He missed Best of times

Music Row
By Brian Rademaekers

Pete Best has to be one of the most luckless lads to have ever walked the Earth.
At least, that is, at first glance.
For all those not obsessively versed in Beatlemania, Best was the original drummer for the Beatles, but quickly became an ex-Beatle — before there ever was such a thing as Beatlemania.
Best, who will play at the M Room on Monday, got dumped in 1962 . . . right before the Beatles launched into the spotlight, eventually becoming the most popular pop band of all time.
Within a few months of swapping Best for Ringo Starr, the Beatles would go on to become the center of an unprecedented and outright insane teenybopper rock craze. We all know the story from there. The black-and-white era of mop-tops and the stadiums full of fainting, screaming teenage girls.
The hair gets longer, the music weirder, and the Fab Four help to usher in the psychedelic 1960s with classics like their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
By 1970, fame beyond imagination and Yoko Ono had tag-teamed the band, leading to a permanent and ugly dissolution.
John Lennon, George Harrison and Paul McCartney headed off on solo careers of varying success.
And Ringo. The guy Pete Best could have been had life deal him a better hand. Well, he played that quirky train conductor in the hit 1980s public television show Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends.
And where was Best all this time?
That’s not exactly an uplifting story in itself.
Best was the Beatles’ drummer from 1960 to ’62, a period marked by a series of live shows in Hamburg, Germany.
Accounts of their early days portray Best as an oddball who often got left out by the Lennon-McCartney-Harrison partnership. He didn’t share their hairstyle, dress, jokes or early drug use.
The story has it, however, that Best didn’t get axed until the Beatles returned to England in ’62 to record with producer George Martin, who said he didn’t much care for the drumming on the first tracks.
The band had manager Brian Epstein dismiss Best and bring Starr on board. These days, just about the only place you can find Best’s drumming for the Beatles is a handful of tracks on the 1995 release Anthology.
Another theory behind Best’s infamous dismissal, and one that holds a bit of water, was that the three boys didn’t like that Best (who had a sort of James Dean look) got attention from the ladies. So they brought on Ringo, and never had that kind of trouble from their drummer again.
The rejected drummer put out some recordings on the Decca label under Lee Curtis and the All Stars, a band that acted as Beatles rivals for a short time before dropping into obscurity.
Still, he kept at it, and even put out an album called Best of the Beatles, a move that ticked off a lot of people who mistakenly thought they were buying a Beatles album.
After watching his young music career dissipate, and even flirting with suicide, Best accepted the realities of a much more humble life.
He married a girl named Kathy, worked a government job for two decades, and has four children with his wife of 40 years.
He also started touring again in 1988. Best has played all sorts of festivals and tribute concerts honoring the band that left him the dust, in a way proving that he could have stuck with them all along.
Pete Best never reached anything quite like those old Beatlemania days. Then again, who has?
But his story does hold a gritty, never-give-up workingman quality, where the moral is the guy who never made it big might have ended up the most fulfilled in life.
Shamelessly spinning out his own take on Beatles songs and other hits from the late 1950s and early ’60s — the stuff they played in Hamburg — it’s clear that Best has long gotten bitterness over the way things could have been.
His band, the Pete Best Band, also looks to have good times rocking out at their many live gigs. Not a bad life for a 66-year-old guy.
Then there is the sense that Best was one of the few people who really knew the Beatles in the days when they first fell in love with rock ’n’ roll. Before the managers, the money, the fame and the world got a hold on them.
As Lennon himself once said, "We were at our best when we were playing in the dance halls of Liverpool and Hamburg. The world never saw that."
Philly music fans, however, will get to see a little slice of that in the confines of the M Room on Girard Avenue when Best takes the stage and hammers out some of the old tunes, happily taking his place as the Beatle who never was. ••

Check it out . . .
Who: Pete Best
What: The Beatles drummer who was.
Where: M Room, 15 W. Girard Ave.
When: Monday, May 12, at 8 p.m. Tickets are $12.