TL;DR:
- The Beatles’ had Pete Best as their drummer before Ringo Starr.
- George Harrison thought Ringo Starr looked “nasty” and “cocky.”
- Ringo Starr impressed George Harrison with his drumming.
George Harrison and Ringo Starr were close friends, but Starr didn’t make a good first impression. It wasn’t his fault, though: Harrison just didn’t like the way he looked. He thought Starr looked cocky and nasty. He said that it didn’t take long for him to realize that this was not Starr’s personality.
The Beatles’ initially had Pete Best as their drummer
Before Starr, The Beatles had Pete Best as their drummer. He was with the group for two years and played with them in Liverpool and their residency in Hamburg.
“We knew of this guy,” John Lennon said, per Express. “He was living in his mother’s house that had a club in it, and he had a drum kit so we dragged him, auditioned him, and he could keep one beat going for long enough so we took him to Germany.”
In 1962, the band fired Best. According to Lennon, this had been their plan all along.
“We were always gonna dump him when we could find a decent drummer,” he said. “By the time we’d got back from Germany, we’d trained him to keep a stick going up and down. He couldn’t do much else.”
George Harrison did not like the way Ringo Starr looked when he first saw him
When they fired Best, the band already had plans for Starr to join the group. They became familiar with his drumming in Hamburg, where Starr was playing with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. Harrison admitted that he didn’t like the look of Starr.
“I didn’t like the look of Rory’s drummer myself,” he said, per The Beatles: The Authorized Biography by Hunter Davies. “He looked the nasty one, with his little gray streak of hair. But the nastier one turned out to be Ringo, the nicest of them all.”
Starr seemed cocky to Harrison. It only took a little time for him to realize that this wasn’t the case, though.
“They would do their show and Ringo was the cocky one at the back; and with the way he looked, with that gray streak in his hair and half a gray eyebrow and a big nose, he looked a real tough guy,” Harrison said, per The Beatles Anthology. “But it probably only took half an hour to realize it was actually … Ringo!”
George Harrison wrote a letter saying he admired Ringo Starr
Though Harrison didn’t like the look of Starr, he did admire his drumming. In a letter to a friend, Harrison insulted Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, but he admitted that Starr was good at what he did.
“The only person who is any good in the group is the drummer,” Harrison wrote in his letter, per the book Ringo: With a Little Help by Michael Seth Starr.
The Beatles eventually recruited Starr, and he remained with them until they broke up in 1970.
