Beatles vs. Stones Read online

  Epstein usually claimed that this was the fated episode that brought the Beatles to his attention and piqued his curiosity so much that he decided to attend one of their lunchtime engagements at the Cavern Club (which happened to be only about a three-minute walk from his store). This could be so, but it’s hard to believe. Since July 1961, the Beatles were regularly featured in Bill Harry’s Mersey Beat, a music newspaper that Epstein not only distributed at NEMS, but that also featured his own record reviews. Even though Brian’s personal tastes were more for Mozart and Shakespeare than rock ’n’ roll, it seems likely that the enterprising record store manager would have at least recognized the name of one of Liverpool’s most popular bands—especially since they played regularly just around the corner.

  In any event, it was on November 9, 1961, that Brian and his trusty personal assistant Alistair Taylor ventured down the stairs into the Cavern, where they saw the Beatles for the first time. “Inside the club it was as black as a deep grave, dank and damp and smelly and I regretted my decision to come,” Epstein later wrote in his memoir, A Cellarful of Noise. The Beatles, though, impressed him incredibly favorably. He was “fascinated” by their “pounding bass beat” and “vast engulfing sound,” and he could not help but notice the charged enthusiasm of their audience, which numbered about two hundred. He was also struck by the group’s rough exterior and devil-may-care attitude. “They were not very tidy and not very clean,” he remembered. “They smoked as they played and ate and talked and pretended to hit each other. They turned their backs on the audience and shouted at them and laughed at private jokes.” Some have speculated that it might have been exactly this behavior—the Beatles’ scrappiness—that Epstein found most attractive. Though Epstein was as dapper and debonair as they came, sexually he went for “rough trade”—tough, unpolished, working-class greaser types. But Taylor sharply disputes the notion. “This accusation has been put up so many times,” he complained. “It’s bullshit. He signed the Beatles because they impressed us.”

  As for the Beatles, it’s clear why they went with Epstein. First, as John Lennon put it, “he looked efficient and rich.” Second, Epstein was the type to think big, and big is how the Beatles were beginning to think as well. Though devoid of pop management experience, Epstein worked evangelically on the Beatles’ behalf, championing them to music industry insiders with measures of loyalty, pride, passion, and grit that were exceptional by any standard. Numerous sources suggest that the old story about Brian meeting an audience of nonplussed record executives and angrily blurting out, “The Beatles are going to be bigger than Elvis Presley!” is probably true. He really did go about saying that. But before that could happen, Brian always maintained that his boys would have to clean up their act. Except for on one slightly infamous occasion, when he was probably very drunk, Epstein would not dare try to interfere with the Beatles’ music, but as their manager, he worked closely with them on their presentation. As a result, he was finally able to exercise some of his longstanding creative and theatrical impulses. “Brian wanted to be a star himself,” producer George Martin speculated. “That was the essential part of Brian. He couldn’t do it as an actor, and now he was able to do it as a man who was a manipulator, a puppeteer, if you like. He loved this role of being the power behind the scenes.”

  The Beatles went along with Brian’s desire to tidy up their performance, not because they ever wanted to get into spiffy suits, but because they gradually became convinced that he was right. “It was a choice of making it or still eating chicken on stage,” Lennon remarked. Still, their metamorphosis did not happen overnight: first went the leather jackets, and then the jeans were replaced with smart-looking trousers. “After that . . . I got them to wear sweaters onstage,” Brain recalled, and only afterward, “very reluctantly,” did they begin wearing their trademark grey collarless suits, which were inspired by Pierre Cardin. (Eventually the Beatles’ main tailor, Dougie Millings, would make about five hundred garments for the group.) Meanwhile, Epstein had his secretary type up memos spelling out exactly what the Beatles must not do: They must “stop swearing on stage, they must stop joking with the girls, they must stop smoking or carrying cans of Coke onstage,” and so forth. Even some of their offstage behavior was regulated. For instance, it was fine if they smoked, but only filtered cigarettes. Harsh, unfiltered Woodbines, or rollies, were considered déclassé and strictly prohibited. The Beatles were instructed to trim their guitar strings and to bow deeply from the waist after each number. “He was a director. That’s really what he was,” Paul said about Brian.

