Beatles vs. Stones Read online

Given the scarcity and hardship that afflicted all of England in the immediate postwar period (to say nothing of the difficulties of drawing class distinctions), it is important to put the differences between the Beatles’ and the Stones’ backgrounds in careful perspective. A good treatment of the Beatles’ origins can be found in Steven D. Stark’s Meet the Beatles: A Cultural History of the Band that Shook Youth, Gender, and the World. Yes, Stark points out, the Beatles came from downtrodden Liverpool, but John, Paul, and George all resided in the city’s leafy suburban districts, on the “good side” of the Mersey River. (Only Ringo came from central Liverpool; he was born in a ramshackle row house in a notorious neighborhood called the Dingle.) Lennon was the sole Beatle who was fortunate enough to grow up in a home with indoor plumbing, but that is not quite as remarkable as it might seem, since fewer than half of British homes had indoor toilets in that period. And while Paul and George were both raised half a mile apart in state-subsidized “council houses,” their quarters carried none of the stigma attached to American-style housing projects. Their homes got very cold in the winter, but they still compared favorably to the lodgings of many working-class families at that time.

  Many years later, George’s older sister, Louise, quibbled with the perception that their family was so rough-and-tumble poor. “My father drove a bus, and Mom looked after us at home,” she said. “Occasionally she would take a job at about Christmas time . . . but we never thought of ourselves as poor or anything. Afterward you read these stories about The Beatles growing up in slums and all this kind of stuff. . . . [But] we had a good, warm, friendly family life.” And in one of his final interviews, Lennon stressed that his childhood hardly resembled “the poor slummy kind of image that was projected in all the Beatles’ stories.”

  Naturally, when the Beatles were growing up, they all endured the UK’s rationing of food and petrol. Fresh eggs, fresh milk, and juice were hard to come by. All four Beatles would have walked and played amidst bombed-out buildings and charred rubble left over from the war. The dazzling array of consumer goods and leisure opportunities that so many American teens enjoyed during the booming 1950s would have been completely foreign to them. But by the standards of their day, only Ringo—who in addition to being poor, was afflicted by two major childhood illnesses—suffered real deprivation.

  Growing up, the Rolling Stones were also familiar with rationing and wartime rubble, but they were better off than the Beatles. Brian Jones, the group’s charismatic founder and early leader, came from an upper-middle-class home in Cheltenham; his father was an aerospace engineer and church leader. Mick Jagger was from Dartford, Kent; his well-educated father was an assistant schoolmaster and college phys ed instructor, and his mother was a hairdresser (an occupation that carries a bit more prestige in England than in the States). According to the Stones’ official 1965 biography, Jagger was raised in a climate of “middle-class ‘gentility.’ ” His three-bedroom childhood home had a name (Newlands), and when he was young his family vacationed in Spain and St. Tropez. Keith Richards likewise came from Dartford. After briefly attending the same primary school as Jagger, his parents migrated to a drab, cheaply built council estate, but they never gave up their middle-class aspirations. In response, Richards cultivated what he later described as “an inverted snobbery.” “One was proud to come from the lowest part of town—and play the guitar too,” he boasted. “Grammar school people were considered pansies, twerps.” Only the Stones’ two peripheral members, Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts, were solidly working class: Bill’s dad was a bricklayer, and Charlie’s drove a truck. But in spite of England’s strict class hierarchy, whereby sons typically marched lock-step into the same types of professions as their fathers, both young men could afford to be fairly optimistic about their prospects by the time they joined the Stones: Watts was working as a graphic designer, and Wyman held a department store job while playing bass semiprofessionally.

  Furthermore, the Stones came from Southern England, and the Beatles from the North. Differences between the two regions were stark. Writing in 1845, Benjamin Disraeli described Northern and Southern England as “Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy,” and a hundred odd years later, the situation had hardly changed. “To Londoners,” Steven Stark writes, “Liverpool seemed almost like the frontier—impertinent, emotional, and a lot less important than the capital city, which was considered the center of almost everything the establishment considered English.” Liverpool actually may have had a more robust music scene than London, but as fledgling musicians with thick Scouse accents, the Beatles knew the odds were stacked against them. “With us being from Liverpool,” Harrison remembered, “people would always say, ‘You’ve got to be from London to make it.’ They thought we were hicks or something.”

