Was Pete’s sacking really such a mystery?
Wrence responds to Tim Sommer’s interesting speculation
It’s the 5th of March 1962.
Right around this time, Ringo was kind of a free agent. And George, John and Paul first started telling Brian they needed to sack Pete.
On this very day, though, we mark another anniversary. This very day our friend Tim was born. Jump ahead six decades. It just so happens that a few months ago (in October 2021) Tim wrote a mighty, unique and provocative article on the sacking of Pete Best.
Who’s Tim, you ask?
"Timothy Andrew Sommer is an American music journalist, musician, record producer and former Atlantic Records A&R representative. Sommer was the bass player for the slowcore/dreampop band Hugo Largo. Born: March 5, 1962 (age 60 years), New York, United States." (Wikipedia)
Reading Tim's articles is always time well spent. Great value added. He habitually offers up fresh insights. He's not the type who'll simply build on (or make adjustments to) established consensus. What he offers isn't unique for its own sake, of course. He disrupts but always with clarity, wisdom and common sense. His writing points us to truths that've been previously overlooked. Provocative, insightful, while always keeping our attention on what matters. (I haven't asked him about his writing much but I reckon he'd say that there'd be no point in writing about things that don't matter.) Like most long-form journalists, Tim walks the reader through the logic of, and evidence for, the deeper truth that he's offering. He's a kind of thoughtful disrupter. It’s not like he’s out to overturn common wisdom just to cause disruption for its own sake. The style can be bold and exciting enough to keep a reader’s attention, but guides the reader up each step after convincing step. Tim builds cases that matter and leaves readers with fresh, relevant, informative insights.
I chose the Pete Best example of Tim's work because it's topical for our group. It fits our timeline. (Also because the drummer matters, especially 60 years ago now). What's strange about this choice, though, is that this is one of the rare Tim articles that’s failed to persuade me. We still find here some of his typically clear insights but oddly mixed with some quesswork that just doesn't sound right if you're following the sixty-years-ago story as it unfolds. I know it's weird to feature a failed piece, as I see it, to mark the author's birthday, especially considering that he’s a friend. But, to repeat: it’s simply a coincidence that the Pete topic fits our timeline right as Tim is turning 60.
A few members of the “Nothing is Real” Facebook group have already commented on this article. Harold Lepidus shared it in the group last October. The post garnered a number of informed comments. For example, I’ll quote Ingrid Schorr and Steve Bradley, below.
But first, here’s a sample of Tim Sommer at his very best. He deftly deconstructs “the oft-told story that George Martin rejected Pete Best and/or encouraged The Beatles to engage a better drummer.”
I haven't fact-checked it all but he's explaining so completely confidently that I'm sure this must be right. So, let’s start with this. He proclaims:
“I am going to concretely disprove that myth and toss it out of the window for all eternity in six syllables: Bobby Graham and Clem Cattini... This idea may seem supremely foreign to any band that came of age in the 1970s, ‘80s, ‘90s and beyond: When a self-contained pop/rock combo arrived at a major London recording studio for a session in the early and mid-1960s, there was virtually zero expectation that the drummer they walked in with would be playing on the finished record. This is the reason that Graham and Cattini play on almost every pop, rock, and beat record of the era. (Even a cursory list would double the length of this article; suffice to say that Graham, in particular, is the sound of the British invasion. The snap and oomph he brings to nearly all of the early hits of the Kinks, Them, the Dave Clark 5, the Pretty Things, the Animals, Herman’s Hermits, Et al., helped define the sound of the genre itself.)... It would have been extremely unlikely that an experienced producer like George Martin, working for a gigantic company like Parlophone, would consider using an unproven drummer on a session. Nor would Martin have ever used that as the basis to fire a drummer. What bands did in the studio and what they did on stage were considered entirely different parishes; the studio was Parlophone’s concern, the live performances the domain of the band, their management, their booking agent and the promoter (and there’s zero evidence that any promoter ever said, 'Dump that Pete Best!')."
Solid, right?
And, to be fair, we have to acknowledge that tucked away near the end of his article, Tim offers a disclaimer (however weak) that Ringo might be awesome.