  Eventually, Lennon came to despise the Beatles’ anodyne image, but it’s not clear when that began to happen. Derek Taylor, the Beatles’ press officer, dismissed Lennon’s “posthumous, wise-after-the-event” objections to the Beatles makeover. “They didn’t mind at the time,” he said. “They were making more money that way.” When the Beatles were filmed for the very first time—on August 22, 1962, at the Cavern Club, for a Granada TV program called Know the North—Harrison recalled, “It was really hot and we were asked to dress up properly. We had shirts, and ties, and little black pullovers. So we looked quite smart. . . . and John was into it!”

  But Lennon remembered feeling differently: “there we were in suits and everything. It just wasn’t us.” Even though they played old standbys, like “Some Other Guy” and “Kansas City” / “Hey Hey Hey Hey,” Lennon said “that was where we started to sell-out.” Cynthia adds that when Epstein began sprucing up the Beatles, John was always differently minded than the others. “Paul was keen on the changes and George was happy to accept them,” she recalled. “But it wasn’t easy for John. When Brian asked them to wear suits and ties, John growled for days. That was what the Shadows—the group John most despised—did.” Still, knowing Lennon’s ambition, one gets the impression he would have had the group dress up in clown suits if he thought it was necessary.

  Later on, though, when the Stones showed it was possible to become very successful while acting like hooligans, Lennon became a little annoyed. “He always believed the Stones had hijacked the Beatles’ ‘original’ image,” said Chris Hutchins, who was friendly with both bands. Without the Beatles, Lennon reasoned, the Stones never could have gotten away with so much. “Brian Epstein made them behave, conform, perform, wear suits, be polite, [and] made them do Royal Variety Shows,” Hutchins noted. “That really left the field open for Andrew to say ‘Fuck that, the Stones don’t do that.’ As Lennon so correctly observed, Brian left the way open for the Stones to occupy a very large vacancy.”

  • • •

  It may say something about Andrew Loog Oldham’s ego, as well as the richness of his life, that in the first of his three memoirs, nearly two hundred pages breeze by before he describes his first exposure to the Rolling Stones, which happened at the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond, Surrey, on a Sunday night in April 1963. Nevertheless, he narrates the occasion in nearly mystical terms; it was not only pivotal, but epiphanous. “I’d never seen anything like it,” he said. “All my preparations, ambitions and desires had just met their purpose. . . . Everything I’d done up until now was a preparation for this moment. I saw and heard what my life, thus far, had been for.” At the time, he was nineteen years old and still living with his mother.

  Whatever he lacked in resources, though, he compensated for with style, ambition, and an almost otherworldly amount of chutzpah. His love for the glamorous life was apparent by the time he was a young teen. Oldham was so enchanted by show biz and celebrity culture that just about every month or so, a friend said, “a new public personality would take pride of place in his young heart.” A favorite Hollywood icon was Laurence Harvey, the Lithuanian-born actor who found international stardom in Room at the Top (in which he played an inveterate social climber) and Expresso Bongo (where he played a sleazy talent scout). Another favorite was Tony Curtis, who portrayed the gangsterish press agent Sidney Falco in The Sweet Smell of Success. None of these protagonists brought mu
ch good into the world, but Oldham wasn’t interested in these films for their social messages. Instead, they fueled his ambition to become, as he put it, “a nasty little upstart tycoon shit.”

  Though of a very different temperament than Epstein, Oldham was also theatrically handsome, and he shared Brian’s love of fashion and haute couture. “He was the most concerned-about-clothes person I’ve ever met in my life to this day,” claimed an old business partner. “He was meticulous.” At age sixteen, after getting only three O-level passes, he strolled into Bazaar—the famous, youth-oriented boutique operated by Mary Quant—and sweet-talked his way into a job as an errand boy for £7 per week. His main responsibilities involved preparing tea, taking messages, and walking dogs, but sometimes he helped Quant dress the storefront windows, and she recalled “he had all the confidence in the world.” For Oldham, the experience was invaluable. “I will always thank Mary [and her business partners] for teaching me about fame, fashion, money, and how to have fun getting it done,” he said. Every evening after work, Andrew would venture over to Soho, where he held a second job waiting tables at a Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club. Though not musically gifted, he briefly tried to find an agent or a manager who thought he might be able to make it as a pop star. That didn’t go anywhere, though Oldham was able to conjure some bright-hued aliases for himself: he wanted to be known as either Chancery Lane or Sandy Beach.

