Pete Best / Пит Бест

The Pete Best interview
(This interview was conducted by telephone on July 12, 2003, done in conjunction with a local newspaper to publicize upcoming concerts in the San Francisco Bay Area.
http://abbeyrd.best.vwh.net/petebestinterview.html

The Pete Best Band : The Pete Best Band will be performing on three seperate occasions in Hamburg, Germany. The band will be performing on the world famous Reeperbarn on the 17th, 18th & 19th of June as part of the Hamburg Beatles Convention.

Это значит, скорее всего, в Kaiserkeller...

Действительно, Пит Бест и его группа The Pete Best Band выступают, я их слушал - играют в основном вещи конца 50-х начала 60-х. В группе вообще-то другой ударник, и играют в 2 ударника , а Пит похоже только обозначает удары, возможно его установка не озвучена микрофонами. Еще у него есть сайт, а штаб квартира по-прежнему в клубе Касба. Там время от времени можно встретить Пита с его командой.

У Пита Беста изданно огромное колличество альбомов и синглов, я когда увидел этот список, даже глазам своим не поверил !!!

У меня книга есть John Lennon, The Beatles and me авторства Беста. Правда, она у меня называется John Lennon, The Beatles et moi и на французском. Все прочесть не собирусь - французский все же хуже английского знаю.

А последнюю книгу Пита с его автографом можно
купить в клубе Касба за 25 фунтов ( около 50 долларов) Называется книга
The Beatles - The True Beginnings by the authors Roag Best, Rory Best and Pete Best. Еще там продают фото Битлов в Гамбурге тоже с автографом Пита за 20 фунтов. Я пока себе не купил - не было импульсивного желания, но возможно куплю.

а скачать альбомы Пита можно на ftp://mp3.int.ru

а недавно Пит был на нью-йоркском битлз-фесте и там к нему по рассказу моего знакомого было не подступиться.кроме того у него полно было охранников.Так что он вёл себя как "звезда"

The Pete Best band will be returning to the U.S. in July, this time playing the East Coast. Here's a list of their upcoming North American dates:

July 1st – Springfield, Mass – Sterns Square
July 2nd –Sellersville Theatre, 24 Temple Avenue, Sellersville, PA 18960
July 4th – Maxwells, 1039 Washington Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030
July 5th – Les Foufounes Electriques, 87 Ste-Catherine St. E, Montreal, QC H2X 1K5
July 6th – – Barry Moores Music Hall , 323 Bank Street, Ottawa, ON CANADA , Ottawa, Canada, K2P1X9
July 7th – – The Casbah @ La Luna , 306 King Street, West Hamilton, ON 111111 ,Ontario, Canada Ph: 905-777-7844
July 9th – Village Casino, 1 Lakeside Drive, Bemus Point, NY 14712
July 10th – Centennial Terrace, 5773 Centennial Rd, Sylvania, Ohio –
July 11th – Tenny Street Roadhouse , 22361 West Village Drive, Dearborn, MI 48124
July 12th – The Intersection, 133 Grandville Avenue SW, Grand Rapids, MI 49501
July 13th – The Funk Box , 8-10 E. Cross Street, Baltimore, MD
July 14th – – Star Hill music Hall, Charlottesville, Virginia
July 15th – Jaxx, 6355 Rolling Road, Springfield, VA 22152
July 16th – Aleghanny Country Fair – South Park Ampitheatre. Pittsburg – PA
Aug. 19-23: Beatlefest, Chicago.

автограф Пита...

Pete Best was interviewed by the Austrailian newspaper The Advertiser.
http://www.theadvertiser.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5936,9767488%5E16422,00.html

Sacked Beatle happy on his own
By Andrew McGarry
June 11, 2004

THE former Beatle wandered through Adelaide's shopper-packed Rundle Mall yesterday without anyone being the wiser. And Pete Best is quite happy with that.

Forty years after 300,000 squealing fans turned the City of Churches into the City of Moptops, the band's original drummer arrived in town for this weekend's inaugural Beatles Festival.

Best was 18 when he joined the group, providing the rhythm section for gigs in Liverpool and elsewhere before going on a breakthrough tour to Hamburg in 1962. A short time later he was gone from the group, however, replaced in mysterious circumstances by Ringo Starr in pop music's Garden Of Eden.

So what really happened?

"Wish I knew, to be quite honest," he said.

"I was called into Brian's (Epstein, The Beatles manager) office and told I was being replaced by Ringo, and told that Ringo was joining the band - there was no forewarning. The reason that was given was that I wasn't a good enough drummer, and that basically didn't make sense."