Let’s also start with some Pete appreciation. We started our “60 years ago TODAY” group exactly sixty years after Pete joined the Beatles. They got him on board so that they’d have a drummer on their first Hamburg residency in mid-1960. That’s exactly when this group started (sixty years later). So, young Pete’s sort of been part of our lives for almost two years along with the other Beatles. He’s been with us every day. There’s very little audio evidence from the period. Some, but not a lot. Up until now it’s not been clear whether he propelled their live performances or held them back. We know he had a powerful kick, liked doing snare rolls, and didn’t really connect with the other three so much. We know he’s a good-natured, regular kind of guy, handled bookings with promoters, and brought in Neil. You could say that Mona, Neil and Pete facilitated the Beatles’ Merseyside gigs those first two years. (And, of course, Neil would continue in support roles far beyond the breakup of the group at the end of the 1960s for decades more.)
Well, as you can read in Tim’s speculative piece, the difference in drumming style/skill/feel between Ringo and Pete might not have been the main cause of Pete’s sacking. It’s been considered a mystery. Some say it was that Pete was great in a dancehall but not in a studio, Tim bypasses the question of drumming and turns to psychology. That could be an interesting and informative angle, don’t you think? According to him, all the drumming talk is just a distraction. Instead, we really need to be looking at Mona and Brian having been engaged in some kind of emotional power struggle.
Okay, let’s consider Mona's involvement (and the limitations of her involvement) and also Brian’s perspective on her continued attempts to further the group by intervening in strategic decisions. According to Joe Flannery, Brian had been complaining about her meddling, and this was at the time just before her son’s sacking. Pressure starting to build just around now, sixty years ago.
In fact, historian Steve Bradley saw Tim’s article and actually followed up. “I asked someone in Pete’s family if they thought there was any connection and they said ‘no.’”
Ingrid Schorr commented, “There's a major flaw in this argument and that is the author's description of Neil Aspinall as the Beatles' ‘day to day manager’ and ‘Brian's right hand man.’ He was neither. Neil picked the Beatles up in his car and drove them to gigs. He was paid by the gig and was not part of Brian's management strategy.” The man who actually served the role of Brian’s right-hand man and the Fabs’ day to day manager was Joe Flannery, “the Beatles' booking manager between 1962-3 and a lifelong friend of their manager Brian Epstein." (The Mirror)
Here’s a sample memo from Brian to Joe following up on Pete’s sacking,
Joe had some firsthand insight into Brian's mind at the time and seems to corroborate Tim's portrayal of the situation and the pressure on Brian.
Joe revealed:
“It was prior to the Parlophone auditions of ]une 1962 that [Brian] and I travelled to Hamburg. My memory of this is confirmed by the fact that it was while on the plane (my first ever flight) that Brian informed me that Pete Best's mother Mona was proving to be something of a nuisance. He said that Mona's very presence was jeopardising the whole operation. I also recall this period well because of Brian's paranoia over the prospective record deal. By this time the Beatles were still unsigned and Brian had promised faithfully that he would find them a record agreement at speed. He had thought that, being a provincial record retailer, he would be able to open doors, but he hadn't reckoned with the aforementioned cartel-like machinations of the UK record industry.”
Joe Flannery, Standing in the Wings: The Beatles, Brian Epstein and Me, p.212
Tim emphasizes that "Mona Best had been exerting a powerful influence on the group. More than any Beatle parent (by far), she was involved in the band’s life and supported their dreams in every way she could." And he further speculates:
“I believe that Brian Epstein was so threatened by the potential of an Aspinall/Best alliance that he stage-managed Pete Best’s dismissal from the band. Pete Best was fired on August 16; Vincent 'Roag' Best, the son of Neil Aspinall and Mona Best, would be born exactly fifteen days later.' For these reasons, Brian 'had to have been worried that Neil Aspinall, Mona Best and Pete Best were going to form an alliance that could jeopardize his control over the band at exactly the time when they had the golden ring within their sight."
Hmmmm, okay, well we’ll never know for certain. I understand that half a year ahead of where we are in the timeline now they will have signed with EMI. Did anyone ask Neil and/or Mona about any of this before they passed? Pete never mentions anything like this.