  During this period, Oldham usually managed to constrain his dark side, but not always. His ex-wife Shelia Klein recalls the time when he’d enthusiastically arranged for her to visit a modeling agency. He helped her get styled by Vidal Sassoon, and had her professionally photographed, but then, on the morning of her appointment, his thinking made an abrupt U-turn. “He didn’t want me to be a model anymore,” Sheila remembered. “There was no discussion; he just locked me in the cupboard and wouldn’t let me out. That was the end of my modeling career. Andrew definitely was different. His way of handling a situation was very effective.”

  After a brief sojourn to the South of France, Oldham returned to London and found work in public relations. As a result he was able to meet Phil Spector, the legendary pop producer who, even then, struck a foreboding presence. Spector made an overwhelming impression on young Andrew. The two of them “were a nightmare together,” a friend recalled. “Andrew got hooked on Phil’s not behaving very well.” Riding together in darkly tinted limos and dining under the protection of bodyguards, Andrew plied Spector for advice about how to make it in the music industry.

  Another very important person Oldham met was Brian Epstein. They crossed paths in January 1963 at the taping of the Beatles’ second national television appearance, on ABC-TV’s hugely popular Thank Your Lucky Stars. “Brian merely stood watching his boys, yet his belief and their talent permeated the room,” Oldham recalled. In a conversation, Oldham persuaded Epstein to hire him as a London-based PR man for a monthly retainer of £25. Mostly, Oldham worked for two of Epstein’s recently acquired acts, Gerry and the Pacemakers and Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, but sometimes he helped drum up publicity for the Beatles in music weeklies, teen magazines, and daily papers. On one glorious occasion, he even got to chaperone the Beatles to some radio shows and press interviews. Another time, he saw the Beatles play the Granada Theatre in Bedford, just as they were beginning their glide path to superstardom. “Onstage, you could not hear the Beatles for the roar of the crowd,” Oldham rhapsodized. “The noise that night hit me emotionally, like a blow to the chest. . . . When I looked at Brian, he had the same lump in his throat and tear in his eye as I.”

  Andrew craved these sorts of heady experiences, but it was a routine lunch that changed his life. Peter Jones, of the pop periodical Record Mirror, mentioned that one of his colleagues had just written enthusiastically about the bourgeoning R&B scene and favorably mentioned a new band, “the Rollin’ Stones,” even though they hadn’t yet made a record. “It looks like rhythm ’n’ blues will make it big soon, so why not have a look at them?” Jones said. Oldham wasn’t particularly enthused by the suggestion, but since he wanted to curry favor with Jones, he figured he should at least appear to be interested in his advice. The next Sunday, Oldham traveled to Richmond, where, he said, “I met the Rollin’ Stones and said ‘hello’ to the rest of my life.”

  Oldham not only lacked managerial experience—he didn’t even have a registered address, and it would be almost two years before he would be old enough to apply for an agent’s license. The first person he phoned for help was Epstein, offering him 50 percent of the Rolling Stones management contract in return for some office space and enough upfront funding to finance a recording session. Citing his obligations to the Beatles and other Liverpool acts, Brian declined. Next, Andrew approached Eric Easton, an older, experienced, London agent who, after some hesitation, expressed interest in accepting a similar deal . . . if it could be arranged. Sean O’Mahony figured the Oldham-Easton partnership was an excellent one. “Andrew was the young go-getter with loads of good ideas for promoting groups and giving them an image,” he said. “Eric was this rather conservative show business agent, a very straightforward businessperson, who had the necessary practical knowledge, knew how contracts worked, knew how to do bookings, knew that side inside out.”

  The following Sunday, Philip Norman writes, Oldham made “the most brilliant self-selling job the nineteen-year-old had yet pulled off, expertly mixing audacity with intuition. He came on to Brian, Mick, Keith, Stew, Bill, and Charlie as a London big shot who could give them anything they wanted and get anywhere they cared to go. At the same time, he was one of them, a rebel, an outsider who shared their quasi-Marxist ideals and evangelical zeal for bringing pure blues and R&B to a wider audience.” The bit about Andrew being an R&B fan was a particularly hideous distortion; in fact, he was glomming on to a trend he’d only just learned about.

