The entire lineup of The Beatles were introduced to the world like a band of brothers. There was no chance that any of them could have made it without the rest of the charismatic characters behind them, but it turned out that the Fab Four could have had a very different lineup had time gone in another direction.
But when John Lennon and Paul McCartney first started playing together, it was more or less just to have a laugh at the time. Both of them had a deep love of rock and roll, but there was also a little bit of healthy competition between the two that turned them into a songwriting duo to contend with. George Harrison may have been their loyal partner in crime, but the drummer really varied from one group to the next.
While Harrison was already in the group after they had ditched their original Quarrymen lineup, they weren’t going to get very far without someone behind the skins. No matter how many times they tried to get around it at local parties by claiming that the “rhythm was in the guitars”, the heartbeat of the group always came from the back of the stage, and they already had their hands full before Ringo Starr came in.
Because as lovable as he comes across next to the rest of the band, Starr was always a relative latecomer to the group. Pete Best is already known as the one person to help arrange a lot of their early club dates and the victim of the worst sacking in music history, but before they even had Best to rely on, Tommy Moore was usually the one they could rely on when they needed a backbeat in a pinch.
Granted, Moore was not known to be the most patient when it came to the group’s antics. It’s almost expected for any rock and roll outfit to get into at least a little bit of misbehaviour every now and again, but since Moore was years older than the rest of the band and had been through the emotional ringer before, he figured that the entire music world had passed him by when working with the group.
Despite the massive chance for stardom waiting for him, Moore knew it was more sensible to settle down and get a job that could support a family, saying, “I went to work for the Beatles through an advertisement I saw in a newspaper where Paul and George were looking for a drummer. I joined the group, but it was a tough living in the beginning. We did get an invitation for a tour in Scotland, a very tiring one […] I needed something more secure. I abandoned the hobby of playing drums.”
In all fairness, Moore wasn’t the only one who didn’t know what he had on his hands with the band, either. Even when they got their first major record contract, George Martin saw potential in the group before anything else, and it took a lot of time to foster their talent before they became the complex musicians that they would turn into later on.
Nevertheless, Moore does at least deserve a casual mention in the grand story of The Beatles. He didn’t stick around for very long, and he himself would have hardly called himself a drummer in the truest sense of the word, but he was there when the band was still a breeding ground waiting to become a musical giant.