  George was correct: initially, the Beatles were seriously disadvantaged by their origins (maybe even more than they realized). Certainly Decca executive Dick Rowe—aka “The Man Who Turned Down the Beatles”—had Liverpool on his mind after he heard the group’s audition tape in early 1962. It’s not that he thought the Beatles were bad, but with limited resources, his company had to make a choice: they could sign the Beatles, or they could go with Brian Poole and the Tremeloes. Many years later he explained that his unfortunate decision had rested, at least in part, upon the fact that Brian Poole was from London. That meant that his staff “could spend night and day with Brian at no cost to the company, whereas Liverpool is a long way away. You’ve got to get a [steam-powered] train. You’ve got a hotel bill to pay. You don’t know how long you’re going to be up there. And London is so very strange about the north of England. There’s sort of an expression that if you live in London, you really don’t know anywhere north of Watford. So, you see, Liverpool could have been Greenland to us then.” Mick Jagger’s old flame Marianne Faithfull likewise confessed that geographic prejudice against the Beatles was rampant among her charmed circle of friends. “We looked at them as being very provincial, very straight, sort of a little behind the London people,” she said. Only later did she conclude that that attitude was “very patronizing and not really true.”

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  Of course it would be unfair, and even stupid, to draw too much from this—to infer that the Beatles were “thugs” or that the Stones were “gentlemen”—based upon where they came from. More relevant is the knowledge that growing up, three of the four Beatles were known troublemakers, and the charismatic John Lennon was easily the group’s most loutish member. On that last point, the historical record is so unequivocal that it is almost unseemly to delve into the details. Going all the way back to primary school, Lennon is remembered as a garden-variety delinquent—the type of kid who would pocket the change he was instructed to deposit in the church collection box, and pilfer from his aunt’s handbag. He would hitch free rides on the bumpers of tram cars, steal cigarettes and then sell them, pull down girls’ underpants, vandalize phone booths, set stuff on fire, act the clown in class, skip detention, gamble, pick fights, and arouse fear in others as he and his friends tooled around on their bicycles. He was, by his own admission, the “King Pin” of that age group, and many years later, an erstwhile neighbor could only remark, “Running into John Lennon and his gang in Woolton on their bikes was not an enjoyable social encounter.”

  Lennon continued in this vein when he attended the Liverpool College of Art, where, according to biographer Ray Coleman, “His work, erratically presented, was the last thing [his teachers] worried about.” Instead, they fretted about his incredible capacity for causing trouble. Armed with a caustic wit, Lennon could be spectacularly cruel; one classmate remembered, “He was the biggest micky-take I’ve ever met. He picked on all kinds of characters in school, whatever their backgrounds, and tried to find some way of laughing at them.” For some inexplicable reason, anyone who was physically afflicted, whether by disability or injury, was especially likely to be targeted by Lennon. Drinking only seemed to exacerbate his meanness, and a
ccording to his first wife, Cynthia, “he had a very small capacity before he became aggressive.” With women, Lennon was a notorious cad. He was obnoxiously possessive of whomever he dated, yet rarely faithful to anyone and disparaging of those who were too timid to go to bed with him. His best childhood friend, Pete Shotton, explained that Lennon “came to be regarded, by all but his small circle of friends, as thoroughly bad news. Even I sometimes worried that he seemed destined for Skid Row.”

  Of course, Lennon had many appealing qualities as well. It was not unusual for him to show flashes of the warmth and sensitivity that he would later become well known for, and his friends always reckoned that his obnoxious behavior was merely his way of camouflaging his pain and vulnerability. Though Hunter Davies’s authorized biography of the Beatles implies that Lennon may have had a happy childhood, in fact he had a terrible one. His father, Alf, abandoned him when he was very young, and later his mother, Julia—always a bit of a floozy—left him in the custody of his aunt Mimi and uncle George (the latter of whom died unexpectedly in 1955). As a young teenager, Lennon began reconnecting with his mother, but the rapprochement was confusing, to say the least: In 1979, Lennon recorded an audio diary, which surfaced in 2008, in which he reminisced about a time he’d laid in bed with his mother when he was fourteen. Somehow, he touched her breast, and then he wondered about trying something more. Then when Lennon was seventeen, Julia was struck and killed by an errant driver. “It was the worst thing that ever happened to me,” Lennon said. “We’d caught up so much, me and Julia, in just a few years.”

