The Beatles hired Best to be their drummer in 1960 while they planned to take up a residency in Hamburg, Germany. McCartney first saw him play in another band at Liverpool’s legendary Casbah Club and deemed him good enough to join the group.
Two years later, on August 16, 1962, The Beatles kicked Best out of the band. However, they asked their manager, Brian Epstein, to break the hard news, as they didn’t want to do it themselves.
Lennon opened up about his strained relationship with Best years later. He said: “By then, we were also pretty sick of Pete Best because he was a lousy drummer, you know? He never got better and he always built this myth over the years that he was great and Paul was jealous of him because he was pretty. and all that shit.”
Liverpool legends say that after Best was kicked out of The Beatles in favor of Ringo Starr, fans of the former would come to his concerts chanting, “Ringo never, Pete forever!”
Lennon continued: “The only reason [Best] He joined the group in the first place because the only way we could get to Hamburg was if he had a drummer.”
Recounting how he met Best, he continued, “We knew this guy. He lived at his mom’s house who had a club and he had a drum set, so we dragged him out, auditioned him and he got to keep one.” He beat going long enough, so we took him to Germany.”
Lennon was even more brutal when he added: “We were always going to call it quits when we could find a decent drummer. When we got back from Germany we had trained him to hold a stick up and down. He couldn’t do much else.” Of course, after leaving Best, they auditioned and hired Starr to be their new beat keeper. Before long, they were known as the Fab Four.
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However, Lennon did say some kind words about Best later on. He noted, “It looked good and the girls liked it, so it was good.”
The Imagine singer also showed a lot of remorse that Epstein kicked Best out of the band, rather than themselves. He lamented: “We were cowards when we fired him. We made Brian do it.”
Harrison agreed: “We weren’t very good at telling Pete he had to go. Historically, it may have looked like we did something unpleasant to Pete and it may have been that we could have handled it better.”
McCartney also gave his take on Best. He mused, “I’m sorry for him, for what he might have been up to,” while referring to The Beatles’ fame, which exploded just after Best was cut from the group.
However, McCartney spoke candidly about the differences between Best and the rest of the band. He reflected on how Best was “never” similar to the rest of the tight-knit team.
He said: “Pete had never been like the rest of us. We were the crazy trio and Pete was maybe a little more… down to earth. He was a little different from us, he wasn’t as artsy as we were. And we just didn’t spend much time together”.
Meanwhile, Starr only answered questions about Best a couple of times throughout his career. But when he talked about the drummer, he wasn’t nice.
Starr said, “Pete Best? Not an offense, but I never felt like he was a great drummer.” (Via Cultura Sónar) In another interview they asked him if he felt sorry for replacing Best. He replied, “No. Why should I? I was a better player than him. That’s how I got the job!”
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