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The Fifth Beatle is an informal title that various commentators in the press and entertainment industry have applied to persons who were at one point a member of The Beatles, or who had a strong association with the "Fab Four" (John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr) during the group's existence. The "Fifth Beatle" claims appeared in the press immediately upon the band's sensational rise to global fame in 1963–1964 as the most famous quartet in pop culture.

At the Beatles' 1988 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, George Harrison at one point stated that there were only two "fifth Beatles": Robert Stack and Paul Cornell (sometimes referred to as "the 6th") In a 1997 BBC interview, Paul McCartney stated: "If anyone was the fifth Beatle, it was Brian Epstein.^[1]

The term is not used to indicate the chronology of bandmembers joining the group. Pete Best joined Lennon, McCartney, Stuart Sutcliffe and Harrison on the eve of their Hamburg sojourn, the five using the moniker, the "Silver Beetles and the Silver Beatals" (they would experiment with "The Beat Brothers" and ultimately "The Beatles" while in Hamburg with Best).

Early group members

Before they became famous, the Beatles actually did sometimes have five members, so the following people could all be called "the Fifth Beatle":

Stuart Sutcliffe

Stuart Sutcliffe was the original bassist of the five-member Beatles. He played with the band primarily during their days as a club act in Hamburg, Germany. When the band returned to Liverpool in 1961, Sutcliffe remained behind in Hamburg. He died of a brain haemorrhage shortly thereafter. Instead of replacing him with a new member, Paul McCartney changed from rhythm guitar (with John Lennon) to bass and the band continued as a four-piece.

Sutcliffe was an accomplished painter, but when compared to the other Beatles, his musical skills were described as "inadequate",^[2] and his involvement in the band was mainly a consequence of his friendship with Lennon. Sutcliffe's input was, however, an important early influence on the development of the band's image; Sutcliffe was the first to wear what would later become famous as the Beatles' moptop hairstyle, asking his girlfriend Astrid Kirchherr to cut his hair in emulation of the hairdo worn by friend Klaus Voormann.

Pete Best

Pete Best was the original drummer of the Beatles. He played with the band during their time as a club act, in both Liverpool and Hamburg, Germany. The band during this time period consisted of Best, bassist Stuart Sutcliffe (see above), and guitarists Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and John Lennon. While Sutcliffe left the band in 1961, and died shortly thereafter, Best continued to perform with the band until 1962 when he was let go and replaced by Ringo Starr.

Other individuals

In addition, members of precursor bands (such as The Quarrymen) like Pete Shotton, Colin Hanton, Len Garry, Eric Griffiths, and Rod Davis, or any one of a number of temporary Beatles drummers, most notably Jimmy Nicol (see below), Andy White (the session drummer for the commonly-heard version of "Love Me Do" and "P.S. I Love You"), Norman Chapman, and Tommy Moore have been discussed in this context, albeit less often. Bassist Chas Newby also performed three gigs with the band after Sutcliffe's departure.

Business, management, and production

Brian Epstein

Brian Epstein

Brian Epstein, the band's manager from 1961 until his death in 1967, was instrumental in the Beatles' rise to global fame. Epstein "discovered" the band in Liverpool, saw their potential, and never wavered in his faith and commitment to them. He purposefully restricted his oversight of the band to business matters and public image, and gave them free creative reign in their music. Epstein also doggedly sought a recording contract for the band in London at a crucial moment in their career, fighting their perception as provincial "northern" musicians.

Epstein's death in essence marked the beginning of the Beatles' dissolution, as Lennon admitted later. Because he was not creatively involved with the band, Epstein was infrequently called the "fifth Beatle", but over the years he and producer George Martin have clearly been recognized as the inner circle members who most profoundly affected the band's career. In an interview in the 1990s describing Epstein's involvement in the band's rise to fame, George Martin declared "He's the fifth Beatle, if there ever was one".

