Beatles vs. Stones Read online

  He “made sure we were as vile as possible,” Mick acknowledged. “Andrew pitched it so we were very much the antithesis of the Beatles.” Of course, the Stones proved masterful at projecting arrogant, sour attitudes. Surely, Jagger was deploying his best Cockney put-on when he told an interviewer, circa 1964: “If people don’t like us, well that’s too bad. We’re not thinking of changing, thanks very much. We’ve been the way were are for much too long to think of kowtowing to fanciful folk who think we should start tarting ourselves up with mohair suits and short haircuts.”

  But Jagger was lying. It had only been a short while earlier that the Stones, eager for exposure, appeared on Thank Your Lucky Stars with acceptable hair and matching suits. If the Beatles had “sold out” by changing their image in order to improve their chances of becoming successful, so too did the Stones—only they went through two early transformations. First, they costumed themselves in matching suits and ties, just like any Liverpool pop group. Then within a few months, they began experimenting with a different approach of their own design—dressing sloppily, accentuating their sexuality, and behaving obnoxiously. That was an image that suited them perfectly. Though not quite “gentlemen” in the first place, they became rather convincing as thugs.

  • • •

  Even if they initially set out merely to become the best band in Liverpool, with their life options already severely circumscribed by the time they formed in 1960, the Beatles were quick to embrace one of rock’s core myths: the idea that it promises an escape from the ordinary, workaday world into a parallel universe of wealth, prestige, and excitement. Lennon once revealed that as a child, his “most vivid dreams” involved either flying over Liverpool or finding hidden stashes of money. “I must have had ambition without realizing it,” he mused, “a subconscious urge to get above people or out of a rut.” But the odds didn’t look good. Once when Lennon was a teenager, his headmaster forced him to produce a sheet of paper on which he was instructed to list some potential careers; Lennon wrote: “salmon fisherman.” Though Paul seemed to have benefitted from his Liverpool Institute education, the rest of the Beatles were facing the likelihood of spending their lives in low-wage, low-prestige vocations. As Robert Christgau has suggested, the Beatles “loved rock and roll at least partly because rock and roll was a way to make it.”

  The Stones burned with ambition, too, but not because they were desperate. If white R&B had never caught on in England, and the Stones had never escaped London’s dingiest clubs, it still would not have been impertinent for Brian Jones or Mick Jagger to hope that they might become stereotypically successful. Granted, it’s hard to imagine Keith Richards doing anything besides playing rock guitar, but considering the British class system, as a teenager his prospects were always a bit better than those of the Beatles. Fortunately for the Stones, they didn’t have to grind it out for years playing in slummy bars the way the Beatles did—otherwise they would never have made it. Jagger would have ditched the band to finish his education, and as a unit, the Stones were never friendly or trusting enough with each other to stay bonded for a prolonged, frustrating period. After the Beatles pried open a tremendous market for British bands, the Stones rose to fame comparatively quickly—as the anti-Beatles.

  For the most part, the two bands were friendly toward each other. Especially early on, the Beatles were helpful to the Rolling Stones, and the Rolling Stones were grateful. But as the Stones began burning up the charts, the Beatles couldn’t help but recognize that their act was (as George put it), “more like [what] we’d done before we got out of our leather suits to try to get on record labels and television.” And while it might have been ludicrous for the Beatles to be truly jealous of anyone, there’s little doubt that if they thought they could have reached the toppermost of the poppermost without having to smile, bow, and wear suits, they’d have leapt at the opportunity.

  Meanwhile, the Stones seemed to envy the Beatles’ success more than their music. “Sure, they were very creative, but somehow they seemed to regard it all as a joke—and it was,” Jagger later said. “The Beatles were so ridiculously popular, it was so stupid. They never used to play—they just used to go on making so much bread, it was crazy.” Musically, Richards said, “We saw no connection between us and the Beatles. We were playing blues; they were writing pop songs dressed in suits.” Furthermore, the fact that the Beatles emerged from Liverpool must have seemed stupefying to the Stones. “For the first time, London had been left out in the cold till the very last minute,” a British writer remarked. But it was way more than that. When the Beatles were at the peak of their success, the poet Allen Ginsberg said, they briefly made Liverpool “the center of the consciousness of the human universe.”

