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By Jay Zimmer

Fired by The Beatles when they were on the brink of mega-stardom, Pete Best became a footnote in musical history. It took a long time, but today, he's OK with that, and he's carving out his own success with his own band, which bears his name.

Best turned 67 in November of 2008. He still lives in Liverpool, and still speaks in that adenoidal, throaty Northern accent called Scouse. His hair is whiter than it was when last the music world heard from him - and if record producer Sir George Martin is to be given credence, Best is a much better drummer today, as he plies his trade with another trio of Liverpudlians, than he was when Martin, then a staff producer for Parlophone, told the Beatles he didn't like Best's playing. Today The Pete Best Band travels the world promoting their new CD, "Hayman's Green," released in September 2008, and which Best calls a musical story of his life.

Their show digs into the set-list Best performed with The Beatles on the Hamburg Reeperhahn. And if one closes one's eyes, one can visualize the 19-year old Beatles performing in those seedy clubs, their sound tightened to a razor-sharp edge by an exhausting regimen of week-in-week-out eight-hour sets. Their powerful renditions of such standards of the day as "Besame Mucho," (back then a Paul McCartney "gets-off" song) and the all-but-obscure Leiber/Stoller/Barrett club rocker "Some Other Guy" and the seldom-heard Lennon-Harrison instrumental "Cry For A Shadow" easily conjure images of what it must have been like in those sweat-permeated clapboard clubs of 1960's Germany.

Recently the Pete Best Band traveled to Benton Illinois, a gone-to-seed coal mining town in the southern part of the state with a single claim to fame. Five months before The Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show, George Harrison took a two-week vacation there to visit his older sister Louise, who was married to mining engineer Gordon Caldwell. Lou Harrison's old house was rescued from the wrecking ball and converted to a bed and breakfast honoring Pete Best's old mate. Best appeared in the high school gym, a Quonset-hut-like affair with side bleachers and metal folding chairs for an audience of about 400. Best told me in a telephone interview that the venue didn't matter to him - an audience of 25 or 25,000, the idea is for him and his band to have fun, and for them to bring fun to those they perform for.
They do that. What's more important, it's obvious that they are having fun as they run their list, an amalgamation of songs that surprise and delight, with vicious energy and aplomb.

As a part of that interview, I asked Best if he was still bitter about what happened totally out of the blue in Brian Epstein's Whitechapel office that summer day 46 years ago.

By August of 1962, Pete Best had been with The Beatles for two years. He was recruited from the stage of the Casbah Coffee Club, which his mother had founded in the basement of their large home (and at which The Quarrymen - later The Beatles often played, drummerless). The group had a chance to go "over the water" to play a residency at a club in Hamburg, Germany's "red light" district - but they couldn't go without a drummer. Best had recently bought his blue Premiere drum kit and was playing with a group of guys called The Blackjacks. He continued to do that until Paul McCartney came to the club and offered him the job in Hamburg - they were leaving tomorrow. Best acquiesced.

For two trips to Hamburg, Best was the "back line" of The Beatles, supplying the pounding rhythm that was typical of the so-called Mersey Sound - named for the river that flows through Liverpool, whose seaports were decimated by Nazi bombing. When they came back, after one ignominious end - deportation - Liverpool audiences were amazed at the sheer power of their performances. The nights at the grimy seaport clubs of Germany, stretching their songs to twenty minutes and more to eat up the eight-hour night, had honed them, strengthened them, and they had, by their own admission, improved immensely as musicians.

And so it was that music store manager Brian Epstein took them under his wing, cleaning up their jeans-and-leather-jacket image, putting them into mohair suits. John Lennon was quoted as saying, at the time, "Brian stopped us from eating and drinking and throwing up onstage." Not as farfetched as it sounds, say witnesses, of their Hamburg depredations, people like photographer Astrid Kirscher. She took the first professional pictures of the group, and is credited with helping to invent the famous Beatles hairdo.
Epstein negotiated an audition with the group before George Martin at the EMI studios in London in 1962, and it was then that Martin told Epstein that he didn't care much for Best as a drummer. But he had no intention of seeing Best kicked out of the group.