Best admits the time after his sacking was one of heartache and soulsearching. "You're the number one drummer with the number one band, you've got the recording contract, we recorded in Germany, everything is going great, and then for no apparent reason you're out," he said.

"You sit back and say to yourself, 'if I was still there, I don't think there would have been any difference'."

Best played six more years with various groups before quitting music to be with his family, working first in a bakery and then as the antithesis of a rock star - a civil servant.

Then, after 20 years out of the limelight, he was convinced to play on stage at a Beatles convention, kickstarting a new career. Today he spends up to seven months of the year on the road, doing one-man shows, talks and gigs with The Pete Best Band in venues around the globe.

"At the end of the day, if people remember me as part of a legend, thank you. If it's (as) Pete Best the normal guy, then thank you anyway," Best said.

This weekend's festival marks the 40th anniversary of wild scenes on the city's streets when 300,000 turned out to see the band at an Adelaide Town Hall reception on June 12, 1964.

The Australian

Best sellers and Best's cellar Jan 26 2005
Liverpool Echo

THE brightest new stars in music played in Liverpool yesterday as one of the original Beatles made a comeback at the Cavern Club.

Hundreds of fans stood for hours at HMV's city centre shop to have CDs and posters signed by US band The Killers.

Crowds also gathered to sing along to Beatles classics with former drummer Pete Best, who returned to the Cavern Club for the filming for a BBC documentary about his early days with the band.

At HMV, Liverpool John Moore's geography student Maryanne Cooper, 18, said: "Me and my friend have just run out of a lecture to come down to meet the band."

The Killers' album Hot Fuss has sold more than a million copies in this country, and new single Somebody Told Me had top-ten chart success.

HMV marketing manager Jason Legg said: "It has brought the shop to a standstill.

"They are a proper rock 'n' roll band and they've got all the glamour of being American."

At the Cavern, Pete Best enjoyed his time back in the limelight.

Of the documentary, he said: "You could say it's about my side of the story. There will be certain things that will put a different slant on what people have been told. It should put a few myths straight".

Early recordings by Bob Seger, the Kinks and ex-Beatles drummer Pete Best will be included on the four-CD box set Cameo Parkway 1957-1967, which will be released on May 3. The compilation will feature previously unavailable tracks from the vaults of the Philadelphia-based Cameo-Parkway label. The 115-song collection contains three tunes by Seger, including two he recorded with his 1960s band the Last Heard.
http://www.oldies.com/product/view.cfm/id_192232.html

Booted Beatle back on the road

Jeff Spevak
Staff music critic

(May 12, 2005) — Liverpool is infested with Beatles. Even the Casbah — which first played host to the band, when John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison were the Quarrymen — still survives. The music stopped in 1962: It's now a museum for Fab Four pilgrimages.

"They come to see the Casbah, and not the old relic, Pete," says Pete Best. He's a 63-year-old grandfather whose production company, which includes studio and filmmaking operations, runs the Casbah. And he plays drums with the Pete Best Band, which performs Tuesday at the German House Theater.

But he's better known as the guy who was kicked out of the Beatles to make room for Ringo Starr.

To some, death would seem a better fate. Stu Sutcliffe, the Beatles' bassist in those early years, famously fell in love with a German photographer, quit the band to pursue his first love, painting, and was soon dead of a brain hemorrhage. It's such a compelling story that it became a movie, Backbeat.

There is no Pete Best movie. Best calls himself a survivor, a guy who's moved on, a guy who expects to always be asked about a past he'll never live up to. "I think it's something which goes with the territory," he says.

The territory was August 1960, and the Beatles needed a drummer for two months of gigs in Hamburg, Germany. Mona Best, who ran the Casbah, had a son who played drums.

"We'd been as mad as you could be in Germany," Best recalls. "Paul and I had been kicked out. We were young musicians enjoying ourselves."

Yes, there was beer and women. Perhaps not enough women. Best's version of why he and Paul were deported from Germany involves the two of them attaching condoms to the wall of the Kaiserkeller, and setting them on fire.

For Best, the fire went out on Aug. 15, 1962, when he was dropped from the Beatles.

"Dumbfounded at first," he says of his reaction. "There was no forewarning. The anger came in afterwards. The way it was done, it was already pre-arranged that Ringo would join the band. The dismissal was on Wednesday, Ringo joined the band on Saturday."

The reason, Best says, was "I was not a good-enough drummer. That's never held up."

The move didn't sit well with many of the band's supporters. Best, who had the dark, smoldering, leather-jacketed looks of a James Dean with sticks, had been with the band for two years. Fans, particularly women, loved him. There were even shows where he'd come out front and sing while McCartney played drums. "Pete Best forever!" people shouted at Liverpool's Cavern Club. "Ringo never!"