  Eventually both groups would become settled enough in their success that they wouldn’t worry so much about manipulating the media. In 1966, the Beatles even decided they’d had enough of their silly fan magazine, and so they stopped providing Sean O’Mahony with the access, interviews, and photographs he needed to keep The Beatles Book afloat. But O’Mahony would not be deterred so easily. In response to the Beatles’ new attitude, he phoned his lawyer and called for a meeting. Epstein likewise showed up with his solicitor, plus two more advisors, and he matter-of-factly told O’Mahony it was time to wind down his publication of The Beatles Book. Asked for an explanation, he replied, “They feel you don’t tell the truth. You’re not reporting them as they are . . .”

  “O’Mahony exploded with anger,” said Epstein’s biographer:

  The truth? What do you mean? Do you mean for example when we were in Blackpool, John Lennon flinging open the window of the dressing room and shouting to the fans below: “Fuck off and buy more records?” Was that the level of revelation Epstein and the Beatles expected from their authorized mouthpiece? Should the Beatles be reported as they really were? Or were there no-go areas?

  A brief silence fell over the room, after which the two parties were able to proceed amicably enough to reach an agreement. O’Mahony continued publishing The Beatles Book until December 1969 (and then he revived it in 1976 and kept going until 2003). Though O’Mahony labored to keep the Beatles’ images up-to-date, he went about his work delicately, always refraining from saying too much about the controversies in which the group became embroiled. To adopt a sharper or more discerning approach would, said O’Mahony, “be like shooting myself in the foot.” Instead, he presented the Beatles as gentlemen.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “SHIT, THAT’S THE BEATLES!”

  The Beatles played Liverpool’s Cavern Club for the 292nd time, and for the last time, on August 3, 1963. They brought home £300 that night, and according to the Club’s legendary compère, Bob Wooler, they put on a rip-roaring show, a bit reminiscent of the very first time they performed there, for only £5. Inside the venue, it was so sticky hot that the Cavern’s electricity blew, and the show was interrupted as the club’s owner rushed to repair a fuse. Still, the “fans loved it,” he said. “It was such a marvelous scene.”

  It was also, however, a bittersweet occasion. The Beatles had obviously outgrown the cramped, dingy venue, and although Brian Epstein tried to reassure Wooler that someday his boys would be back, privately, he must have known that was unlikely.

  By then the Beatles’ debut album, Please Please Me, was resting comfortably atop England’s hit parade (where it would remain for thirty weeks), and the group, now residing permanently in London, was growing accustomed to headlining national tour packages. In the nation’s weekly pop periodicals, they received gushing praise; in teenybopper magazines, they appeared on color pin-up posters. And in an extraordinary effort to satisfy eager requests from every studio executive, disc jockey, newsman, photographer, and club owner who wanted something from them, under Epstein’s direction, the four lads from Liverpool were working almost to the point of burnout. Even if the Beatles had found time in their frenzied schedule to play another homecoming show at the Cavern, Epstein probably would not have al
lowed it: henceforth, he declared, the group would play only in proper theaters with elevated stages. The new policy was necessary in order to prevent the Beatles from being overrun by a scrum of frenzied fans.

  Perhaps inevitably, with their staggering success, the Beatles began spawning imitators (or, in early-’60s British parlance, “copyists”). About two months after they performed at the Cavern for the last time, pop fans could find on newsstands an issue of Melody Maker that contained an article headlined: “Boiling Beatles Blast Copy Cats.” John Lennon, identified as “the group’s spokesman,” is quoted extensively throughout the piece, yet none of his remarks are challenged or contextualized, and in this way, the item has something of the flavor of a press release. But even if the Beatles’ press officer, Tony Barrow, was primarily responsible for the item, he still would have needed Lennon’s permission before putting it out, and Lennon was clearly rankled by bands that were aping the Beatles’ style and sensibility. “Certain groups are doing exactly the same thing as us . . . pinching our arrangements,” he complained. “And down to the last note, at that.”