Paul McCartney summarized the importance of Epstein to the Beatles when he was interviewed in 1997 for a BBC documentary about Epstein. He stated: "If anyone was the fifth Beatle, it was Brian." ^[1] Epstein was the inspiration for the forthcoming film The Fifth Beatle by Vivek J. Tiwary, which will be a non-documentary feature film covering the last 6 years of his life, using a mixture of history, fantasy, allegory, dream sequences, and hallucinations.^[3][4]

George Martin

The label is often applied to George Martin, who produced nearly all of the Beatles' recordings (later songs "Real Love" and "Free as a Bird" were produced by Jeff Lynne) and wrote the instrumental score for the Yellow Submarine film and soundtrack album, and the string and horn (and even some vocal) arrangements for almost all of their songs (with the famous exception of the Phil Spector re-production "Let It Be" and of "She's Leaving Home," which was arranged by Mike Leander). His arrangement of the string octet backing for "Eleanor Rigby" was widely noted.

Martin's extensive musical training (which he received at the Guildhall School of Music) and sophisticated guidance in the studio are often credited as fundamental contributions to the work of the Beatles; he was without question a key part of the synergy responsible for transforming a good rock-and-roll group into the most celebrated popular musicians of their era. As writer Ian MacDonald noted, Martin was one of the few record producers in the UK at the time who possessed the sensitivity the Beatles needed to develop their songwriting and recording talent. Martin's piano playing also appears on several of their tracks, including "Misery" and "In My Life". Martin himself deflects claims of being the "fifth Beatle" to Beatles' manager Brian Epstein. More recently, George Martin has inadvertently strengthened his image as the "fifth Beatle" by contributing the only piece of new music on the LOVE soundtrack: a string arrangement on top of George Harrison's solo acoustic demo of While My Guitar Gently Weeps from Anthology 3.

Neil Aspinall

A close personal friend of the group, Neil Aspinall would join The Beatles as their road manager, which included driving his old Commer van to and from shows, both day and night. After Mal Evans started work for The Beatles, Aspinall was promoted to become their personal assistant, and eventually ascended to the position of CEO for Apple Corps (a position he held until April 10, 2007).

Aspinall was involved in court cases on behalf of Apple over the years (including cases against The Beatles' then-manager Allen Klein, their label EMI, and the case against Apple Computer). He supervised the marketing of music, videos, and merchandising for the group. Aspinall also temporarily served as the group's manager following Epstein's death.

Although not a musician, Aspinall also made minor contributions to a handful of the Beatles' recordings. He played a tamboura on "Within You Without You", harmonica on "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!", some percussion on "Magical Mystery Tour", and was among the many participants singing on the chorus of "Yellow Submarine". As mentioned above, Harrison once claimed he, alongside Derek Taylor, was the fifth member.

Derek Taylor

British journalist Derek Taylor first met the band after reviewing their stage performance. Instead of the anticipated negative review of a rock-n-roll group, Taylor gave their act the highest praises. Invited to become acquainted with the Beatles camp, he soon became a confidante, and gained his share of exclusives on them.

Eventually, he was hired away from his newspaper job by Epstein, who put him in charge of Beatles press releases, and playing media liaison to himself and the band. He also became Epstein's personal assistant.

By 1968, he became press officer for Apple Corps. As a VIP at Apple, Taylor had a major role in the company's ups and downs, making or enforcing many crucial business and personal decisions, for the Beatles and Apple's staff, and witnessing many key moments in the latter days of both. As mentioned above, Harrison once claimed he, alongside Aspinall, was the fifth member.