"There are a couple of people still alive who know the real reason for it," Best says. "And I'm not privy to be one of those. It's the mystery of the Sphinx, a mystery of show business.

"As far as I'm concerned, it's over and done with."

Sorta. Best picked up the sticks again, after a two-decade absence, to form the Pete Best Band. "You hear the raw sound of the Beatles, the sound you heard in Germany, that we brought back to Liverpool," he says. "You hear the raw, savage, young Beatles."

You hear the Merseybeat sound. And early Beatles. "You can't forget about the history," he says.

It's a good history. "I was friends with all of them," Best says. "But I was closest to John. John and I spent a lot of time together. I found that there was another side that the world never saw. He was very caustic-witted. He was seen as the cynical type of person who kept fans at bay. But that was just a defense mechanism. I saw a tender and loving side. I saw the complete man."

Yet Best has not spoken to a Beatle in 40 years.

"People say, 'It would have been so easy to pick the phone up,'" Best says. "But it wasn't, believe you and me. With the rapid rise of the Beatles, as fast as they grew, it didn't matter who you were. You just wouldn't get through.

"I'm not saying," Best says, laughing about the idea of talking to Lennon once again, "it never will happen." It just depends on how you feel about the probability of an afterlife.
http://www.democratandchronicle.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article...2/ENT0501/505120317/1077/ENT05

Pete Best says Hamburg got Beatles ready to rock

Drummer Pete Best, a member of the Beatles in the band’s early days, says the marathon performances in Hamburg, Germany, helped the Beatles develop their distinctive sound.

For two years, Pete Best was in the eye of the hurricane. Actually, it was more like the eye and the wall and the tidal surge and every cubic inch of the storm's awesome power.

In August, 1960, the 18-year-old British drummer joined a raw but talented group known as the Beatles as they were getting ready to leave Liverpool for a gig at the Indras and Kaiserkeller clubs in Hamburg, Germany.

By the time Best and the boys parted ways two years later, the Beatles were poised to rock the world.

"We went there a young band. But when we came back from that first trip to Hamburg, we blew the lid off of Liverpool," Best said in a phone interview last week from Liverpool. The Pete Best Band performs at 8 tomorrow night in Maumee.

The marathon performances in Hamburg helped Best, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Stuart Sutcliffe develop a distinctive sound that blended American blues and rock, British skiffle and folk music, and the musicians' own creative energies.

While most band gigs lasted an hour or maybe two a night, the Hamburg clubs wanted the Beatles to play from early evening until the bars closed in the wee hours of the morning.

"It was something we weren't expecting until we went out there," Best said. "Then we were told we'd be playing six to seven nights a week, six to seven hours a night. But you were young and it was the task set before you. There was no complaining. It was very much a case of, 'That's what we've got to do.' "

The lengthy shows provided a musical education for the adventurous lads.

"Playing those long hours consistently made the band so tight and so prolific. It was like practicing every night for three months solid," Best said. "We were so tight and the sound had that explosive, savage element."

When the Beatles returned after their lengthy engagements in Hamburg, Sutcliffe stayed in Germany and the group decided in August, 1962, to replace Best with an older, more experienced drummer named Richard Starkey, aka Ringo Starr.

"Yeah, you've been knocked down, but you've got to pick yourself up and get back in the game," Best said of being fired.

He formed his own band but in 1968 quit the rock and roll business to raise a family, working as a baker and a British civil servant until 1988, when he revived his music career.

He said the Pete Best Band plays songs from the 1960s including his favorite Beatles tunes of the era as well as many classics by other rock artists. "We're not a Beatles copy band or a Beatle tribute band," he said.

Now 63, Best is not one to look back and evaluate his place in music history. "I'll let other people think it out for me, to be quite honest," he said. "I'm very much of the today and tomorrow brigade. It's OK if other people want to constantly remind me that I was part of that band and a legend and all that. But at the end of the day I say, 'Thank you very much,' I go to bed, and hopefully get up in morning and wash my face, and I'm still Pete. I'm just a regular guy."

The Pete Best Band will be in concert 8 p.m. tomorrow in the Maumee Indoor Theater, 601 Conant St., Maumee. Tickets, $25, are available in the box office. Information: 419-897-8902.

http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050519/ART10/505190336/-1/ART

Beatles' drum alum lives on the bright side
Sunday, May 22, 2005
By John Sinkevics
The Grand Rapids Press

He is the poster child for missing out on rock 'n' roll glory. He is forever the forgotten drummer, the guy stranded at the station when the gravy train chugged out of town.