  But it wasn’t just that certain bands were trying to ride the Beatles’ coattails by mimicking their outfits and nicking their arrangements. “To crown it all,” Lennon carped, “other groups are climbing on this rhythm-and-blues bandwagon . . . by doing stuff we were playing two years ago”—that is, American R&B covers by the likes of Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly, which the Beatles used to pound out in grimy bars and run-of-the-mill dancehalls. The article continued:

  And in a final blast, an angry Lennon said: “It happens in hair styles, as well. I see players in some groups even have the same length hair as us.

  “It’s no good them saying they’re students and they just happen to have long hair. We were students, as well, before we came to London and we didn’t have these styles then, did we?”

  Lennon added: “I suppose people might say it’s an honor to be copied, and I wouldn’t have bothered to have hit back really. But when they have a dig at us, we’re going to have a go. I’ve wanted to say this for a long time . . .”

  The notion that Merseyside acts like the Beatles were at odds with the groups coming out of London had been gaining traction. When a pop journalist asked Brian Jones about “the Liverpool-London controversy,” however, Jones replied sharply: “It’s all a load of rubbish. We are on very friendly terms with the Northern beat groups and there’s a mutual admiration between us.” Many years later, in his scrapbook-cum-memoir, Stone Alone, Bill Wyman said it was “a popular misconception . . . that we were at war with the Beatles.” In reality, he maintained, the two groups were always bonded by “mutual respect.” It was just “the newspapers” that always fueled the idea that the two groups were rivals. And in his celebrated memoir, Life, Keith Richards said “it was always a very friendly relationship” between the Beatles and the Stones.

  The Beatles frequently echoed these sentiments. In August 1964, at an American press conference, Ringo called the Stones “very good friends of ours,” and Paul added, “We hear some ridiculous rumors over here . . . like, ‘The Beatles hate every other group on the face of the earth.’ It’s just not true.” At another press event a few days later, John said about the Stones, “I know it sounds daft, us liking them, but we’re good friends.” And in 1968, he said flatly, “Our rivalry was always a myth.”

  Among music mavens, this has long been the conventional wisdom: While the press was busy making invidious comparisons between the Beatles and the Stones, the two groups remained above the fray, bonded by their mutual admiration, shared experiences, and obvious enjoyment of each other’s company. The supposed “rivalry” between the Beatles and the Stones was a media creation, a faux controversy that arose from a press that was either base in its sensationalism or fanciful in its ignorance.

  But if all of that is the case, who was it that Lennon was itching to “hit back” in October 1963? He never mentioned any names, but he clearly had a specific target in mind. He was thinking about a band that was now playing R&B of the type that the Beatles played in Hamburg; and he seemed particularly peeved at a newer, London-based group, made up at least partly of students, whose members refused to attribute their hairstyles to the Beatles’ influence. Instead, they disingenuously maintained that they “just happen to have long hair.”

  Only one group fits the bill exactly. In the Rolling Stones’ official biography, Record Mirror reporter Peter Jones (writing under the alias “Peter Goodman”) describes a period in 1963 when “The Beatles were high in the charts” and “reporters were very interested to know if the Rolling Stones hairstyles had owed anything to the high-riding Liverpool group.” But whenever Jagger was asked about the provenance of their shaggy hairdos, he turned defensive. With his “hands on his hips” and his “sweater awry as his shoulders gesticulated angrily,” he replied: “Art students have had this sort of haircut for years—even when the Beatles were using hair cream!”

  • • •

  A Hollywood adage holds, “It can take a lifetime to become an overnight success.” Of course, it didn’t take the Beatles nearly that long; they managed to hit it big when they were still very young. Before they became household names, however, they paid their proverbial dues. Lennon and McCartney began their musical friendship on July 6, 1957, at a garden fete in Liverpool. Five more years would pass before the Beatles started recording with EMI. In between came all of the failed auditions and talent show competitions, the late-night sets in West German nightclubs, and the difficult personnel changes that endure so vividly in Beatles lore.

