The Beatles Completely Ignored a Close Associate After His Unceremonious Firing
In 1969, Allen Klein began to manage The Beatles. Soon after his appointment to the position, Klein began to make major changes in the band’s business affairs. When he took control of Apple Corps, he fired a lengthy list of people, many of whom had been with the band for years. One of them, Alistair Taylor, said the way The Beatles treated him in the aftermath stung just as much as getting fired.
The Beatles ignored Alistair Taylor after Allen Klein fired him
When Klein took control of Apple Corps, he shook up the company by firing a long list of people. Taylor, who had been the personal assistant to former Beatles manager Brian Epstein, was on the list.
“There were about fifteen of us altogether, if I remember rightly,” Taylor said in the book All You Need Is Love: The Beatles in Their Own Words by Steven Gaines and Peter Brown. “Which I mean, I found astonishing.”
He had dedicated years to the band, so the loss of his job stung. What hurt more, though, was the fact that The Beatles didn’t seem to care.
“But I think what bothered me, and still does now … I left,” he said, adding, “I went home and I rang all the boys in turn. I just wanted to make sure that they knew about it. But none of them would speak to me, and I know two of them, for sure, were there. They wouldn’t come to the phone.”
He said that he went two years without hearing from them before he decided to reach out to Paul McCartney. His letters went unanswered.
Taylor said it saddened him that they would behave that way
Taylor said that the reason this rankled so badly was because he saw The Beatles as friends. Their complete lack of communication after his firing seemed to prove otherwise.
“Not a breath from them from that day to this, which is eleven years ago, which I think disappoints me, as human beings,” he said. “I thought we were buddies. Obviously not.”
He said it saddened him greatly that they could behave this way, and it led him to make a “cold-blooded” decision.
“You know, and I’m just sad for them, that they could treat someone like myself, when I could truthfully say that I never conned them for anything, except at the very end, which was quite cold-blooded,” he said. “Revenge. I had a loan out from the company, and I said, ‘Stuff it, they can whistle for it.’”
The Beatles treated their drummer, Pete Best, similarly after they fired him
Years before Taylor lost his job, The Beatles fired their drummer, Pete Best. They didn’t speak to him about it, though. Instead, they passed the burden of letting him go onto Epstein and proceeded with their lives as though Best had never existed.
“I’m not saying I’d change the outcome, but at least give me the decency of being there and [letting me] confront them,” Best told the Telegraph in 2018
They even played some of the same shows as Best after they let him go. They wouldn’t speak to him and even asked for people to protect them when they passed him.
“I knew Pete wouldn’t do anything, he’s a gentle guy,” promotor Sam Leach said in the book Paul McCartney: A Life by Peter Ames Carlin. “And when they did pass in the hallway, Pete just put his head down. And I just felt rotten.”
Though Best said he doesn’t hold onto negative feelings toward his former bandmates, he felt deeply hurt for years.