No one could fault Pete Best if he still held a grudge, if he remained bitter 40-some years after the Beatles dumped him and soared to superstar heights with their waggish new drummer, Ringo Starr.

But Pete Best doesn't sound the least bit resentful, even when talking about that dark day in 1962 when Beatles manager Brian Epstein fired him. Indeed, speaking by phone from the very same Casbah coffee club in Liverpool where the Beatles first cranked up their amps, Best sounds almost cheery about the whole thing.

"You don't live in yesteryear," Best quips, though I must admit the first thing that pops into my mind is the contrasting message in Paul McCartney's "Yesterday."

"Initially when it happened, there was anger and there was resentment and financial embarrassment. It does get you down a little bit. But there does come a time when your strong backbone says, 'You got knocked down, but you're going to get back up and start fighting again.' No use looking at what happened yesterday. It's about what happens today and tomorrow and over a period of time."

So at 63, Best isn't ditching the Beatles legacy but embracing it, touring with his brother, Roag, and The Pete Best Band in a rock show titled "Best of The Beatles" which hits The Intersection in Grand Rapids on Friday. He'll trot out early Beatles tunes and '60s standards he played after departing the Fab Four.

"It's a big-sounding band. It's music from my period of time with the lads, music we played in Hamburg, some Polydor and Decca stuff," he says of a group that plans to record a new studio CD this year. "We're not a copy band. It's The Pete Best Band: very big, very raw, savage sound. We love to get the crowd involved."

That means Best stays after shows to meet fans and autograph stuff, even Beatles memorabilia.

"I'm not averse to signing it," he reasons. "It's our way of saying thank you to them."

Of course, if time heals all wounds, Best has had lots of it to put the pain behind him, even if he says he never got an explanation for being sacked.

It helps that he's finally reaped some benefits from his association with the pre-Ringo Beatles. He earned royalties from the 1995 "Anthology" CD that included several songs with Best on drums, and his family owns the historic Casbah -- which houses a production company and recording studio -- with hopes of opening it for tours.

"A lot of people tend to be mesmerized by the fact that you were a Beatle," he concedes. "They say, 'You don't know it, but you're a legend.' It's very gratifying."

Anyway, while Best may be the most glaring example of a rock musician who slipped off a shooting star, he's not the only one. Try Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd, Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac, Bernie Leadon of The Eagles, Dave Mustaine of Metallica and John Rutsey of Rush, who for various reasons weren't around when platinum albums started to pile up.

Best seems genuinely excited about touring the globe with his band, something he took up again in 1988 after working for two decades as a civil servant.

"Regardless of what happened 40 years ago, I'm a lucky guy. I've been married for 40 years and ... I've got a great band and health and happiness," he said. "At the end of the day, I put my pants on and I'm still Pete Best."

And hey, nobody else can say that.

http://www.mlive.com/entertainment/grpress/index.ssf...ntertainment-1/1116757063221400.xml

Best delivers Beatle magic
Monday, May 23, 2005
SUE WHITE
THE SAGINAW NEWS

For Dave Conner, it was "I Saw Her Standing There" that did it.

Former Beatle Pete Best, the Liverpool man who kept the beat before Ringo Starr joined the Fab Four, was on stage Saturday at White's Bar in Saginaw, and Conner, 52, of Essexville, slipped back in time when he heard the now-classic "She was just 17"

And he and his wife, Cheryl, didn't stop screaming and singing and shaking their way down memory lane until Best and his band closed their second hourlong set with the rousing "Roll Over Beethoven."

"I'm a big Beatles fan," Conner said, and he was hardly alone Saturday. Best brought out an interesting assortment of young fans and old, many clutching Beatles memorabilia as they waited for the autograph session that followed.

They sang out a crescendoing "ahhhhhh" to "Twist and Shout" and eagerly ate up the memories Best offered in addition to near-forgotten nuggets such as "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean."

And they lined up on the back terrace afterward, trading stories with Best and snatching up vintage photos he brought of the Beatles in those early years.

It was a magic night, faces sporting punch-drunk grins as the music took them back to when the teen music club Daniel's Den stood next to White's Bar on State near Bay and dreams of ever standing this close to a Beatle hovered somewhere in another universe.

Best felt it, too, he said, promising to return on the next leg of his American tour, in mid-July or August or in the fall. While the band usually plays larger clubs in bigger cities -- Chicago is its next stop -- Best said the obvious joy of everyone involved in Saginaw's shows gave him a big rush.

"Bo was really into us," he said, referring to bar owner Robert "Bo" White. "The whole atmosphere here was like that.

