Was Pete Best really that bad of a drummer?

This thread is the best.

 

I can't remember where I read this, but I thought he said Revolver was his favorite.

 

Well if he did,'a man of wealth and taste'. Fintastic otherwise.

 

Are those YouTube clips still up with the Pete Best "drumming"?

 

I wonder if Pete Best owns Beatles Rock Band and then plays the tracks with the fake drums using his own style of drumming.

 

Love the early Shadows.

 

Yeah, a decent guitarist, unfortunately not The Beatles ' Cry For A Shadow ' homage.

 

Indeed. Pete's medal story is such an arbitrary thing to decide to be skeptical about, absent any evidence.

 

You are certainly a significant part of what is making this conversation silly. Pete Best starring in a fictional film?

 

It's like "the 3 Stooges with Curly" vs. "the 3 Stooges with Shemp."

 

If Pete Best had been allowed to play his full drum set on "Ain't She Sweet" Pete Best's performance would have improved significantly.

 

Pete Best made his own documentary, Best of the Beatles in 2005. It is very interesting, and yes, it is "one-sided." However Pete Best did not lack for people to support him, including EMI personnel.

 

He'll be here all night, folks!

Yeah, it was certainly a shameful, disappointing run they had with Ringo, a pale shadow of their former glories.

 

"You could sit Pete Best on a drum kit and ask him to play for 19 hours and he'd put his head down and do it. He'd drum with real style and stamina all night long and that really was the Beatles's sound-forget the guitars and forget the faces-you couldn't avoid that insistent whack, whack, whack." -Chris Curtis, drummer for the Searchers, great Liverpool band, saw Pete Best play many times in both Hamburg and Liverpool.
"Pete Best was excellent for the Beatles-I don't think you could have found a better drummer for the material they were doing [at the time]..." Fred Marsden, drummer of Gerry & the Pacemakers, good Liverpool band, at one time hugely popular in England. Marsden had doubts about Best advancing at the same pace as the other Beatles but added Pete Best was "an excellent drummer in his field."
Several sources (Bill Harry, Alan Clayson, Larry Kane) claim that Johnny Hutchinson considered Pete Best to be a great drummer as well. This was contradicted recently in a British newspaper which featured a vulgar quote from Hutchinson about Best. I doubt that the quote was real though, because if it was it would have been in Lewisohn's recent book and it isn't, which leads me to believe Harry was correct.

 

Mark Lewisohn took the opposite approach in regard to Pete Best in Tune In. Several authors have supported Pete Best. Your last question was about drummers, not Beatles writers.

 

Many of them did see Pete Best play with the Beatles.

 

There is a very large contradiction within in this post. first talent=succcess, then it doesn't. Also Pete Best was offered gigs, first he was offered the Merseybeats, and nearly as quickly the Hurricanes.

 

This is definitely a bit over the top, but .

 

How many bands allow a member "they are always going to dump" to sing lead vocals?

 

Ringo Starr-9
Pete Best-7
Paul McCartney-4

 

Before Anthology, Pete Best won a few lawsuits against the Beatles.

 

Pete Best was still the Beatles drummer on July 1, 1962.

 

they experienced a sharp decline in their insistence on competently completed recorded performances between 1967 and 1973 with severe declines in 1970 but eventually recovered.

 

Many claim that Ringo Starr is playing on the Cavern Club recording of "I Saw Her Standing There" (with the harmonica). If so, that is certainly a strong Pete Best influence. Nearly everybody claims Ringo Starr is playing the drums on the official version of "Ask Me Why" which shows a Pete Best influence that is even stronger than than that....