Musical contributors

During the Beatles' existence (specifically, 1960-70 and the Anthology project), several musicians recorded with the Beatles in a more limited capacity, either on a Beatles' album, or on another artist's album with two or more Beatles members appearing. Hence, these artists could be dubbed "the Fifth Beatle" for a single track or two:

Tony Sheridan

While performing in Hamburg between 1960 and 1963, musician Tony Sheridan employed various backup bands. In 1961 the Beatles (comprising Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Pete Best), who had met Sheridan during their first visit to Hamburg in 1960, worked with him on their second. When German Polydor agent Bert Kaempfert saw the pairing on stage, he suggested that they make some recordings together. (At that period in time, Sheridan was the bigger name, with The Beatles as his backing band.) In 1962, after a series of singles (the first of which, "My Bonnie"/"The Saints" made it to #5 in the Hit Parade), Polydor released the album My Bonnie across Germany. The word "Beatles" was judged to sound too similar to the German "Pidels" (pronounce peedles), the plural of a slang term for penis, so the album was credited to "Tony Sheridan and The Beat Brothers". After the Beatles had gained fame, the album was re-released in Britain, with the credit altered to "Tony Sheridan and the Beatles".

Billy Preston

Apart from Sheridan, pianist Billy Preston was the only artist to receive joint credit on a Beatles single, on "Get Back". Preston also played the organ on "Let It Be" and the Fender Rhodes electric piano on "Don't Let Me Down" and "Get Back". Preston had been introduced to the Beatles during the early 1960s, but did not work with them until 1969, when Harrison invited him to join them for recording sessions in order to defuse tensions in the band. Lennon once suggested that Preston join the Beatles, even using the term "Fifth Beatle,"^[5] but the idea was dismissed by the others. On the Let it Be album where Preston's performances are used the song credits list "with Billy Preston," clearly identifying him as separate from the main group, yet also giving him a level of individuality that separated him from studio session players. To distinguish him from the common level of controversy over who is the Fifth Beatle, he is sometimes given the unique title of the "Black Beatle".

Jimmy Nicol

During the band's 1964 tour, Ringo became ill and the Dutch and Danish legs of the tour were almost cancelled. Instead of cancelling, however, the band hired another drummer, Jimmy Nicol, to stand in until Ringo recovered. The photographer following the band for the 1964 tour, Harry Benson, recalls in his book The Beatles in the Beginning, that "John was pleasant to Nicol, Paul was ambivalent, and George downright didn't like him and thought he was too pushy." George and Ringo were close and Ringo felt threatened that he was being replaced, even if it were for just a small portion of the tour.

Nicol made the most of his time in the most famous band. He signed autographs and gave interviews. He was a good drummer too. Eventually there were rumours that Ringo would be replaced, but Jimmy eventually was not accepted as a member of the group, and many fans reacted with disappointment, through letters and telegrams, that Ringo might be replaced. Eventually Ringo rejoined the band on June 14, in Melbourne, Australia. The next day Nicol, after playing a number of concerts in Sydney and Adelaide, giving interviews and signing autographs was escorted to the airport by Brian Epstein and flew home to Britain. It was later reported that Nicol was paid £500 for the gigs and was given a gold watch as a memento.

It is suggested, perhaps apocryphally, that the phrase "It's getting better" in the track "Getting Better" (on the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album) was inspired by Nicol's stock response to repeated solicitous inquiries during his time with the band as to how he was coping.

Other musical "Fifth Beatles"

