Beatles vs. Stones Read online

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  CONTENTS

  Epigraph

  Soundtrack

  Introduction

  CHAPTER ONE

  Gentlemen or Thugs?

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Shit, That’s the Beatles!”

  CHAPTER THREE

  A Particular Form of Snobbery

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Yankophilia

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Politics and Imagecraft

  CHAPTER SIX

  Wheel-Dealing in the Pop Jungle

  Epilogue

  Photographs

  Shout Outs

  About the Author

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Index

  For my parents

  The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

  —F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

  SOUNDTRACK

  (Recommended)

  The Beatles

  “Shimmy Shake” (2:28) (Live at the Star Club)

  Bo Diddley

  “Pretty Thing” (2:48)

  The Shirelles

  “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” (2:43)

  The Beatles

  “Love Me Do” (2:22)

  The Rolling Stones

  “Come On” (1:48)

  The Beatles

  “I Wanna Be Your Man” (2:00)

  The Rolling Stones

  “I Wanna Be Your Man” (1:49)

  The Beatles

  “Yesterday” (2:03)

  The Rolling Stones

  “As Tears Go By” (2:45)

  Bob Dylan

  “Girl from the North Country” (3:22)

  The Kinks

  “See My Friends” (2:50)

  The Byrds

  “Bells of Rhymney” (3:35)

  The Animals

  “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” (3:17)

  The Beatles

  “Drive My Car” (2:28)

  The Beatles

  “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” (2:05)

  The Rolling Stones

  “Paint It, Black” (3:22) (stereo album mix)

  The Rolling Stones

  “Stupid Girl” (2:55)

  The Rolling Stones

  “Let’s Spend the Night Together” (3:36)

  The Beatles

  “All You Need Is Love” (3:47)

  The Rolling Stones

  “We Love You” (4:35)

  The Rolling Stones

  “Street Fighting Man” (3:16)

  The Beatles

  “Revolution” (3:21)

  The Beatles

  “Hey Jude” (7:11)

  The Dirty Mac

  “Yer Blues” (4:39) (Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus)

  Yoko Ono

  “Whole Lotta Yoko” (5:03) (Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus)

  The Rolling Stones

  “Sympathy for the Devil” (8:52) (Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus)

  INTRODUCTION

  In the summer of 1968, Mick Jagger attended a birthday party in his honor at a hip, new Moroccan-style bar called the Vesuvio Club—“one of the best clubs London has ever seen,” remembered Tony Sanchez, one of its proprietors. Under black lights and beautiful tapestries, some of London’s trendiest models, artists, and pop singers lounged around on huge cushions and took pulls from Turkish hookahs, while a decorated helium-filled dirigible floated aimlessly around the room. As a special treat, Mick brought along an advance pressing of the Stones’ forthcoming album, Beggars Banquet, and when it played over the club’s speakers, people flooded the dance floor. Just as the crowd was “leaping around” and celebrating the record—which would soon win accolades as the best Stones album to date—Paul McCartney strolled in and passed Sanchez a copy of the Beatles’ forthcoming single, “Hey Jude” / “Revolution,” which had never before been heard by anyone outside of the group’s charmed inner circle. As Sanchez remembered, the “slow thundering buildup of ‘Hey Jude’ shook the club,” and the crowd demanded that the seven-minute song be played again and again. Finally, the club’s disc jockey played the next song, and everyone heard “John Lennon’s nasal voice pumping out ‘Revolution.’ ” “When it was over,” Sanchez said, “Mick looked peeved. The Beatles had upstaged him.”

  “It was a wicked piece of promotional one-upsmanship,” remembered Tony Barrow, the Beatles’ press officer. By that time, the mostly good-natured rivalry between the Beatles and the Stones had been going on for about four years. Although the Beatles were more commercially successful than the Stones, throughout the 1960s the two groups nevertheless competed for record sales, cultural influence, and aesthetic credibility. Teens on both sides of the Atlantic defined themselves by whether they preferred the Beatles or the Stones. “If you truly loved pop music in the 1960s . . . there was no ducking the choice and no cop-out third option,” one writer remarked. “You could dance with them both, but there could never be any doubt about which one you’d take home.”

  Initially the rivalry was strongest in England. The Beatles began inspiring mass adulation among young teenage girls in the spring of 1963, but it soon became apparent that the group’s invigorating music and seductive charm worked on adults as well. The Fab Four couldn’t quite win over everyone—they were too unusual for that—but conventional wisdom held that the Beatles were a wonderful tonic to a society that was finally ready to shed the last vestiges of Victorian Era restraint. Their effect on British popular culture was said to be salutary, pitch-perfect, and perfectly timed.

  The Rolling Stones provoked a different reaction. Pale and unkempt, they did not bother with stage uniforms, and they were not often polite. Instead of laboring to win the affection of the broader public, they feigned indifference to mainstream opinion. Musically, they favored American electric blues—an obscure genre in England that was championed by adolescent males as well as females, and that was most suitably performed in dark ’n’ sweaty, smoke-filled rooms. Those who were faint of heart, or who enjoyed a prim sense of propriety, knew to stay away from the Stones. Adults regarded them as a menace.