  In losing a parent, Lennon had something in common with Paul McCartney, whose mother Mary died from complications of breast cancer surgery when he was just fourteen. His choirboy looks notwithstanding, Paul likewise sometimes engaged in aberrant teenage behavior, though nothing to rival Lennon’s. He would merely play hooky and steal trifling things, like cigarettes, and on one occasion he may have helped steal some valuable audio equipment from a local church. Later, McCartney seemed chagrined about his uninspiring values: “All I wanted was women, money, and clothes,” he said. According to one biographer, “Without question one of young Paul’s greatest natural attributes was his smooth sense of diplomacy and persuasive charm. Apprehended red-handed perpetrating any number of naughty boyish pranks . . . he generally managed to weasel his way out.”

  The youngest Beatle, George Harrison, likewise managed to stay clear of any real trouble when he was growing up, in spite of being incredibly laxly supervised. “They let me stay out all night and have a drink when I wanted to,” he said of his parents. “That’s probably why I don’t really like alcohol much today. I’d had it all by the age of ten.” Still, George embarked on a classic anticonformist, teenage rebellion trip, stubbornly disobeying his teachers, altering his school uniform, slicking his hair back with gobs of pomade, and tramping through Liverpool in blue suede shoes. “From about the age of thirteen, all we were interested in was rock ’n’ roll,” remembered one of his friends. Of the four Beatles, Ringo is the only one whose childhood reputation seems unblemished by any dubious activities. Whether this speaks to his affable good nature, or his instinct for self-preservation, is hard to know. The hoodlums who prowled around the Dingle operated on a whole different order of magnitude than, say, John Lennon’s bicycle gang. It was the type of place, Ringo recalled, where “You kept your head down, your eyes open, and you didn’t get in anybody’s way.”

  Ringo also was not with the Beatles during most of their trips to Hamburg, Germany (though he, too, regularly performed there, as the drummer for Rory Storm and the Hurricanes). Still, Beatles scholars agree that the Hamburg experience was formative. Forced to adhere to a brutally demanding schedule, that is where they honed their individual skills, matured into a tightly knit unit, and were introduced, via the beautiful photographer Astrid Kirchherr, to the haircuts that evolved into the mop top. Hamburg is also the place where the Beatles—consisting of John, Paul, George, drummer Pete Best, and bassist Stu Sutcliffe—enjoyed an almost unimaginably debauched lifestyle of drink, women, and pills punctuated occasionally by violence (though Pete refrained from the pills, and Stu shied away from the women except for Astrid). If a few music-industry insiders in the early 1960s regarded the Beatles as “thugs,” their sojourns in Hamburg—where they held residencies at four different nightclubs over a twenty-eight-month period—are part of the reason why.

  Hamburg bears some similarities to Liverpool—both are seaports, home to migrant communities, that endured strafing attacks during World War Two, and the two cities even share the same line of latitude (56 degrees North). But the St. Pauli district, where the Beatles played, made Liverpool’s roughest neighborhood, Scottie Road, seem almost tranquil. St. Pauli may even have been the most stereotypically “sinful” place in the world. All of the clubs the Beatles played—the Star-Club, the Kaiserkeller, the Top Ten, and the Indra—were on or around the Reeperbahn, the street known to Germans as die sündige Meile (the sinful mile). It teemed with strippers, prostitutes, petty criminals, and the worst types of itinerants who intermingled in brothels, sex clubs, and dark and grotty bars controlled by mobsters. The Beatles, meanwhile, ranged in age from seventeen to twenty when they initially visited Hamburg, and for the first time in their lives, they had a wee bit of money in their pockets. It was a recipe for mayhem.

