Before The Beatles were household names, they had several band members who would not stay with the group through their fame. The band fired drummer Pete Best, but they had bigger problems with the skill level of one-time bassist Stuart Sutcliffe. While they didn’t fire him — he was too good of friends with John Lennon — they didn’t want his subpar playing to affect their music. Their solution was rather mean-spirited.
The Beatles didn’t want the audience to hear one band member playing
Sutcliffe was a close friend of Lennon’s who used money he made selling paintings to purchase a bass guitar and new amps. He helped name the band and was one of Lennon’s closest friends. Despite this, he wasn’t much of a musician.
“Stuart was in the band now,” George Harrison said, per The Beatles Anthology. “He wasn’t really a very good musician. In fact, he wasn’t a musician at all until we talked him into buying a bass. We taught him to play twelve-bars, like ‘Thirty Days’ by Chuck Berry. That was the first thing he ever learnt.”
Sutcliffe was aware of his lackluster skills. His bandmates were as well; they tried to take action to prevent the audience from discovering it.
“His lack of skill so embarrassed him that he’d stand with his back to the audience to hide his inept fingering,” Philip Norman wrote in the book Paul McCartney: The Life. “Often the others would secretly unplug his amp, leaving him mute.”
John Lennon admitted The Beatles were rude to their one-time band member
Sutcliffe was often the butt of The Beatles’ jokes. Paul McCartney once even got into a physical fight with him onstage.
“[Lennon] was a bit aggressive at first. If he found he could browbeat you then you were under his thumb,” a friend, Billy Harry, told The Guardian. “He used to treat Stuart really badly at times, humiliate him in front of people.”
According to Lennon, McCartney was even worse to him. This was possibly because he was jealous of Lennon’s relationship with Sutcliffe, or because he was tired of having to pick up the slack of an untrained musician.
“We were awful to him sometimes,” Lennon said, per The Beatles: The Authorized Biography by Hunter Davies. “Especially Paul, always picking on him. I used to explain afterwards to him that we didn’t dislike him, really.”
Stuart Sutcliffe left the band before fame
Ultimately, the band never had to fire Sutcliffe. He left of his own volition in 1961. He was a talented artist and wanted to refocus on his painting career.
In 1962, Sutcliffe died suddenly of a brain hemorrhage. Lennon thought of his former bandmate as a soul mate and mourned him for the rest of his life. He reportedly wrote the song “In My Life” with Sutcliffe in mind.
