodger and eventual lover would spend all of an adult lifetime serving the Beatles first as a driver, then as a personal assistant, road manager, and chief executive of Apple Corps.

  Once again, as it had been almost two years earlier the night John and Paul first met, “Long Tall Sally,” Paul’s eternal rock ’n’ roll anthem, was a big hit. It was greeted with thunderous applause on opening night at the Casbah.

  The boys were thrilled with the venue. It was truly their home, this Victorian house that Mona Best put together. They were so involved with its beginnings, they even helped paint the place, with their neighborhood buddy Tony Bramwell joining the paint brigade.

  “We had so much fun helping to fix up the place,” Bramwell recalls. “The house looked like something out of a gothic novel, a big stone wall on the outside, nine bedrooms. It was big for all of us anyway, and Mo was a kick. Everyone loved Mona. She was a real personality, very energetic.”

  Even though the boys had some conflict with Mona down the line, Bramwell is very quick to point out that she had all the makings of a professional organizer: “There wasn’t much left to task. With Neil [Aspinall] by her side, it might have been the most organized voluntary cleanup ever. I loved it. She took part of a house and turned it into the Casbah.”

  It was also the place that the Beatles retreated to after their first significant and embarrassing trip to Hamburg.

  Mona, or Mo, as she wanted to be called, was a hardworking incubator of young musicians. Everyone was invited to play at the Casbah, whether they had the goods or not.

  Pete, in a film interview with producers John Rose and Tony Guma, said, “She was so helpful in getting any group in. If they were not good enough, then they were told to improve and come back.”

  That helping-hand attitude was music to the ears of the youthful musical aspirants of Liverpool.

  The Quarrymen actually painted the place out of respect for Mona. That was twelve months before Paul reached out to Pete to ask him to join the band and go to Hamburg.

  In some ways, Mona, with her direct yet welcoming personality, was Dick Clark without the TV program, an innovator who wanted all the bands to have a chance.

  Although her relationship with the boys would come to an end, the respect for her cunning and instincts did not. When Brian Epstein became the Beatles’ manager, he reached out to Mona for input. Pete remembers what she told Epstein: “My mother said, ‘You have an unpolished diamond. . . . Polish it up right.’”

  In the beginning, Epstein was a bit timid, but he understood what she was saying, and in due time he put the shine on the group. Like many observers in Liverpool, Epstein understood the role that Mona and her Casbah played, even if he rarely wrote or talked about it. It’s interesting how time and memory revision has for the most part diminished Mona’s and Pete’s roles.

  In a 2004 conversation at the New Jersey Fest for Beatles Fans, and before he sat down to meet admiring autograph seekers, Pete asserted, “The Casbah was the true home of the Beatles, the first place that embraced this group warmly, even before I was a real member. It never got as much attention as the Cavern, but there is no doubt, absolutely, that the rhythm and flow of the band was developed there. And I should add, Larry, that my mother really cared about all the boys.”

  That she did, although there were some conflicts along the way. Best is correct when he explains that the Casbah was a major early venue for John Lennon’s Quarrymen/Silver Beatles/Beatles, a band still without a permanent drummer. The Quarry boys liked Mona Best and her son, and enjoyed the comfort of the Casbah. From the summer of 1959 to the winter of 1961, the Casbah remained their home venue. And it was there, with close proximity to the Best family, that Paul McCartney’s mind started racing, as it always did. Paul, the ultimate realist even as a teenager, according to Bramwell and others, was obsessed with the details of performance. He especially enjoyed the Casbah but was well aware that there was an important piece missing from the ensemble.

  In August 1960, nervously facing their first visit to Hamburg, the newly renamed Beatles needed a backbeat. The Beatles had split with Ken Brown, a talented guitarist, in what Pete describes as a huff over money—“huff” in Liverpool means a serious argument. Pete was close to Brown, so it was a little awkward when Paul McCartney called him and made the invitation. He joined the band, along with the small entourage, on the ferry ride across the sea to Hamburg. As the first non-temporary drummer took his place with the vagabond touring group, mother Mona was already plotting concerts and special appearances for their return, with the promoter Brian Kelly. She was also trying to book them in the Cavern, but she came away frustrated. The owner of the Cavern had a strict jazz-only policy at the time. She called incessantly, but the policy remained intact, and that was that
.