I may not be doing Tim’s idea justice since, in my daily study along with other B60 people it’s still March 1962, and Tim is talking mid-August. Let’s just note how no “golden ring” existed in the spring. The group was getting rejected by labels and remained unknown outside of Merseyside. They were just beginning to make their name in nearby Manchester. Let’s consider where Mona is sixty years ago now, at the start of March.
Spring 1962
By this time in 1962 Mona would definitely have known that she was a couple months pregnant. Of course we can’t imagine her making trips down to London for meetings with A&R men at Decca and EMI. Of course she had already played an indispensable role in launching the group early on. But that was mostly about hosting gigs at the Casbah Club in her large home’s basement. She was smart. She had money. But she didn’t have record industry connections as Brian did. You can’t imagine her networking her way up to the office of EMI publisher Ardmore and Beechwood just spontaneously on a suggestion from HMV’s disc cutter. Brian worked that way. Mona didn’t. She could cold-call industry people she’d never met but there’s no evidence that she ever made any headway with that approach.
Our daily looks back sixty years in our Facebook group seem to show us an early-60s record industry that had the air of a gentlemen’s club. We just don’t see anyone but males in management or in A&R. The latter could be young, but, in the story as we’re following it, not one was female. And in retail, we see even our Brian referring to female staff as “the girls.” When a female NEMS staff person comes up in his autobiography, she seems never to have a name. I could be overstating it, but this, I hear — quoted by my podcast co-host Andy — is how Brian had dictated his autobiography to Derek. And in more than one instance.
In 1962, it wouldn’t have been noticed. Our purpose in immersing ourselves in the timeline isn’t to scold the not-so-woke past but to gain insight and understanding. It’s hard to imagine even a woman as strong, smart and wealthy as Mona making her way through these offices full of gentlemen, either with child in utero during the spring, or in her arms in the late summer.
Summer 1962
I doubt that doors would have opened for Mona the way they did for Brian. Tim’s focus on the risk of a meddlesome Mona requires us to assume somehow that Mona, with a new baby to care for, would have the time and energy to replace Brian even if she otherwise had such aspirations. And this is the main reason why Tim’s speculation fails to convince me.
Are we sure that it’s really such a big mystery? Journalists’ suspicions that the sacking remains a great unsolved mystery seem to be raised eternally and never reach any conclusions. The Beatles have never given the world a credible explanation. There was almost complete silence from them until they started responding obliquely/incompletely to questions about it decades after the group’s breakup. It’s understandable that some onlookers are going to interpret the Fabs’ silence as something darkly suspicious, like a well kept family secret. Tim implies a scandalous kind of silence creating the big mystery. Behind the mystery he finds circumstantial evidence of a dark, guilty secret. But equally plausible is that it was a tactful silence agreed to by John, George, Paul, Ringo, Brian and Neil. I mean, it’d be scandalous only if they were defensively silent. It seems more likely that they were tactfully silent -- not wanting to harm Pete's reputation, not wanting to rile Mona up, not wanting to make things awkward for Neil (who was still working for the Beatles). Isn’t it completely plausible that in their silence the Fabs were protecting the Bests, not themselves?
And the idea of alliances and power struggles assumes a situation such that the guys in the group saw Mona’s “management” as a viable alternative to Brian’s. As if they were interchangeable. But, hang on a minute. We saw that the Beatles took their contract with Brian seriously (even though he knew it wasn’t actually binding). Brian’s having felt annoyed by Mona’s meddling nature didn’t necessarily entail a paranoid fear that she’d replace him. He may have worried that she’d have “jeopardized the operation,” but there’s no evidence (as far as anyone can show) that he felt she was a threat to his own role.
It’s not completely impossible. I don’t know. It’s not easy to counter Tim’s speculation confidently. Indeed, here again, Joe seems to corroborate Tim.
Joe explains,
“Although [Pete] has stated that there were no problems during his stint with the group, one man's view of a working relationship can be entirely from those of another... So from that particular perspective, it was indeed the Beatles who took the decision to disımiss Pete Best from the group, and the reason? Well, Pete's mother, Mona. The response from Mona herself after Pete was dismissed from the group was very revealing. She immediately phoned everybody, not including myself for I was then attempting to handle Pete's next career move, in a mad panic. It was as if she had finally realised that the group was no longer her personal plaything. Not only was she poking her nose into the running of the band, but she had just had Neil Aspinall's baby. Brian was already concerned about keeping Cynthia's pregnancy out of the news (that was the way it had to be done in those days) and he told me that Mona's liaison with Neil was very indiscreet -- the last straw, that was something, coming from a man who could be very indiscreet himself at times. Pete therefore was removed, but not sacked as such, for Brian had a plan.”