"I told Brian he could do what he liked with him onstage, but we'd have a studio drummer in for the sessions," Martin said later.
But the rest of The Beatles used Martin's statement as an excuse to sack Best.

Only Brian Epstein and the three other Beatles know why Best was sacked. McCartney isn't talking, and Lennon, Harrison, and Epstein are dead. There are published insinuations that the other three, particularly the star-struck Paul, were jealous of the fan attention accorded to the drummer, whom the rock newspaper Merseybeat called "Mean, Moody Magnificence."
Best didn't join the others in their use of Preludin, diet tablets that were in reality "pep pills," that enabled them to stay awake for their manic eight-hour performances during which the German audiences prevailed upon them to mach shau, or "Make Show."

Best didn't hang around with photographer Astrid Kirscher. He is in few of the photos she took in Germany. So naturally he didn't join the rest of the Beatles in adopting the hairstyle she had developed for her friend Klaus Voorman, which was then adopted by Beatles bassist Stuart Sutcliffe, and thence his best friend John Lennon, and on to the others. Best was content to keep his hair as it was, the swept back "do" with the D.A. (duck's arse) that all of them had affected when they first arrived in Germany.
Best spoke very little, again standing out in a negative way against the boisterous, often mouthy moods of his band-mates.
Maybe these are the real reasons Best was booted. Maybe none of them are. Maybe Epstein just misunderstood when George Martin said he didn't like Best's drumming, and the boys, based on that, told Epstein to do the dirty deed.

Whatever the real reason, Best was called into Epstein's office and summarily fired just weeks before the band went in to record their first single.

To soften the blow, Epstein offered to build an entirely new band around Best, who refused. A month later he joined Lee Curtis and the All Stars, with whom he recorded with indifferent success.

Later, in disgust, Best gave up show business and married a woman named Kathy, a marriage that has endured for more than 40 years. For a time he worked on the loading dock of a large Liverpool bakery. He was a civil servant for 20 years, during most of which he refused to talk about his time with The Beatles.

Then came the 1995 Beatles Anthology. Licensing songs on which Best played brought him a windfall of between 1 and 4 million pounds.
Whether it was the money or the passage of time, Best's tongue loosened to the extent that he began reveling in his Beatles past.

In a telephone interview just before his Benton Illinois gig, Best told me affirmatively that he was no longer bitter about the "old days."
"I think if you keep reflecting back on it all the time then you do end up being bitter. But there comes a time in life when I think, basically, you've just got to get on with life. And you suddenly realize that once you stop looking over your shoulder all the time and saying could be, should be, may have been, life leads different ways, and because of that, you look back on your life and life's been good to me."

And it has. His two daughters produced three grandchildren whom he says he adores. And his new band has taken him alternately back to his roots and to new heights. His roots are the songs from his stage show that dig deep into the Hamburg experience. The new heights come from "Hayman's Green," a CD of all original equipment written by Best and the members of his band.
The band includes Best on drums, echoed by his younger brother Roag, also on drums and percussion. Add to that the lead guitar stylings of Phil Melia, the versatile bass renderings of Paul Parry, and rhythm guitar by Tony Flynn, whose lead singing on many of the old John Lennon vocals is absolutely haunting. The self-described autobiographical CD contains all original material composed by Best and his band-mates. While it is instrumentally and vocally reminiscent of The Beatles in their pre-recording days, and into their early studio work, the arrangements and their precision take on a Sgt. Pepper-esque mystique.

Best will never escape his Beatles past. But now, instead of running from it, he's turned it into a positive legacy as his music rides again.
At age 67, he's back on the road to prove what his fans were saying 45 years ago... "Pete is Best.