August 16, 1962, Brian Epstein’s Office, Liverpool
Pete Best went into Brian Epstein’s office expecting the usual conversation about gigs and venues, for within the band he was the one you spoke to about such matters. Ten minutes later Best was no longer a Beatle. Epstein had told the drummer bluntly, “The lads don’t want you in the group anymore.” Best felt the world give way beneath him. Surely Epstein had it wrong? He had put everything he had into the band and they were ejecting him just as success beckoned?
But Epstein was not fooling around. He informed a shocked Best that the band had already lined up Ringo Starr as his replacement. There was no going back.
This incident has inspired as much attention as any other in Beatle history. What were the real reasons behind Best’s dismissal? Many people suspected that Best’s position as the most desirable Beatle had tipped the scales. They assumed that Lennon and McCartney were insanely jealous of the attention the fans gave the reticent drummer. Others put the blame George Martin’s way.
After the June 6 session at Abbey Road, Martin had told Epstein that Best, “was not a very good drummer and we need one to bind this group together.” Martin later said that he had been the unwitting catalyst in Best’s removal, “I didn’t realize that The Beatles were thinking of getting rid of Pete anyway.”
Why was the band heading toward this decision? Paul McCartney is a good place to start. His drive to better the band often led him to challenge other band members on a musical level. There are several reports of Paul at band rehearsals sitting at the drum kit instructing Pete how to play certain songs. Publicly, there had been no complaints about Best’s drumming in the two years he had been with the band. And given The Beatles’ set list of straight-to-the-beat rock’n’roll songs, the demands put on Best were pretty straightforward.
McCartney addressed the issue in Barry Miles’ biography Many Years From Now (1997). He pointed to the drumming on the Ray Charles record “What’d I Say.” “We used to love it. One of the big clinching factors about Ringo as the drummer in the band was that he could really play that so well.”
It is also worth noting that McCartney was about to or had just written “When I’m Sixty-Four,” a highly sophisticated song for someone so young. It is possible that Paul already knew the music he was creating would prove too difficult for Pete.
Best’s drumming skills, his looks and his attitude provoked different responses at all times. But one fact remains—Best never quite fitted in with the gang. A shy man, he rarely hung out with the band, shared their jokes or their ethos. Early interviewers of the band said that Best often sat apart from the others and you were lucky to get a grunt out of him. What Best did not realize was that if you show indifference to the gang, eventually the gang will turn on you. “He was a harmless guy but not quick,” Lennon later said. “All of us had quick minds but he never picked up on that.”
The best drummer in Liverpool—the only man who soloed at that time—was Johnny Hutchinson from the band The Big Three. They too were under Epstein’s management but never really followed his instructions. Perhaps if they had done then national success would have been theirs. Prior to Best’s sacking, Epstein had approached “Hutch,” as he was known, about the possibility of joining the band. Hutch turned him down. As far as he was concerned his band was far superior to The Beatles, plus he and Lennon would never have gotten along.
The man The Beatles chose was perfect for the job. A drummer of great repute and a man given to slips of the tongue on a regular basis, Ringo Starr was approached by the band two days before Best’s sacking. He was well known to them, having played with them out in Hamburg and at The Cavern. George Harrison in particular had taken to a liking to Ringo and hustled John and Paul for his inclusion.
What then of the new boy the band had chosen, the boy born Richard Starkey on July 7, 1940? Out of all four Beatles, Ringo hailed from the poorest background. He was raised in the area of Dingle, the product of a one-parent family. His father had divorced his mother when he was three. Like most of the other Beatles his childhood was scarred by a missing parent.
At three years of age, Ringo moved to Admiral Grove and attended St. Silas School. Afterward it was on to Dingle Vale Secondary Modern. “Sometimes those days come back to me with great clearness,” he would tell Billy Shepherd (aka Peter Jones) for the first authorized Beatles book, The True Story of The Beatles (1964). “I can remember being given dinner money by my mum. I’d buy a few pennyworth of chips and a hunk of bread and then save the rest for the fairground or the pictures.”
At age seven, he developed an inflamed peritoneum, and spent a month in the hospital. This set the tenor of much of his childhood: illness would dog him from now until teenage years. At 13 Ringo went to London where he contracted pleurisy. He had another lengthy soul-sapping stay in the hospital and when he emerged, his school days were over.
Ringo began an apprenticeship in an engineering firm. He also fell for the skiffle craze. When he was 18 and a half, his mother and stepfather gave him a present—a drum kit. “Why did they think I’d like drumming?” he once pondered. “Because I suppose I’d always been a noisy lad.”
He was also an amusing lad, unintentionally so, for Ringo was someone who spoke before his brain had clicked in. He often called his stepfather his “stepladder” and would later conjure up phrases such as “eight days a week,” which would enter Beatle folklore. It was this endearing characteristic that Lennon, with his fondness for wordplay, loved.
Ringo entered the music world by forming a band called The Eddie Clayton Skiffle Group. He then sat in with other bands including Rory Storm And The Hurricanes, and The Texans. Rory Storm was in fact Alan Caldwell, and his sister was dating one George Harrison. In 1959 Ringo joined the band on a regular basis and spent three years playing with them. During that time he acquired his nickname and a reputation as a fine drummer.
In October 1960 the band landed a gig in Hamburg and it was here that Ringo met the men that would change his life. When Pete frequently failed to show up for gigs, the band asked Ringo to sit in instead, and every time he did the other band members felt it all coming together.
George would later remark, “Although Pete had not been with us all that long … when you’re young it’s not a nice thing to be kicked out of a band and there’s no nice way of doing it.” In an interview conducted months after the band’s break-up, Lennon would remark that, “You have to be a bastard to make it. That’s a fact. And The Beatles are the biggest bastards on Earth.”