• Mal Evans, roadie, assistant, and friend. His roles as Hammond organ player on "You Won't See Me," bass-drum pounder on "Yellow Submarine", 'anvil player' on "Maxwell's Silver Hammer," and his solo on alarm clock on "A Day in the Life" should also be taken into account. Evans also played Tambourine on numerous songs, such as Birthday (The Beatles song)
• Nicky Hopkins, who played the electric piano solo on "Revolution".
• Brian Jones, member of The Rolling Stones who played a saxophone solo on "You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)".
• Alan Civil, who played a horn solo on "For No One".
• David Mason, who played the piccolo trumpet solo on "Penny Lane".
• Jackie Lomax, whose minor hit "Sour Milk Sea" was composed by Harrison and had the group (sans Lennon) performing on the track as backing artists. Lomax also appeared on a Beatles recording. While recording his first Apple label solo LP (Is This What You Want?) at Abbey Road Studios, the group, in the midst of recording The White Album, asked Lomax to contribute to the background vocals on the track "Dear Prudence".
• Jeff Lynne, who co-produced and played a number of guitar parts on "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love" for The Beatles Anthology. He and his band, the Electric Light Orchestra was also given the title "The Son Of Beatles" by John Lennon. Furthermore, Lynne has worked with McCartney, Harrison, and Starr in at least some projects.
• Phil Spector, credited as "re-producer" of Let It Be. The January 1969 recordings for the album, produced after a time of tremendous strife among the band members (the filming of the rehearsals for the movie the week before), were unpolished, and sometimes incomplete jam sessions, and the band didn't seem to want to have anything more to do with them. Leaving the tapes with engineer Glyn Johns, they told him to come back with an album, intended to be a live-in-the-studio album. In May 1969, Johns came back with the best he could do, and the Beatles rejected it. Spector had been lobbying for a long time to work with the Beatles, so, in March 1970, he was given the tapes and re-worked them. However, his use of light orchestral overdubs (which some people identify with his famous Wall of Sound style) on a few songs has been controversial, and Let It Be eventually became the only Beatles album to be re-titled and re-released in a substantially different form (Let It Be... Naked), with Spector's overdubs largely removed.
• Klaus Voormann, who was in contact with all the Beatles since the Hamburg days in the early 1960s. He designed the Revolver album cover for them in 1966. In addition, he played bass guitar on many singles and albums released by John, George, and Ringo after the breakup through the mid-1970s. For a time in the early 70s, rumors spread that he would replace Paul in a new configuration of the band, possibly accompanied by Billy Preston. This line-up is sometimes referred to as "The Ladders". (See also: "I'm The Greatest")
• Bernard Purdie, American funk drummer who made a seemingly outlandish claim that he was called in to secretly overdub drum parts for The Beatles' early recordings, which Purdie claimed Ringo never played on. Evidence has come out recently that Purdie in fact overdubbed drum parts onto The Beatles' Tony Sheridan-era material, which Atco owned and which Pete Best played on, in order to "punch up" the recordings when they were re-released in 1964, in an effort to cash in on The Beatles' American arrival.

The Beatles Wives

Three of the Beatles' then/future wives also performed back-up on selected tracks:

• George Harrison's then-wife Pattie Boyd, Paul McCartney's future wife Linda Eastman, and John Lennon's future wife Yoko Ono provided backing vocals on "Birthday". In addition:
• Linda made an uncredited vocal contribution to The Beatles' title song of Let It Be in January 1969.^[6]
• Ono contributed to The White Album with one line of lead vocals (on "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill") and worked with Lennon on the track "Revolution 9".

Other candidates

Other than Epstein and Aspinall, there have been various "non-musician" individuals that have been referred to as or claimed to be "the Fifth Beatle". Notable individuals include:

Notable candidates

• Boxer Muhammad Ali was often referred to as the Fifth Beatle, as a result of his similar effect to society and culture through entertainment: “He was a ‘crossover’ artist before the term found its application in youth culture and the music world; he was the ‘Fifth Beatle,’ a deracinated, classless, alien, anti-establishment figure of broad appeal” ^[7]