Joe Flannery, Standing in the Wings: The Beatles, Brian Epstein and Me, p.187
So, we see this evidence that Mona maybe becomes not her normal self as 1962 progresses. As always, her meddling (or not meddling but care, from her perspective) seemed to arise from a deep deep interest in the group’s path to possible success. Then when her son was replaced by Ringo, her meddling/care went off the rails. (You would have expected her to stop caring about the Fabs without Pete, but she doesn’t stop.) Still, it’s unclear: Does this imply that the Bests were forming a power block and planning an insurrection? Seems doubtful. Tim’s speculation years later about all this apparently is limited to “circumstantial evidence.”
And if Brian felt he had to fight off a coup, why wasn’t Neil fired? Who knows?
So, where are we? My friend Tim hasn’t convinced me with his Brian-vs-Mona power struggle psychodrama. True, we do need writers like Tim to question conventional assumptions surrounding these kinds of murky patches in popular music history. But where is Tim deliberately not looking?
The sacking of Pete is conventionally explained either
the Beatles needed a drummer like Ringo… or…
EMI engineers refusal to work with Pete meant he had to go
Some biographers cite both reasons. In the long quote above, we saw Tim skillfully put the EMI reason aside. But what about the concern that the Fabs voiced in private (and Tony Sheridan voiced openly and loudly) that Pete’s drumming was limiting them?
Of course we know how essentially arrogant it is that in 2022 we’re trying retrospectively to read the minds of a group of people who in 1962 would soon hit the jackpot with both Ringo Starr (a.k.a. 4th Beatle) and George Martin (a.k.a. 5th Beatle) on team Fab when none of them knows this future yet. We future humans have more than half a century later something they didn’t have at this time: the perspective of all that came later.
Anyway, they’re now signed to a label. Sure. That’s still no “golden ring.” Not yet.
If we escape their 1962 and look ahead a few years, then… oh… oh, yes, we can see how it could have made a difference had they not changed drummers. Can you imagine if Pete was still their drummer when they recorded Rubber Soul? Revolver??
But, no. Forget you know that. Let’s stay in 1962. They don’t know all that yet. They’re still aiming at the toppermost but they haven’t by any means reached the toppermost. To compare Pete’s EMI demo of ‘Love Me Do’ with Ringo’s drumming genius on ‘She Said, She Said’ would be unfair. Of course it would.
But how about some reasonable comparisons? I’ve got one. I recently audio edited ‘Besame Mucho’ in a way that makes the drums louder — Pete in the EMI demo in June 1962, Ringo live at the Star-Club half a year later. I thought it was an instructive comparison. I shared it somewhere on Facebook (I forget where). There were suggestions that a comparison that better (almost) eliminates variables other than drummer would probably be some BBC live performances from Manchester in 1962. Indeed, Tim very much likes Pete’s drumming on two of those live radio broadcasts. I wish I had thought of finding a closer match like that, same conditions. But I’ll just stick with ‘Besame Mucho.” I’m a busy person. This is the only comparison video I’ll make. I hope that someone else can compare other recordings. The comparison I made (audio A compared with B) alternates Pete in June and Ringo in December on the song ‘Besame Mucho.’ So we’re already giving Pete the advantage of EMI’s London studio. Ringo was recorded with the Beatles and the whole roomful of attendees at the Star-Club on Kingsize Taylor’s recorder. Handicap goes to Pete in this case. Somebody pointed out that the song’s Latin rhythm was unusual for the Beatles (implying something like… it wasn’t a fair test?). No, it’s a perfect choice to compare versatility. I say the Latin rhythm’s a fine choice as the Beatles didn’t play just one genre, one rhythm, one beat. They were a versatile group and this song choice is an excellent test of drumming with high sensitivity to a song’s dynamics. And, remember, the other Fabs’ complaint was that Pete’s ability to adapt was limited, practically the same old beat on every song. He wasn’t interested in becoming a versatile player. So, this would be the perfect test of Beatleness.
