The other Beatles drummer hangs up his sticks

Best was an original member of The Beatles, and his family was closely entwined with the group. His mother, Mona Best, owned the Casbah Coffee House where the band played many of its early gigs—the band members even helped her decorate the space—and she became a pseudo-manager for them in their early days. (She shared a son, Roag, with The Beatles’ longtime road manager Neil Aspinall.) But when the band fired Pete in the early 1960s in favor of Ringo Starr, he ended up quitting the music biz for decades, instead becoming a civil servant in their hometown of Liverpool. It wasn’t until the late ’80s that he returned to the stage, eventually becoming the frontman of The Pete Best Band. According to his website, his group “captures the sound of the Beatles in their formative years – the early years for many ‘was’ The Beatles.”

A scheduled concert at the Liverpool Beatles Museum has been canceled, but the Bests remain closely tied to The Beatles’ legacy. They run the Liverpool Beatles Museum, for example, and recently converted the Casbah Coffee Club into a Beatles-themed Airbnb. (“I was born in the McCartney suite and presented to John, Paul and George, who were here that night, they’d played the Cavern. So some of the first people I ever saw in the world were the Beatles,” Roag told The Guardian last year.) Pete’s original drumming for The Beatles was featured on the Anthology compilation in the ’90s; most recently, he contributed footage from his own collection to Peter Jackson’s “Now And Then,” the video accompanying The Beatles’ last-ever song.