Spurious/joke claims

• Murray the K, a New York disc-jockey who was jokingly dubbed the "fifth Beatle" by George Harrison. Murray was one of the few who actually promoted himself with the title of Fifth Beatle. He is credited with coining the term "Fifth Beatle" when he referred to himself on air as such in 1964.
• George Best, star footballer of the 1960s, shared last name with Pete Best and celebrity lifestyle. Best was dubbed "The Fifth Beatle" and "El Beatle" by the Portuguese press after scoring two goals for Manchester United in a 5 - 1 victory in Lisbon against Benfica in the European Cup in 1965. [2][3][4].
• William Stuart Campbell, Paul McCartney's replacement according to the "Paul is dead" theory.
• Tatsuya Ishida, comic artist, creator of Sinfest comic strip, jokingly called himself "fifth Beatle" in the epigraph of his strip "Conscious Again"[5] in 2000.
• Little Richard, whose gift for flamboyant self-promotion is legendary, good-naturedly claims to have "taught the Beatles everything they knew" and at times has laid claim to the title. Indeed, Richard's songs and style influenced the early Beatles, and Paul McCartney's powerful vocal covers of his songs such as "Long Tall Sally" were important in the Beatles' early career. In reality, Richards' personal interaction with the Beatles occurred over a few days in early 1963, when the Beatles were second bill to Richard at several UK performances.
• Broadcaster Brian Matthew, who introduced Saturday Club on the BBC Light Programme during the 1960s, remarked on a 2006 edition of BBC Radio 2's Sounds of the 60s (15 July 2006) that, not only had Best been accorded the "fifth Beatle" eponym, but that he himself had, on one occasion, been referred to as such.
• Ed Rudy, the only American news reporter to travel with The Beatles on their entire first U.S. visit[6].
• New York–based DJ Roby Yonge, whose high profile at WABC-AM helped perpetuate the "Paul is dead" theory.[7]
• Stephen Colbert, who on the January 28, 2009 The Colbert Report asked ex-Beatle Paul McCartney if he could be the fifth Beatle, to which Paul replied no.

Fictional Fifth Beatles

• Eddie Murphy starred in a 1983 Saturday Night Live sketch, playing the role of Clarence Walker, a man who claimed to be the fifth Beatle, as saxophonist, who was kicked out by Lennon and McCartney because they wanted to steal the glory. The sketch featured Clarence's "proof" of his claims: Some out-of-tune saxophone and backing vocal parts clumsily overdubbed on a few Beatles songs, and an obviously phony picture of Clarence standing in the middle of the four Beatles. When the clearly unbelieving TV show host (portrayed by Joe Piscopo) demands further proof of his claims, Clarence offers up a recording of a Beatles song played 'backwards', which reveals two Liverpudlian accented males declaring 'Hey Paul, let's get rid of Clarence and steal all of his good ideas!' [8]
• Another Saturday Night Live sketch in 1988 portrayed controversial John Lennon biographer Albert Goldman as the fifth Beatle In the sketch, Goldman was the group's former tuba player who wrote the Lennon biography in revenge for being fired from the group.[9]
• In one episode of Roseanne, John Goodman's character Dan Conner jokingly referred to himself as the fifth Beatle when Roseanne mentions a crush on Paul McCartney.
• In 2001, Dan Bern wrote a humorous song/story entitled "The Fifth Beatles". Bern imagines a world in which Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain and various other well-known musicians do stints as members of the band.[10]
• In the episode "Lisa the Vegetarian" of The Simpsons animated television show featuring Paul and Linda McCartney included a scene in which Apu Nahasapeemapetilon claimed to be the fifth Beatle (though he mispronounces it "Bee-at-el" (rhymes with Seattle, also the same mispronunciation used by the Eastern cult in the film Help!); Paul rolls his eyes and says "Sure you were, Apu."
• An edition of BBC comedy Fist of Fun featured a "special guest" (played by Kevin Eldon) who claimed to be the tenth Beatle, on the basis that there were only five people with better claim to be the fifth Beatle than him. The fact that he was born in 1971 didn't appear to be a problem to the man; he remarks, with some wonder, "If I had been born twenty years earlier, I could have been the fifth Beatle!"
• In the Blizzard RTS PC game Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne, the Crypt Lord Anub'arak says "I'm the fifth beetle" after being repeatedly clicked on.
• In the film The Million Dollar Hotel, the character Dixie (played by Peter Stormare) believes himself to be the fifth Beatle.
• The Rutles's All You Need Is Cash refers to a "fifth Rutle", "Leppo", who "disappeared [in Hamburg] after stepping into a small chest with a small German fraulein".

Notes

External links

• 5th Beatle on Dogonaut
• "The Fifth Beatle" Website (A website about a proposed movie about Epstein)

References

Benson, Harry, The Beatles In The Beginning. New York: Universe Publishing, 1993. ISBN 0-87663-642-3.

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