Before Shea Stadium,
The Ed Sullivan Show, and the Cavern, Came the Casbah.
The Club That Gave Birth to the Beatles
and Started a Music Revolution.
For the first time in forty years, Beatles’ fans can finally get an inside look at the club that brought together some of the greatest names in rock music and became the catalyst for the Mersey Beat phenomenon that swept Liverpool in the early 1960s. The Casbah Coffee Club, which opened in Liverpool on August 29, 1959, was the brainchild of Mona Best, the mother of Pete Best. It is well known that Pete Best was the drummer for The Beatles in their early days in Liverpool and Hamburg. But less well known is that The Beatles’ origins were in fact at Pete’s mother’s club--it was at the Casbah and with Mona Best’s blessing that the greatest popular music phenomenon of the twentieth century began.

The United Kingdom Release	The United States Release

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Joe Johnson Spoke to Original Beatles Drummer Pete Best Recently.
Pete and his brothers Roag and Rory have written a book on the Beatles early beginnings called, “The Beatles: The True Beginnings” about the coffee club "The Casbah Club" that Pete’s mom, Mona, started in the basement of the family house in West Derby, Liverpool in 1959.  The book features wonderful photos of original Beatles memorabilia, including original drawings on the ceilings and walls that were painted by John and Paul and have been preserved for 42 years. It also includes an written endorsement/quote from Paul McCartney. Pete and his brothers are opening the club as a tourist attraction and plan to offer tours and even have guest lecturers, art exhibits and music performances there in the coming months to re-introduce Beatle fans from all over the world to “The Casbah Club”.  In addition to these historical facts, the book also briefly admits to a rumor that many fans have heard over the years: that Beatles roadie and now head of Apple, Neil Aspinal is the father of Roag Best, Pete’s younger half-brother. Portions of this interview were broadcast on a recent edition of Beatle Brunch.  

Joe: The book is called “The Beatles: The True Beginnings”, what do you mean by “the true beginnings?”  For people who just tuned in, I guess they thought the true beginnings were the Cavern Club. Can you explain?
Pete: Well basically, what it is, I mean a lot of people think The Cavern Club was the capitalist for The Beatles and that the Beatles really only played The Cavern Club and that’s where they were discovered. In reality, what happened was, by “the true beginnings” we mean the untold story. We’re gonna dispel some of the myths with it being well chronicled and distorted, and bring in some new facts and figures which prove that in fact The Casbah and my mother Mona were very inspirational with regards to the ascendancy of The Beatles.

J: Your mom opened this club. And what year did the club open?
Pete: the club opened on the 29th of August 1959, and the group that opened it, it’s a funny story really, the group that should have opened it, should have been the Les Stewart Quartet, of which George Harrison and Ken Brown were members. And a couple of weeks before the club was due to open, George Harrison and Ken Brown came down and saw my mother Mona and basically turned around and said “we’ve got bad news for you, unfortunately the group has broken up. And it was a bit of a shock. But George basically said, “well I’ve got a couple of friends that I used to play with who aren’t doing anything at the present moment and I’ll put the deal to them.  Because the deal was gonna be a residency when we actually opened the club. And residencies in those days were like gold. And he brought them down the next day and lo and behold they turned out to be John Lennon and Paul McCartney. And my mother put the deal to them, and they turned around and said, “Yeah, we’d love to play it. It’s a residency.” The price was agreed on, which was three pounds for the night, which was a lot of money in those days. You may laugh now, but it was a lot of money in those days. And she said, “what are you going to call yourselves?“, and John said, “well we used to be called The Quarrymen, how does that sound?”  So she said, “it sounds good enough to me”, and August the 29th 1959 they took the stage as The Quarrymen. But the funny thing was, they wanted to see the club. The club was still in assemblance, it needed some decorating to be done on it, you know, a little bit of work to be done the night before the doors were due to open. So they all rolled their sleeves up and hence we got the Aztec ceiling, which was painted by John, which is still in the Casbah today. The Rainbow ceiling, which was painted by Paul McCartney, the stars in the coffee club. Basically as it closed in 1962, it’s basically the same. And that’s the beauty of it. It stands in its total originality.  