  That is one of the reasons that the debate over which band was better, the Beatles or the Stones, was freighted with such deep significance. To say that you were a Beatles fan was to imply that (just like the Fab Four) you were well adjusted, amiable, and polite. You were not a prig, necessarily, but nor were you the type to challenge social conventions. For the most part, you conformed. You agreed. You complied. When you looked upon the world that you were bound to inherit, you were pleased.

  To align with the Rolling Stones was to convey the opposite message. It meant you wanted to smash stuff, break it and set it on fire. “The Beatles want to hold your hand,” journalist Tom Wolfe once quipped, “but the Stones want to burn down your town.”

  Fans registered their loyalty in readers’ polls conducted by music papers such as New Musical Express and Record Mirror. Whenever one group displaced the other at the top of the music chart, the news ran under a screeching headline, as if the Beatles and the Stones were football rivals or opposing candidates in a high-stakes election. People also tended to be deeply entrenched in their opinions. Beatles fans were often so devoted to the group that they would hear nothing against the Beatles. Youths who were in thrall to the Stones tended to be equally intransigent; they
simply would not abide any criticism of their idols.

  It is sometimes said that the “rivalry” between the Beatles and the Stones was just a myth, concocted by sensationalizing journalists and naïve teenyboppers. In reality, we are told, the two groups were always friendly, admiring, and supportive of each other. It is doubtful, however, that their relations were ever so cozy or uncomplicated. The two groups clearly struck up a rapport, but that never stopped them from trying to outperform each other wherever and however they could. And as most people understand, emulous competition rarely nourishes a friendship; more often it breeds anxiety, suspicion, and envy.

  It is little wonder, then, that in some respects the Beatles and the Stones simply could not help but act like rival bands. Ensconced in West London, the Stones fancied themselves as hip cosmopolitans. They were obsessed with a particular style of “cool”—which they associated with reticence and self-possession—and so they were bemused by the Beatles’ amiable goofball shtick: their corny repartee and their obvious eagerness to please. Furthermore, the Beatles came from the North Country: the industrialized and economically depressed region in England that the young Stones had always assumed was a culturally barren wasteland. Not only were they wrong about that, but like most Merseysiders, the Beatles were sensitive to even the hint of condescension. That may help to explain why when the two groups were first getting acquainted, the successful Beatles sometimes seemed to lord it over the Stones.

  Before long, however, the Beatles began to feel stifled by their cuddly, mop-top image, and they envied the Stones for their relative freedom of movement. The Beatles may also have been rankled as the Stones gained greater credibility with the “right” types of fans: discerning bohemians, as opposed to hysterical teenyboppers. Of all the Beatles, John Lennon especially hated to have to stifle his personality the way he often did. Later, he would be annoyed by the way that underground newspapers portrayed the Stones as left-wing political heroes, while the Beatles were associated with the hippies’ soft idealism.

  The Beatles and the Stones also represent two sides of one of the twentieth century’s greatest aesthetic debates. To this day, when people want to get to know each other better, they often ask: “Beatles or Stones?” A preference for one group over the other is thought to reveal something substantial about one’s personality, judgment, or temperament. The clichés about the two groups are sometimes overdrawn, but they still retain a measure of plausibility. With some qualifications, the Beatles may be described as Apollonian, the Stones as Dionysian; the Beatles pop, the Stones rock; the Beatles erudite, the Stones visceral; the Beatles utopian, the Stones realistic.

  None of the other famous dueling paradigms—say, in literature, painting, or architecture—tend to draw people into conversation like the Beatles and the Stones. How could they? The Beatles and Stones were popular artists of unprecedented magnitude; their worldwide record sales are by now uncountable.

  Obviously the two groups shared a great deal in common; so too did their fans. Had he lived long enough, Sigmund Freud—that master of unmasking human motivations—might have understood the Beatles-Stones debate in terms of “the narcissism of small differences.” “It is precisely the minor differences in people who are otherwise alike that form the basis of hostility between them,” Freud wrote. Nevertheless, it is the opposing qualities of the Beatles and the Stones—which are widely known and well understood—that make comparison irresistible. Chances are, if you’re reading this book, you already have an informed opinion about which group was better.

  Moi-même, I don’t try to adjudicate the question here. Many others have already done so and anyhow, I’m not a rock critic; I’m an historian. In this joint biography, I’ve merely juxtaposed the Beatles and the Stones, examined their interrelations, and shown how their rivalry was constructed. That is not to say that I don’t hold a preference for one group over the other (of course I do), but rather that it is outside the purview of this book.

  Besides, when rational criticism prevails, both groups are lauded. When they were in their prime, the Beatles and the Stones were both irreducibly great. Is that to repeat a dogma? Sure. But that doesn’t make what they accomplished any less remarkable. Somehow, the young men who made up the Beatles and the Stones managed not only to find each other, but also to burnish their talents collectively. Both groups melded and alchemized into huge creative forces that were substantially greater than the sum of their collective parts. They came of age during one of the most fertile and exciting periods in the history of popular music, and they exerted a commanding presence.

