Brushes with fame

Ever heard of a guy called Tommy Moore?

Well, he was the first regular drummer for the Beatles. We all know it was Ringo Starr who eventually got the gig, displacing Pete Best, whom most people have heard of by now. Best felt very bitter about being sacked after a 2 year stint with the band.

And before Best it was Tommy Moore, who was a very different proposition. Shambling, disorganised, turning up late for band practices, sometimes turning up for gigs without his drum kit, or just not turning up. The impression is of a man who felt burdened by his role as drummer for an unremarkable outfit from Liverpool, one of many doing the circuits at the time.

As very little information exists about this man, one can only speculate as to the reasons for his evident lack of enthusiasm. One must be his age...28 while the others were still in their teens. Another one was John Lennon.

Wikipedia has a short stub on Tommy Moore, which is unremarkable, apart from this, which is alarming.

During the tour, he was injured and lost his front teeth when the band's van, driven by Johnny Gentle, had a minor accident. However, Lennon and the Scottish organiser of the tour took him out of hospital and insisted that he perform with the rest of the group.

en.wikipedia.org...(musician)

Another source claims Moore was bullied by Lennon. When they arrived back in Liverpool after a disastrous tour of Scotland, Moore, unsurprisingly, quit.

That tour was a disaster from start to finish with Moore losing teeth and suffering a concussion in an automobile accident while remaining under the unrelenting lash of John Lennon’s acerbic verbal abuse. On his return to Liverpool, Moore had had enough and quit the group by failing to show up for a gig. When they arrived to inquire about his absence, his girlfriend allegedly leaned out of a window to instruct them to p*ss-off, before informing them that Moore had been taken back at his old job as a night-shift forklift driver in a bottle factory. Moore, it seems, had decided not to quit his day (or night) job.

blogcritics.org...

Stories like this fascinate me. I love stories of people who had brushes with extreme fame but, whether by happenstance or design, faded back into obscurity.

Usually it's just bad luck...Tommy Moore reportedly regretted leaving the Beatles after he realised they had made it big. But, just occasionally, someone just decides they've had enough of the limelight.

Billy Williamson was the steel guitar player in Bill Haley and his Comets for about 14 years. He was a founding member of the band. Then, one day in 1963, he decided he'd had enough. Not just had enough of being in that band. He'd had enough of being in any band.

Williamson left the Comets in early 1963 and reportedly never played another note, declining invitations to join Comets reunion groups that formed after Haley's death in 1981.

en.wikipedia.org...(guitarist)

Never played another note. Wow. Radical, man.

Feel free to contribute stories of your own. Pop music, film industry, anything.

a reply to: CJCrawley

Wow, thanks. I love these kind of stories too, but I don't have any of my own. I had never heard of Moore I thought Pete Best was the original drummer, and I've followed the Beatles since their explosion on the scene back when I was 5 or 6 years old. Man, I love to learn something new, thanks!