Pete Best, drummer with The Beatles for two years, returns to the country of his birth this week. He looks back on an almost famous life
“People will learn how it was that Mo threw the pebble, that made the ripple, that caused the wave that shook the world.” —Beatles: The True Beginnings

The cellar of a large Victorian house in Liverpool, with silver stars drawn on the ceiling, the name of a certain John Lennon carved into the wall and the memory of a dusty province of the Raj, is where the biggest pop act in history began. The Casbah Coffee Club, Mo’s café. On Tuesday in Delhi, on a stage set up to recreate that basement café, Pete Best will take his place behind his drum set and let the riffs roll: the man who almost made it, in the city of his mother’s birth.

From 1960 to 1962, Best was drummer with The Beatles, and by some accounts, the most popular member of the group—he had moody good looks that had the girls swooning and drummed an “atom beat” that became the signature of the Liverpool sound. He was asked to leave the band in 1962. The boys, manager Brian Epstein told him, didn’t want him anymore—a decision that was never fully explained and one that cast Best into the leagues of the almost famous. Decades later, the 67-year-old doesn’t bear much bitterness. “I admired them for what they achieved. They took what we started to another level,” Best said over e-mail from London.

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