  It was rather different for the Stones. In July 1962, the band’s nucleus of Brian, Mick, and Keith shared a stage for the first time; almost a year to the day later, they appeared on British national television as Decca recording artists. Their first big break came in February 1963, when they secured a residency at the Crawdaddy Club at the Station Hotel (sometimes called the “Railway Hotel”) in Richmond, Surrey, perhaps thirty minutes outside of central London by train.

  The Crawdaddy’s manager was Giorgio Gomelsky, a Soviet-born, Swiss-educated London transplant who in the 1950s had been a mainstay of the local jazz club scene. Then in the early 1960s, Gomelsky started promoting raw R&B, first in central London and then on the outskirts. “Brian Jones had been bending my ear constantly” about the possibility of landing gigs for the Stones, Gomelsky remembers. “He had that little speech impediment—kind of a lisp. It used be part of his charm. ‘Come and lithen to us, Giorgio,’ he’d plead with me. ‘Oh, Giorgio, pleathe get us some gigs.’ ”

  After catching a Stones performance at Sutton’s Red Lion Pub, Gomelsky was suitably impressed—but he couldn’t offer them work immediately, since he’d already committed to promoting the David Hunt Band, a promising but unreliable Soho-based group. “Listen,” Gomelsky says he told the Stones, “I promised this guy a job, but the first time he goofs, you’re in.” Sure enough, the very next week, Hunt’s band failed to show up for one of their regularly scheduled gigs, and Gomelsky turned their Sunday-night slot over to the Stones.

  Bill Wyman says that when the Stones played their first Crawdaddy gig, they drew a crowd of about thirty. But Gomelsky recalls that snow fell heavily in London that night (a rare thing) and only three people showed up. He added that the diminished attendance might also have been accounted for, at least in minor part, by the transposition error in the flyers that he had illegally pasted all across town.

  SUNDAY NIGHT, 7:30 PM.

  RHYTHM AND BULSE

  Gomelsky shrewdly understood that the Stones’ real problem, however, was that they had yet to build up an audience for grassroots R&B in London. Fortunately, he had a plan. “He was the kind of guy where you could go round to his apartment, have some very strong coffee, smoke some Sobranies, and map out plots, because he was very plugged into the club scene,” Keith Richards recalled. He advised the Stones that instead of hustling for gigs at every opportunity, they should focus on building
their reputation with their regular Sunday-night performances. Once word got around, and with the right kind of promotion, he predicted that audiences would be flocking to see them.

  Gomelsky says that Brian walked up to him that first night at the Crawdaddy and said: “ ‘Giorgio, there’s six of us, and three of them. Do you think it’s worthwhile? Should we play?’ ”

  “I said, ‘Brian, how many people do you think can fit in here? A hundred? Okay, well then play as if there were a hundred people in here.’ And they did. And that was one of the reasons I rarely went to see the Stones in later times, because in some ways, that was like the best show they ever did. For three people.”

  Very quickly, Gomelsky’s prediction proved accurate, and the Stones were playing to a packed house every Sunday night. To get inside, you had to queue in line, sometimes for hours. Once you got through the door, you found a smallish room that was pitch-dark, save for the tiny stage, on which the Stones performed beneath two small spotlights (one red, one blue). Drawing heavily from the nearby Kingston College of Art, early audiences consisted predominately of young men. As pop historian Alan Clayson explains, some among them “detected a certain Neanderthal epater la bourgeoisie in the group, and came to understand that this rugged type of pop music was ‘uncommercial,’ and thus an antidote to the contrived splendor of television pop idols.” Others in the crowd didn’t even necessarily identify as R&B fans. Groups of Mods started showing up, decked in tweed jackets, high-heeled boots, and choke-collar shirts, and so too came their supposed enemies, leather-clad Rockers. Before long, brawls between the two subcultures would lead to some sensational news stories in England, but not a single fight broke out while the Stones were playing at the Crawdaddy.