Pete Best Said People Were ‘Awful’ to Him When The Beatles Fired Him
Before Ringo Starr, Pete Best was the drummer for The Beatles. He worked with the band on their early rise to success, playing in cramped Liverpool clubs and their residency in Hamburg. In 1962, though, Best’s bandmates decided to change their lineup. They fired him and brought in Starr. Best said that in the years after he left the band, people were very rude to him.
Pete Best was the original drummer for The Beatles
Best, like the rest of The Beatles, grew up in Liverpool. His mother ran the Casbah Club, where The Beatles frequently played. According to John Lennon, they specifically hired Best so that they could play their residency in Hamburg.
“We knew of this guy,” he said, per Express. “He was living in his mother’s house that had a club in it, and he had a drum kit so we dragged him, auditioned him, and he could keep one beat going for long enough so we took him to Germany.”
The band fired Best in 1962, but none of them wanted to speak to him about it. Instead, they had manager Brian Epstein break the news. They later admitted that the way they fired him was cowardly.
“We weren’t very good at telling Pete he had to go,” George Harrison said. “Historically, it may look like we did something nasty to Pete and it may have been that we could have handled it better.”
Pete Best said people didn’t treat him well after The Beatles fired him
Shortly after The Beatles fired Best, they rose to atmospheric success. Best did not attempt to cash in on this by sharing stories of his time with the band. Instead, he wanted to distance himself from them.
“What good would that have done, apart from the money? It would just have seemed like sour grapes,” he told Hunter Davies in The Beatles: The Authorized Biography. “I just wanted to try and get a life of my own, but it took a long time.”
He said that people treated him terribly after the band fired him. They made him feel as though he hadn’t contributed anything positive to The Beatles.
“What I dreaded most was people’s cruelty,” he said. “When I met people, I knew what they were going to say or think. I was the bloke that was no good. It was the sort of psychological knowledge which got me down. People were rude and said awful things to me.”
The timing of his firing hurt his chances at a music career
Best said he had always been confident that The Beatles would be successful, which made his firing particularly frustrating.
“That was what was really disappointing, knowing what I was going to miss,” he said. “I did regret everything at first.”
He tried to play in different bands for the next three years, but he couldn’t escape the title of “ex-Beatle.” By 1965, he left the music world altogether.
It’s impossible to say whether or not Best would have had a successful music career had The Beatles fired him at a different time. Their timing did nothing to help him, though. Just a few months after they fired him, The Beatles had their first No. 1 hit. His firing was recent enough that he would be inextricably linked to the band for the rest of his life. Also, their rapid rise to success after letting him go might have seemed like Best had been, in some way, blocking them from success.