Joe: That is really amazing that the club stayed the same. Now your mom and your family never got tempted to convert it into a poolroom, or paint everything? 
Pete: No, because the funny thing is Joe, when it closed in 1962, due to a circumstance of events, it was a decision my mother made, and she had her own reasons for it, and basically what happened over the years, with the Casbah closing, because it had been the catalyst for the Merseybeat sound, every major band in Liverpool basically played the Casbah long before the Cavern. So the Cavern really came into ascendancy when the Casbah closed down. And what happened was, in view of the fact that she wasn’t doing anything, and it’s a great big Victorian house which stands on about an acre of ground with these huge cellars underneath, she decided that she’d use it as storage room. And that’s basically what it stayed as. It was storage room until she made a monumental decision which she was talking on, around about the middle of 1980, and she just unlaunched at this particular speakeasy, if you could put it that way, that she was going open the Casbah up again. And that was a surprise to the members of the audience, but it was more of a surprise to the brothers in the family who were giving her support at that particular speech. And we sort of looked at one another and it was, “well, we gotta roll our sleeves up, and basically that’s what happened.  The “official opening” took place two weeks ago (around August 29th, 2002), because around about the latter part of this year, we will officially open the Casbah up again as an official tourist attraction.  

Joe: You know what I was most amazed with, Pete is all the great memorabilia that you still have. You have the amplifiers, and the record players and the microphones. Was all that stuff just down in the cellar for 40 years? 
Pete: Basically, yeah.  When my mother died, she died in 1988 very tragically. It was an unexpected death. We expected her to live to be 192. She was that type of woman. She had courage and for site and determination which made the Casbah what it was. But when we actually started to clear the place up and look at what was being stored in the house, we came across all this memorabilia which was stored in the house. I mean, if it wasn’t for her, maybe it would have been thrown out. But she stored everything; she kept it down there. She had it in rooms spaced all over the house. And when we accumulated all this together, we found that we all this Beatles memorabilia. 

Joe: What kind of songs did you guys play onstage?  Well first of all, were you in the Beatles the night they opened up the club or did they invite you after that? 
Pete: When they actually opened, August 29, 1959, there was only John, George, Paul and Ken Brown. There was no drummer. There were only four guitarists.  And when I joined them, which was August 1960 after being asked by Paul McCartney.  Because by this time, they’d the offer to go to Germany and needed a drummer. Their drummer had walked out on them, who was Tommy Moore.  And by this time, Stu Sutcliffe had actually been persuaded to join on bass and he was playing bass with them. And when Paul asked me, I said “yes”, and went down and auditioned the next day. But basically, August 1960, I joined them as the drummer. 

Joe: There are great stories about what kind of songs you had to play to audition. What kind of songs did they put you through? 
Pete: Oh, I suppose you could say it was standards and covers. Everyone in those days was playing the same type of music, you know, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, all the American greats. The stuff that was coming in to the markets over here, you know, the good old rock and roll stuff, stuff that was basically grew up on.  So it wasn’t a case of doing anything difficult because I had my own band, The Blackjacks, who were playing a very simple repertoire. And basically I went down to the Wyvern club, which later became the famous Blue Angel Club and we blasted off about six numbers. There was an old 12 bar jam session which was “Ramrod”, then we did some of Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen”, Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Whole Lotta Shakin”, just stuff which everyone played. And basically about 10-15 minutes into the audition, we played about six numbers, and they went away and had a little huddle and came back and said, “you’re in, Pete”, and it was as easy as that, basically. 

Joe: What kind of songs did you guys play then?  Were you still doing cover songs down at the Casbah? 
Pete: Basically. When we came back from Germany, because she (Mona) threw us the lifeline. When we came back from Germany, no other promoter in Liverpool really wanted to book us. The venue which we should have played had burnt down. That was Alan Williams Top Ten Club, and no one had heard of us. We were big in Germany. We weren’t the power to be before we’d gone out to Germany, or before they had. They didn’t have the record then, they didn’t have the following, so when we came back, my mother Mo billed us as “The Fabulous Beatles Direct From Hamburg”.  And of course, when we actually played, she threw us the lifeline, and the first appearance we ever did in England as The Beatles with the new lineup of myself included, on the return from Germany, that was the 17th of December 1960. It was a result of that particular performance at the Casbah, which was absolutely incredible. The place was heaving. Beatlemania started in Liverpool. So we’re very proud of the fact that the first performance took place, on the Beatles return back into Liverpool at the Casbah and it was as a result of that the word was out on the street that “the Beatles are here, and they’re here to stay.

