This would be a kind of desolate photo anyway, but it’s even more so when you know that’s Jimmy Nicol, temporary Beatle… that’s him at Melbourne airport after completing his task of filling in for Ringo on the Fabs’ mid-1964 tour when the latter was ill; once he was good to go again, Nicol was good to go back to the UK and obscurity. I found this on Threads via the Flashbak account there, and some of the commenters on that post were kind of swooning about what a great experience that must’ve been and how he’d always be able to say he’d been a Beatle. And I was interested to discover George Harrison actually threatened to pull out of the tour if Ringo couldn’t play; once they’d calmed him down and all agreed that getting someone to take Ringo’s place was better than just cancelling those shows, Jimmy was brought on board as the ringer for Ringo (sorry).
But what good did it do him? Piss all, apparently; he went from being a relative nobody to the fame of being Ringo’s stunt double and being huge for ten days and then pretty much back to relative nobodyness. Nine months after his Beatles stint, he was bankrupt. Apparently when Paul McCartney read this news, he was moved enough to get him a gig with Peter and Gordon on their 1965 tour, and that seems to have been all he otherwise got from the Beatles. By and large it seems he’d rather forget having been a Beatle, and apparently when he was approached to be part of the Anthology he refused. Per Wiki, he’s apparently still alive but hasn’t been seen in public since the early 2010s. And that photo just became so much grimmer after I’d done that bit of reading on him.
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