  But in the B.E. era (before Epstein), their association with Mona helped kick-start the boys into high gear during a period of almost two years that would bring Pete instant fame, a fast demise, and the gift of a brother, Vincent “Roag” Best, who was conceived by Mona in her relationship with Aspinall, a man half her age, a story that is an unusual side event for the Best family. But while Roag would become a blessing to the Best family, the story of Pete and the boys themselves had an unhappy ending. Mona and Pete were truly, before Brian, the closest thing to real managers the boys had had. In later years, Mona told the Beatles’ first biographer, Hunter Davies, “He’d [Pete] been their manager before Brian arrived, did the bookings, collected the money . . . looked upon them as friends. I had helped them so much, got them bookings, lending them money. I fed them when they were hungry. I was far more interested in them than their own parents.”

  The last statement in that interview is furiously contested by all those who remember the families’ support for the boys, but in reality, Mona had a stronger understanding of the boys’ craft—their music—than the mostly loving parents.

  And then of course, there was her son.

  The truth is that Pete Best was, and remains, an incredible drummer. There were 274 performances by the Beatles at the Cavern from 1961 through 1963. Sir Ron Watson, now of Southport, worked nearby and saw sixty-one of them.

  “In the beginning,” he says, “before their creative songwriting began, the Beatles were able to take American songs and put their own stamp on them. Pete Best was an integral part of that. I would munch on a hot dog or cheese roll, sip a Coke, and tried to ignore the thick cloud of cigarette smoke as I watched them, mostly at lunchtime, some of this in the pre-Richie [Ringo] days.”

  Watson, who worked at the nearby landmark Liver Building, was obsessed with the hard-rock sound, and the drummer’s beat.

  “Dynamic is an understatement,” he recalls. “The place was always packed, boys and girls together. I will tell you, Larry, that the truth of the matter is . . . Pete was an anchor, although a shy one. They played two long sets each time, and the drumming energized them. Quite often the boys would mix with the crowd; Paul, of course, was the most talkative. Pete was friendly but unassuming. He appeared, I think, a little uncomfortable with the fact that he was the girls’ favorite.”

  “The girls’ favorite.” That’s an understatement.

  Joe Ankrah, leader of the Chants—an all-black group that broke through, thanks to the Beatles—observed Pete from a distance, and what he saw was a most dramatic personality. “He was certainly different, you know, a bit of a throwback to the movie-star figures of the fifties, and the girls seemed to love his good looks, because much like the James Dean types that were so popular in the fifties, Pete’s quiet nature seemed to telegraph that he was a reluctant idol.”

  Best had movie-star good looks, mixed with an unusual drumming style. From their very first appearance at the Cavern on February 9, 1961, a show arranged by Pete’s mother, the Beatles, with John, Paul, George, Pete, and Stu, owned the Cavern. The real owner, Ray McFall, almost stopped their debut. McFall continued his strict ban on rock ’n’ roll. It was, after all, a jazz club. The owner also banned the wearing of jeans. McFall eventually relented, and his nightclub, an underground venue nineteen steps down from the surface of Mathew Street, became legend.

  Pete was a big piece of it. His beat was unique. He called it the “atom beat,” what Bill Harry describes as a “driving thrust” of percussion. Pete’s style was copied by many of the bands of Merseyside.

  For frequent visitor Watson, Pete was getting better and better, along with his bandmates. In fact, Watson was there the day Brian Epstein came for lunch. “He looked out of place, a man with a formal business suit sitting there surrounded by people ten years his junior. He was looking at the band, but also looking at the people. Pete was especially ‘on’ that day, and the band, minus Stu, was on fire.”

  History has not always been kind to Pete, who until recent years has been reticent to discuss the real story, allowing his brother Roag to call the shots. Roag, as a gatekeeper for Pete, has modeled himself after his father, Neil Aspinall. Aspinall gave new meaning to the word “gatekeeper,” and Roag, in his quite loving protection of Pete, has been a magnificent guardian of Pete’s professional life, and of his story. Pete’s story, though, is much more worthy than he might believe. And with great flair, half-brother Roag, along with Pete and his brother Rory Best, resurrected the story of the Best family’s influence on the Beatles with the 2003 book The Beatles: The True Beginnings. After all, the Quarrymen, Silver Beatles, and Beatles played at least ninety times in Mona’s refurbished basement.

  The surviving Beatles have little, if anything, to say about Pete, but back in the day there was no question of Pete’s popularity.

  He was the first Beatle mentioned by name in the Mersey Beat newspaper. Fans like Freda Kelly (the original Beatles Fan Club organizer), Sir Ron Watson, and Lennon house curator Colin Hall witnessed firsthand the hysteria surrounding Pete. Hall was especially impressed by Pete’s drumming.