Feel free to hear the comparison here. The file is here in my Dropbox.
Even if it’s not a typical Beatles genre, you can hear Ringo’s version makes the Beatles sound like the Beatles. By December they’d arranged it so that the drums and guitars bang out powerfully in unison in the important parts — the refrain and the bridge. The half-note swinging into two quarter-notes in the chorus -- BAY…SAH-MAY!! Ringo's cymbals and John’s chords hitting in time, banging together, bigly. It may not be a typical Beatles genre, but the big pizzazz cymbals was a Beatles necessity. Pete, by contrast, is off in his own world, doing snare drum rolls for no reason, no relation to anything happening in the song, just, Hey, snare roll! Otherwise, just one beat all through the song. In his own world. Dum dee dum dee dum dee dum.
Tim upholds Pete’s drumming as adequate/competent:
“By mid 1962, Pete Best had played hundreds of gigs with the Beatles. Pete Best had provided the backbeat for their rise to domination over Liverpool’s ballrooms and Hamburg’s nightclubs, and he was plenty good enough to do that. Not one contemporary account says anything about Best being a crappy drummer. If Best had been as shitty as myth has made him out to be, he would have been out of the Beatles halfway through their first Hamburg run... There is also some convincing aural evidence testifying to Pete’s competency."
Tim’s favored audio evidence of Pete’s drumming power are the BBC live performances in 1962. But ‘Please Mister Postman’ is the perfect example of Pete just beating away on his own regardless of what was going on in the song. Pete didn’t hear that drama of John’s desperate pleas at the end. He just continues that one beat all through the song, not noticing the emotional outbursts. Dum dee dum whatever dee dum dee dum, random snare roll, blah blah.
By contrast, Ringo understood how to drop out with the others when John cries “Check it and see one more time for me!” and “Deliver the letter! The sooner the better!” putting John’s voice right up front with supporting claps from the others. Listen how Ringo arranged his parts to power the song and how he punctuates guitar lines. His drumming alive and dynamic. He’s right with it all, part of it all, powering it all:
There’s no question whether Pete had developed bare competence. But Ringo had developed something beyond the beat, something the Beatles needed: emotionally intelligent, song propelling dynamics. He knows when to be silent and when to inject rocket fuel. Euphonious here. Extra, punctuated pizzazz there.
I understand that it’s easy for us to say this in retrospect. The drummer who was with them in their rise to fame automatically seems to have been indispensable to the rise. It’s hard to separate which variables mattered. We’re smugly prophetic looking to the past.
In this case, though, I'm convinced that Ringo absolutely completed the Beatles both in beat and in personality. Although I don’t have the answers, the other Beatles did in fact try to explain that Pete’s limitations held them back. I’m with those who have the same confident hunch, having followed this group’s daily and nightly doings (60 years later) witnessing the duration of Pete’s two years of Beatledom, that he simply wasn’t able to create new and interesting arrangements with Paul, John and George, and so wasn’t able to progress in the ways they wanted. He kept a beat and had a powerful kick, but lacked the ineffable finesse Ringo would apply to each song, using his entire kit to power songs perfectly in a way that would make the Beatles recordings jump out of radios and conquer the world.
Mark Lewisohn closes Chapter 30 of Tune In with:
“Saturday, August 18, 1962, defines the start of Liverpool's famous 1960s. In the afternoon, Liverpool Football Club resumed playing in the top division after an eight-season absence, kicking off a period of unforgettable national and international domination. In the evening, the Beatles became the four the world would know and love. More so than John and Paul, it was George who brought Ringo into the Beatles, and he always knew the rightness of what he did. 'We were all very happy to have him. From that moment on, it gelled -- the Beatles just went on to a different level,' Neil Aspinall, even to the detriment of his own best mate, also knew the score, 'They'd had a succession of drummers through the years and finally now they found one who integrated, someone who fitted. Until this point it was always John, Paul, George and a drummer -- now it was John, Paul, George and Ringo.'"
So, that was a direct quote from Neil via Mark. That's how Neil saw the situation.