  As performers, the Beatles were famously encouraged to “mach shau” (put on a lively show), and when they were jacked up on amphetamines and saturated with beer—as was often the case—they had little trouble generating excitement. Though merely a bar band at this point, specializing in American rock ’n’ roll numbers from the likes of Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, and Carl Perkins, they played faster and harder than most of their peers, and their inspired performances quickly helped them to earn an intense following. With his open-legged stance before the microphone, Lennon was an especially physical presence, and he is said by biographer Philip Norman to have sometimes gone “berserk” in Hamburg’s clubs, “prancing and groveling in imitation of any rock ’n’ roller or movie monster his dazzled mind could summon up. The fact that their audience could not understand a word they said provoked John into cries of ‘Seig Heil!’ and ‘Fucking Nazis!’ to which the audience invariably responded by laughing and clapping.” Other times, Lennon would pass out drunk behind a piano, leaving the others to play without him. A 1962 bootleg recording documents a performance at the Star Club where Lennon sung the lyrics to “Shimmy Shake” as “shitty shitty,” and Paul introduced “Besame Mucho” as “a special request for Hitler.” The entire band ate, drank, and smoked on stage, and occasionally they found themselves throwing furniture around while staging mock fights. Once, Lennon played in his underwear, with a toilet seat around his neck. Locals sometimes referred to them as the verrüchte Beatles (the crazy Beatles). And of course, the Beatles outfitted themselves in leather gear from head to toe.

  Sex in Hamburg was easily obtained for the handsome Beatles—far more so than in England—and their attitude toward it was unembarrassed. Pete Best claims that the band regularly took to partner swapping, and that each member averaged “two or three girls each night,” depending on their stamina. Even if he’s exaggerating (as seems likely), his bandmates have confirmed that they regularly brought women back to their cramped quarters for late-night romps. “It was a sex shock,” McCartney explained. “We got a very swift baptism of fire into the sex scene. There was a lot of it about and we were off the leash.” Lennon put the matter a bit more forthrightly: “Between the whores and the groupies our dicks all just about dropped off.”

  Amid all of these chaotic indulgences, dangerous undercurrents of violence pulsed through Hamburg. Many of the waiters and barmen in the clubs the Beatles played doubled as professional criminals; the whole lot of them carried switchblades, truncheons, and lead-weighted saps. Sometimes, as the Beatles were packing up their gear at the end of a long night, patrons who’d run afoul of the waiters would
still be lying half dead on the floor. In other instances, bar fights became so riotous they could only be quashed with teargas, which of course sent everyone (Beatles included) pouring out of the club, crying and wheezing. “Virtually every night at the Indra some poor bastard was either bottled, knifed, or worse,” Lennon recalled.

  Usually the Beatles merely witnessed the horrific violence, but on a few occasions they acted like common roughnecks. Some of their worst behavior may have been accentuated by the fact that they grew accustomed to gobbling slimming pills called “Prellies” (Preludin). Now off the market, these little blue pills could loosen a person’s inhibitions, keep him awake, and put him seriously on edge. In one legendary incident, Paul and Stu schau gemacht (made a show) when they fell into fisticuffs during the middle of a set. Another time, while playing cards in their flat above the Star-Club, John drunkenly struck someone upside the head with a beer bottle. “Within seconds the fellow [Lennon struck] had gotten up and knocked the hell out of John, pasting him all over the flat,” remembers a friend. “And all of us stood there and let him do it, because we agreed that you don’t go round hitting people on the head with bottles and expect to get away with it.” A long-circulating rumor holds that when he was especially sozzled, Lennon would sometimes find a perch from which to urinate on the heads of nuns who passed by on the streets below. In another despicable episode from his Hamburg career, Lennon once proposed that the Beatles should mug a drunken sailor they’d just met. Paul and George proved too timid to execute the plan, so John and Pete were left to attack the tipsy mariner on a dark corner, at which point they got more than they bargained for: their victim retaliated with a fierce volley of punches and then whipped out what the two Beatles thought was a pistol. In fact, the sailor’s gun only shot teargas pellets, but it was enough to send two assailants scrambling for their lives.