  “He was very good and worked well with the band. George and Paul brought him in, but eventually it was John who respected him the most,” Hall says.

  Sir Ron sees it a different way. “Pete spent many more hours playing with the band in those long Cavern sets. Ringo came in at the time when they were beginning those awful thirty-minute shows. That’s when I stopped going to see them.”

  Most of the fans were impressed by Pete’s drumming style.

  Billy Kinsley—who was close to Pete even as his own band, the Merseybeats, was making headway—was more than impressed: “I saw him at the Cavern and elsewhere. He was a great drummer, dynamic in his style, and he took his work seriously. Watching him at places like the Tower Ballroom and Litherland early in 1961, there was no sense that there was any problem with him and the other guys. Quite the contrary.”

  During this time, Mona Best was playing a role, and it was a job contrary to the social mores of the time.

  Bill Harry remembers, “She was a strong woman in a time when women were swept under the rug in Liverpool. It’s always been amazing to me that John didn’t respond to her in a positive way, considering that the Stanley sisters were so opposite the norm. It’s very telling that John treated Cynthia abominably—he swept her under the doormat young in their marriage—but later revered Yoko, who like the five Stanley sisters was strong and in some ways defiant and unmoving on her key ideals. In the case of Mona, John appreciated her, as much as he personally enjoyed being around Pete, but he was not afraid of her, as he could be of Mimi.”

  As the group started taking off, so did the legend of the Casbah, home to other groups as well, including Gerry and the Pacemakers and the Searchers. Mona’s cozy Casbah was significant to the boys. She was proud of all of them, but Pete was a budding superstar. No one, no journalist or historian, can ever challenge that. Unfortunately, his celebrity, coupled with his mom’s strong hand, may have begun to hurt him. The Pete legend, fueled by the girls who adored him and the admiring boys, was in real life a “movement.” Movements have a flow that can succeed one moment and fade in another.

  “Pete was loved,” Freda Kelly says, “but mostly by the fans, and not enamored of inside the group. He was and is a lovely young man, and a wonderful adult man, husband, father, grandfather. In the beginning, though, things got a bit rough.”

  Kelly is too nice to say what “rough” was. No doubt part of “rough” was raw jealousy, matched with a ton of resentment toward the mother and the son.

  Paul McCartney was and is a charmer, but in the beginning, the animal attraction, the magnetism surrounding the early boys, was almost all Pete. Mersey Beat described him as “Mean, Moody and Magnificent.” He wasn’t mean. He could be moody. But he definitely was magnificent to his fans.

  Too magnificent, at least on March 7, 1962, at the “live” concert in the Manchester Playhouse for the radi
o show Teenager’s Turn. Years later, Roag Best would say that that performance, and what happened around it, was a lightning rod in the turn against Pete, especially for George, who didn’t especially like Pete, and most especially for Paul and his usually mild-mannered father.

  The appearance was marked by trouble from the start. Bill Harry remembers fans cutting out Pete’s picture from concert posters, and others running to the stage trying to push John and Paul’s legs aside to get a look at Pete. This onstage antic embarrassed the other members of the band. But what happened after the concert may have been even worse. The group had arrived in Manchester with members of their family aboard a motor coach. It was a pleasurable trip arranged by Brian Epstein to celebrate the rising profile, and the plan was for them to leave in the same coach, triumphant. But it didn’t end on a pleasant note.

  Bill Harry recalls the show: “When writing about the show in Mersey Beat, I commented, ‘John, Paul, and George made their entrance on stage to cheers and applause, but when Pete walked on—the fans went wild! The girls screamed. In Manchester his popularity was assured by his looks alone.’ After the show we all boarded the coach, but Pete was missing. We waited, but there was no sign of him; the coach went round the block.”

  What happened in those few minutes was frightening.

  Because of security concerns, members of the playhouse staff tried to sneak Pete out of the theater in a large bin designed to carry laundry. The motor coach’s driver had to circle around the area while everyone waited for Pete. As the girls surrounded the exits, the staff quickly carried out the bin with Pete inside. In the desperation of the crowd, one fan tried to get a piece of Pete’s shirt, and in the process, penetrated his skin with a pair of scissors. He was cut and bleeding when he finally trudged into the coach. The mood was icy. Paul’s affable dad, Jim, went right up to Pete and said, “Are you happy with yourself?” According to Roag’s account of the night, passed on to him as an adult, Pete was bleeding and terrified after the wild exit. And he was shocked and despondent about what happened next. There was silence on the trip back—a lack of concern for Pete, and what appeared to be a simmering jealousy.