  That, anyhow, is my own view. And I know I’m not alone. Marianne Faithfull, who dated Mick Jagger in the late ’60s, recalled the evening that I mentioned earlier, when members of the Beatles and the Stones turned up at that trendy nightclub and showed off their latest creations for all their friends: Beggars Banquet, and “Hey Jude” and “Revolution.” “Vesuvio closed a couple of weeks later,” Marianne said, “but the feeling in the room that night was: aren’t we all the greatest bunch of young geniuses to grace the planet and isn’t this the most amazing time to be alive? And I don’t think it was just the drugs.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  GENTLEMEN OR THUGS?

  If you wanted to measure the distance between what the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were really like, before they became famous, versus the heavily mediated, highly stylized images they projected to their fans, you might seek the perspective of someone who not only knew both groups, but who also knew exactly what they were up to when they went about crafting their public personas. That person would be Sean O’Mahony, a successful London-based publisher who frequently wrote under the nom de guerre “Johnny Dean.” In August 1963, O’Mahony began putting out The Beatles Monthly Book, the group’s fan magazine (usually known simply as The Beatles Book). By December, he was selling about 330,000 Beatles Books each month. Then in June 1964, he launched the similarly minded Rolling Stones Book.

  These were both official fan magazines, and naturally, before O’Mahony was awarded the rights to publish them, he had to win each group’s trust and affection.

  He met the Beatles for the first time in May 1963, when they appeared at London’s Playhouse Theatre to record some songs for the influential BBC radio program Saturday Club. “As soon as I shook hands with John, Paul, George, and Ringo, I realized this wasn’t going to be one of their jokey encounters with the press,” O’Mahony recollected. Instead, the group peppered him with questions and suggestions. “Editing their magazine meant that they would have to admit someone new to their inner circle,” he explained, “and put up with me in their dressing rooms, recording studios, homes—in fact, virtually everywhere they went.” Since O’Mahony was already acquainted with the Rolling Stones’ managers—Andrew Loog Oldham and Eric Easton—the sussing out process would not have been as formal, but presumably he had to reassure them as well.

  Though the Beatles and the Rolling Stones regularly appeared in all of the British music periodicals (Melody Maker, Record Mirror, New Musical Express, Disc, Music Echo) as well the nation’s teenage pop magazines (Boyfriend, Jackie, Fabulous, Rave, Valentine), O’Mahony operated from a special vantage: awarded the sole and exclusive rights to publish their profit-oriented fan magazines, he became thickly intertwined in a socio-professional relationship with Epstein, Oldham and Easton, and the groups they managed. Whatever O’Mahony’s private knowledge or feelings, his acquiescence was complete. In 1964, when journalist Michael Braun released his book Love Me Do!—a gossipy account of his travels with the Beatles during the first flush of Beatlemania, which rather contradicted the group’s “squeaky clean” image—its publication was not even mentioned in The Beatles Book. Nor was O’Mahony eager to reveal that John Lennon was married, since Epstein feared that that knowledge would adversely affect the band’s popularity with teenage girls. When publishing photos of the Beatles, O’Mahony often turned to retouch artists who would fix any splotches or blemishes on the
ir faces, thereby making sure they were “the sort of pictures Brian wanted fans to see.”

  In other words, O’Mahony in this period closely resembled a Madison Avenue flack. Whatever inside information he had, he would never have wanted to print anything truly revelatory about John or Paul, or Mick or Keith or Brian. Instead, his magazines were merely platforms; they were meant to promote the Beatles and the Rolling Stones’ carefully considered “brands” meticulously.

  Many years later, though, when he had no need to belie his true feelings, he summed up the two groups this way: “The Beatles were thugs who were put across as nice blokes, and the Rolling Stones were gentlemen who were made into thugs by Andrew.” Like many summations, this one may be a little too neat. But it’s much closer to the truth than either band would like to have admitted during most of the 1960s.

  • • •

  “Thuggery” is of course a moral category, not a socioeconomic one, but much has been made of the fact that, however sunny their dispositions, the Beatles emerged from dreary old Liverpool, a declining industrial seaport that was pummeled by the German Luftwaffe during World War Two. Diversely populated, but largely consisting of the descendants of Irish refugees, Liverpool’s hub teemed with roughhewn seamen and grimy pubs, and was almost completely lacking in refinement. Owing to some measure of pride, obstinacy, and self-deprecation, many Liverpudlians self-identified as “Scousers,” but elsewhere in England, the term was applied purely with derision. By contrast, the Stones came from the outskirts of London. Though hardly affluent, on the whole they grew up a bit more comfortably than the Beatles, and in Britain’s class-riven society, the distinction mattered enormously. “We were the ones that were looked down upon as animals by the Southerners, the Londoners,” John Lennon remembered.