Original Beatles drummer Pete Best got the last laugh on social media with his response to a rhetorical question going viral over the past few days. On January 29th, the “Fab Four's” official social media platforms posed the question: “Who or what got you into The Beatles?” With thousands of fans providing their personal specifics, the next day Best simply tweeted: “Paul phoned me and asked me to join. That's what got me into The Beatles.”
On August 12th, 1960, Pete Best auditioned for the Beatles in his mother's Liverpool nightclub called the Casbah. Best was asked to join the group, which then included original bassist Stuart Sutcliffe, to begin a two-month residency in Hamburg, Germany.
We asked Pete Best if following the audition, he knew immediately that he had the job as the Beatles' drummer: “No. Not at that stage, because at the end of the day, yeah, I'd agreed to go to Hamburg, but the audition was there. I've always queried the fact of the audition. Because in those days people jumped ship from band-to-band so the audition factor was very much a case of like, 'You're making me audition?' But the type of material they were playing, I was playing with my own band as well. So when they turned around and said, 'Do you know this one?' — it's like, okay, bash that one off, 'Do you know this one?' — bash that one off.”