  No doubt Oldham also stressed his connection to the Beatles. “He probably said, ‘I am the Beatles’ publicist’—how about that as a line?” Jagger mused. “Everything to do with the Beatles was sort of gold and glittery, and Andrew seemed to know what he was doing.” Nevertheless, Keith Richards maintains that Oldham “was looking for an alternative to the Beatles” from the very outset. Despite being from provincial Liverpool, the Beatles had already scored two big hits with “Love Me Do” and “Please Please Me.” Never before had an act from so far north succeeded at that level. “I guess Andrew’s mind would work this way,” Keith reasoned. “If Liverpool can produce the Beatles, what can London produce? Liverpool was much further away from London than it is now. There were no streets, no highways. I mean, Liverpool is . . . as far as London is concerned, it’s Nome, Alaska.”

  But in order to share in the type of success the Beatles were having, Oldham insisted that the Stones make some image and personnel adjustments. On the theory that six members was at least one too many for a successful group, Oldham made them kick out pianist Ian Stewart—who anyhow had too square a jaw for Andrew’s liking. Keith Richards was bizarrely instructed to drop the s from his last name; Keith Richard, Andrew said, “looked more pop.” Meanwhile, he added a g to the band’s name, making them the Rolling Stones; otherwise, he said, no one would take them seriously. Twenty-six-year-old Bill Wyman was told to begin pretending he was twenty-one. But most significantly, Oldham persuaded the band to loosen up its performance. Though Jones still postured himself as the group’s leader, Andrew recognized Jagger’s electric appeal and insisted that he share in the limelight.

  The idea to style the Stones as the anti-Beatles, though—to toughen up their image and encourage them to act as surly and defiant as they dared—came a bit later, and in fact that was the opposite of what Oldham originally had in mind. Instead, one of his first moves was to buy them a set of matching outfits. Wyman remembers a day when Oldham “marched us up to Carnaby Street to put us in suits, tabbed-down shirts and knitted ties.” On other occasions, the band could be seen in tight black jeans, black turtlenecks, and Beatle bo
ots. When the Stones debuted on national television, on Thank Your Lucky Stars, they were conscripted into hound’s-tooth jackets, high-buttoned shirts, and slim ties, looking every bit as dainty and amiable as the pop bands they despised. Wyman later remarked that in hindsight, it was “obvious” that “Andrew was attempting to make us look like the Beatles. From his association with them, he was well aware of the power of marketing, and he was initially slotting us as their natural successors rather than as counterparts.”

  The following month, though, when the Stones embarked on their first national tour (sharing a spectacular bill with Bo Diddley, Little Richard, and the Everly Brothers), they began wearing their outfits in a more slovenly style. One night, Charlie Watts unexpectedly doffed his waistcoat in a Fenland dressing room; eventually Keith’s jacket grew so bespotted with chocolate pudding and whiskey stains that it was no longer wearable. Onstage, the whole group loosened up, and Jagger took to chewing gum as he sang. Offstage, a journalist observed, they appeared in “a jumbled assortment of jeans, silk cardigans, camel jackets and sloppy sweaters. None of the slick suits sported by Bill J. Kramer or Gerry and the Pacemakers.” When the Stones appeared on a BBC program in October 1963, they frustrated their interviewer by greeting many of his questions with simple “yeah”s and “no”s. Rather than hurt their popularity, however, all of this seemed to boost their appeal. Their audiences were becoming more demonstrative and more raucous to the point where the Stones, just as soon as they finished their sets, were forced to flee their venues through the back door and quickly speed off to avoid getting mobbed. Without ever devising or articulating a formula for instigating a cultural revolt, the Rolling Stones began to stumble upon one.

  Put another way, though widely held, the idea that Andrew Oldham conjured up a belligerent attitude for the Stones, ab ovo, is a myth. First, he tried to smarten them up. But Oldham was quick—very quick—to see the potential in this new approach. By the time the Beatles conquered America on The Ed Sullivan Show, on February 9, 1964, Oldham was actively promoting the Stones as “the band your parents loved to hate.” “The Beatles were accepted and acceptable,” he added, “they were the benchmark and had set the level of competition.” By contrast, “The Stones came to be portrayed as dangerous, dirty and degenerate, and I encouraged my charges to be as nasty as they wished to be.”