"We're out there to have a good time and share it. We enjoy playing music, and the boys in the band know what it's about."

Saginaw had a nice "two-way thing" going that worked all around, he added.

"We've enjoyed ourselves on stage and offstage tonight," he said.

Best's promise to return is good news to Saginaw guitarist Ron Lopez, who raced to White's after finishing his night with the Brush-Lopez Group at Spencer's restaurant in Saginaw Township.

"I knew it was going to be close," he said, arriving not long after Best left for the night. "But I had to try."

http://www.mlive.com/entertainment/sanews/index.ssf...entertainment-0/1116859856302620.xml

May 27, 2005

Best of renowned beat of the '60s
Former drummer with Beatles, band to bring it all back

A young group backing British crooner Tony Sheridan is playing it cool. The year is 1961, and the lads from Liverpool in the background wait patiently while the singer begins a version of the folk song "My Bonnie" in a style similar to that of a slow Elvis Presley ballad. Suddenly, in the second verse, the guitarists and drummer come bursting in at double-time, transforming the arrangement into something that resembles a Chuck Berry rocker.

The bassist bounces melodic flourishes into the mix, while the two guitar players spurt a blend of propulsive chording and frenetic lead runs. Perhaps the most galvanizing impact comes from the drummer, though, as he blasts his snare and tom-toms into a high-octane flurry that drives the song into a new realm that rock 'n' roll had never quite heard before.

Although this version of "My Bonnie" was embraced in Germany to the tune of a No. 5 placement on the German pop charts, its singer would soon be forgotten. The members of the backing group, however, went on to enjoy considerable success. They ditched Sheridan, began singing their own songs, and were called -- you guessed it -- the Beatles.

John, Paul, George and Pete.

The song is available on the Beatles' "Anthology 1," the multimillion-selling archival collection released in 1995, chronicling the earliest recordings of the group. Drummer Pete Best is featured on 10 tracks of the double-disc set.

Best not only manned the drum kit, he also stole the hearts of many female fans, who screamed his name as loudly as Paul McCartney's at gigs. But in August 1962, Best was sacked. The band and its handlers had become acquainted and impressed with the drummer from a group called Rory Storm & the Hurricanes, hired him instead, and Ringo Starr became the household name remembered today.

Best designed many of the rhythm patterns that Ringo duplicated on the group's first platinum releases. A listen to the June 1962 demo version of "Love Me Do," with Best on the drum set, confirms this. Aside from speeding up the tempo, Ringo changed scarcely a thwap from Best's performance of the track.

Best first became interested in the drums after hearing jazzmen like Joe Morello and Gene Krupa, and he cites later drummers such as Ginger Baker and Carl Palmer as inspirations for his current style. He is also appreciative of the countless young drummers who spend many a late night under headphones, rigorously studying his every recorded beat. He is flattered and humbled by this.

While playing seven hours a night at clubs in Hamburg, Germany, in 1961 and 1962, the band also virtually invented another style of rock, one which would not fully blossom until the late 1970s: punk. Aside from the occasional ballad like "Till There Was You," the early Beatles repertoire consisted largely of short, fast, loud guitar-driven numbers with a high degree of passion and intensity. Just like punk.

"It was aggressive, it was raw, it was savage, and it was the way we felt," Best says. "We were avant-garde in the sense that we said, 'We're the Beatles, and we'll do what we want to do and play the music the way we feel it should be played.' "

Although Best's current touring group does not engage in the advanced techniques of the later Beatles recordings, it re-creates the sounds of early 1960s rock in a way notably authoritative compared to other revival bands. His current sextet, which comes to Elkhart on Sunday, includes his brother Roag Best.

"It's a powerhouse show," Pete Best says. "The music we play is our favorites from the '50s, along with the tunes I played with the Beatles from our demo sessions for the Decca, EMI and Polydor labels."

The drummer says his favorite track represented on "Anthology 1" is the instrumental written by George Harrison and John Lennon called "Cry for a Shadow."

"It's a simple song with a haunting melody, and we threw it together in just a few minutes, but for something which was done so quickly, there's power in it, and it's different," Best says.

Mona Best, his mother, had a huge influence on Best's life and music, and also the Merseybeat sound itself. She opened a club called the Casbah in Liverpool that was the most coveted gig in town among local bands. The full story is revealed in the recent book "The Beatles: The True Beginnings." Paul McCartney himself is quoted in the book, explaining that while the Cavern Club has become the stuff of the Beatles legend, it was the Casbah that really saw the shaping of their sound.

http://www.southbendtribune.com/stories/2005/05/27/entertainment.20050527-sbt-MICH-D1-B...