Joe: What are people going to find when they read the book? What kind of tidbits are in there? 
Pete: Well basically what we credited it as an untold story. It’s a story which puts into perspective the role of the Casbah, the role of my mother Mona because she was very inspirational as regards to their success, a bit of an unsung hero in a way, in as much as she never took the acclaim, she never took the limelight for the help that she gave The Beatles, and she was always there to give them a lifeline. She was always there 100 percent. She was the first person who was inspirational in getting them a booking at the Cavern. It was Brian Epstein who came down and saw her to make sure she didn’t want to manage the group. It was prior to him taking over as manager officially. So there’s lots of inside things. There’s lot of facts in it, which over the years have been reported by other media but have been taken out of context and twisted and they don’t give the right kudos. This particular book brings in and I suppose establishes the people who were very important in the ascendancy of the Beatles. That’s why it’s called “The True Beginnings”.  Now it’s time for them to be brought forward and take the credit, which they so duly deserve.  

Joe: So this is really pre-Anthology.  What did you think of The Anthology Book and the Anthology series that was on television?
Pete: I thought it was good. I had to look at it, as it was very much The Beatles Story. I mean it was “The Beatles Anthology”, and it was very much the way they wanted to tell the story, even though the Casbah was mentioned. But I think now the fact that we’ve actually written the book, and as you can see, with the copy of the book there, Paul has endorsed it. He’s said, words to this effect, “the world knows about The Cavern, but they don’t know about The Casbah, and this is really the story about the Casbah and how important it was in our particular career”. 

Joe: How did you get Paul involved? Have you spoken to him, to get him involved in the book? 
Pete: We were involved in a couple of other projects and the book was mentioned to him and we said that we’d like to use some of the quotes from the interviews, and he said, “yes”, he would approve them. That’s what he did and I suppose in a way, that was his endorsement of it. It was a fact of, “OK, you’re telling the story. It’s a story, which should be told. It hasn’t been told. Tell it the way that you want to tell it. And that’s basically what he’s endorsed. 

Joe: Now you’re still very close with Neil Aspinal, and he’s still very close to The Beatles, now has that been your link to being able to do that? 
Pete: No, no, don’t get confused on that particular one. Neil and I are still very good friends and have been for many many years, ya know, before the split and after the split. But as regards to Beatles and Beatles information, I respect his privilege position and so we don’t talk Beatles. It’s very much on a social level as families, and who’s involved in families, very much a laugh and a joke, but we don’t step on one another’s toes and don’t put one another into embarrassing positions and could we do this and could we do another, and I think he likes that.  (Note: Neil is Roag’s father, as revealed in the book. Roag is Pete’s half brother). 

Joe: What did you think of the way that your story’s been told by The Beatles as far as how did you think you were portrayed in The Anthology? 
Pete: It’s very much a case of, you know, as they wanted it to be. You know, it’s one of those ones there’s been so many different rumors and assumptions as to what the dismissal was. I think even to this day, the real factor to what’s behind it has come out. Whether it ever does, I mean I don’t know, none of us might be on the planet when it does (laughs) surface.  But that wasn’t the case of actually writing the book. I wasn’t trying to put that into perspective. Yes, lots of theories have been mentioned in the past. A lot of them were mentioned in the Anthology from their point of view. They kept very much to the line, which they’d always said, which was that they found a better drummer. But to me, that’s never held up water because I was always reputed to be one of the best drummers in Liverpool. 

Joe: Well your drumming, certainly on the Decca sessions is great. Can you relive that moment for me? Tell me what it was like on New Year’s Day playing those 15 tunes there? Were you guys nervous? Were you excited? 
Pete: (laughs) And hung over, yeah!  The funny thing was, when Mike Smith came down and actually saw us, and came down and saw us at the Cavern, and this was very soon after Brian Epstein had basically become our manager, and of course, the daunting task here wasto get us a recording contract with a major English label. We recorded for Polydor, but we wanted a major English label, and he went to Decca, which was the biggest company at that time.  Mike Smith, who was the A&R man, came down and saw us at the Cavern, arranged a date after just seeing us at a dinner time session, and he arranged a date for January the 1st, 1962. Now the funny thing was, when you think back of all the days to pick for a major record audition, it has to be New Year’s Day! So prior to us going down on New Year’s Eve, Brian gets us all into the office and he basically gives us a little chin wagging, a pep talk and said, “now look, you’ve got a major record audition tomorrow, biggest company in England, you’re going down New Year’s Eve, behave yourselves”. And it was, “yes, of course we will, Brian!”  So after he trundled to London, three o’clock in the morning, we’re all drunk as lords in the middle of Trafalgar Square, enjoying ourselves, celebrating New Year’s Eve with the imminent record audition the following day. But the beauty of it was, we landed up late to it, but Mike Smith, who was actually in charge of the session, landed up late as well because he’d been celebrating himself, so it was a union of great minds on that particular one. But yes, I suppose apart from our arrogance and self-belief that we in ourselves, we were lads from Liverpool, so we had this arrogance, so you know, we were a little bit nervous. We were excited, even though we tried to play it down and keep it very low key. I think if you listen to the music, you can see that there’s mistakes in there and there’s excitement, and you know, voices cracking and all that. But the overall session was totally enjoyable. It was full of excitement, and of course, at the end of it, we thought we’d got the contract with Decca, which as the world knows now, we didn’t. We were turned down. But the actual audition itself was exciting from our point of view. 

Joe: You must have been really floored when they said, “sorry, guitar groups are on the way out”, that kind of thing. 
Pete:  Well, the funny thing is, Mike Smith had basically said, “Yeah, it seems in the bag”.  But as is now, we chronicled in the book, because for many, many years, and this is like where we’re starting to put a few things straight and re-writing the history of music business in Liverpool, for years, people have always thought it was Dick Rowe who turned The Beatles down, and in fact when we interviewed Mike, Mike said “it wasn’t Dick Rowe, basically Dick Rowe left the decision up to myself”. And on that same day, he’d also auditioned a band from London called “Brian Poole and the Tremolos, and even though on stage we were better, in studio on that particular day, Brian Poole and the Tremolos sounded better. So it was Mike Smith who actually turned The Beatles down.  It wasn’t Dick Rowe.  He made that penultimate decision and he’s the one who took it on the chin after that (laughs).  

Joe: Which one of the three Beatles were you the closest with?
Pete: Oh, definitely John. Friends with all of them, I mean there was no animosity or anything like that, but I think I was closest to John because I knew him for a year before I actually joined the band. I always say, “I knew them for three years and played with them for two”.  I liked him when I first met him. I liked his humor. I liked the way he carried himself on stage. But of course when I went to Germany, John and I spent many, many nights propping bars up together. And I suddenly realized that there was another side of John, which the public didn’t see, which was a very tender and a very loving side. What the public saw I suppose in a key, easy way of expressing it was John’s defense mechanism. That’s as far as you can get to John Lennon. But I was fortunate that I saw the other side of him. We became great friends. He spent a lot of time at my house. I spent a lot of time at his house, which was Aunt Mimi’s at that time. And we just had a great friendship between us. 

Joe: But then after you left, you guys didn’t continue your friendship, right? 
Pete: Well, it wasn’t a case of not being able to continue it, it’s that I was dismissed. All of a sudden within weeks of that dismissal, “Love Me Do” charted in England and, poof! Basically after that it was just like, my goodness mate, they were on a roller coaster that was traveling faster than anyone else. And I was still involved in show business. I was still chasing them as hard and fast as I could. But I think I was on the cargo train and they were on the super express.  And because of circumstances, because you’re touring, and they’re all over the world, and basically they’re this phenomenon, they were conquering the world. It became very, very difficult to keep in touch with them.  So you know, you draw further and further apart and then at the end of it it’s just like basically, they go their way and I go mine.  

Joe: It was obviously very sad what happened with George Harrison passing last year. Can you sum up his life for us and maybe the times that you knew him? 
Pete: Yeah, George, very tragic death. I think when people were aware that he had this terminal cancer, it may have been a case of yes, we know the end is coming, but I don’t think anyone expected it to happen as quick as it did. But as regard to person, great memories of him. To me he was always the quietest in the band believe it or not. Quite shy. Had a belief in what he wanted to do and that was to be one of the best guitarists around, he wanted to improve himself all the time and he was a great songwriter, which the world knows today.  And I think when you put all that into my memories of George, I think you can sum it up as the youngest one in the band, the quietest guy in the band, brilliant musician, great songwriter and a wonderful person and a loss to the world as a musician and a wonderful person.

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