Beatles vs. Stones Page 6

  That may be partly attributed to the Stones’ novelty. Initially, fans were riveted by their increasingly edgy performances, but they were unsure of how to respond, and many even seemed afraid to dance. Then one night, Gomelsky’s young assistant, Hamish Grimes, leapt atop a table and started really whooping it up, waving his arms like windmills and yelling “yeah yeah!” Jagger spotted him from the stage, smiled widely, and he too said “yeah!” In an instant, Gomelsky says, “two hundred pair of arms were undulating like crazy! Man, that was something.” For some time afterwards, the Stones made it their trademark to close their second 45-minute set with an extended, hypnotic Bo Diddley jam—either “Pretty Thing” or “Doin’ the Crawdaddy”—that always whipped their fans into a tribal-like frenzy. “No one had seen anything like this in the sedate and reticent London of 1963,” Gomelsky mused. “It was exciting and foreboding.”

  Had he been a little savvier and more business-oriented, Gomelsky might have secured a managerial contract with the Stones, but at the time he was so turned off by how vapid and crass the British pop scene had become that the idea scarcely crossed his mind. Instead, he planned to help rejuvenate “formula-ridden commercial popular music” with more authentic, uptempo electric blues, and eventually he hoped to set up “a kind of ‘United Artists’ of the London blues bands” that would “keep the show business sharks out of the scene.” “My motivation in all this had been cultural rather than business-oriented,” he explained. Besides, in addition to proselytizing for R&B, Gomelsky also dabbled in other bohemian-flavored pursuits, including Stanislavsky’s Method acting and experimental film. And even as the Stones were burnishing their chops at the Crawdaddy, the energetic émigré had yet another project in mind: he wanted to direct a movie about the Beatles.

  Outside of Liverpool, not many people could honestly boast that they were Beatles fans before the Beatles got famous. About two years earlier, however, while passing through Hamburg, Gomelsky had been lucky enough to catch the scruffy young Brits back when they were still playing bowdlerized R&B covers in seedy clubs. He remembered the Beatles as a “good, fluent band,” and one night while they were on break, he’d chatted amiably with them. Now, perhaps six months before the birth of Beatlemania, Gomelsky hoped to direct an avant-garde film about the group, one that was intended “to bring about the still unperceived wit and knockabout charm of the Beatles offstage characters.”

  To that end, he met with Epstein at Teddington Studios on April 14, 1963, while the Beatles’ manager was accompanying his group during the taping of their third appearance on ABC-TV’s pop music show, Thank Your Lucky Stars. Epstein agreed to discuss the proposal further, but Peter Clayton, a Jazz News writer whom Gomelsky had enlisted to draw up a rough script, later surmised that he was probably wary of the idea from the get-go. Still relatively new to showbiz, he likely mistook Gomelsky’s “explosive enthusiasm as just another attempt to stampede him into something.”

  Nor did the Beatles themselves ever seem terribly interested in the film. Clayton recalls one meeting at Gomelsky’s flat when the group sat there eating omelets. “I suppose I should remember some of those tart witticisms which became such a feature of Beatles press conferences, but all I can recall are the omelets, each in the center of a big plate, like a stranded yellow fish,” he said. At another meeting, Lennon picked quietly at a mandolin while everyone talked around him, and McCartney seemed quiet and guarded—“a closed book.”

  They perked up, however, when Gomelsky started raving about the Stones. Neil Aspinall, the Beatles’ road manager at the time, explained that the timing was propitious. The Beatles and their entourage were freshly arrived in London and therefore eager to hit the clubs, “to find out what was happening . . . since it was not yet our scene. We were the new boys in town.” And it just so happened, Gomelsky enthused, that the Stones were playing that very night.

  “Hey you guys, you’ve got to listen to this band on the way home tonight,” he pleaded. “You’ve got to come and see this band when you finish recording the show, it’s on the way back, you’ve just got to come.”

  “Yeah, okay, we’ll come,” someone said.

  • • •

  Over the next few years, the Beatles would have meticulously planned and well-documented summits with some of the most prestigious and successful performers of their era. Probably the most momentous such meeting was with Bob Dylan (at New York’s Delmonico Hotel on August 28, 1964). As James Miller explains in Flowers in the Dustbin, Dylan “represented everything that Lennon still silently aspired to: artistic integrity, musical honesty, [and] the priceless cachet of being hip, not with screaming teenagers, but with serious adults—poets like Allen Ginsberg, artists like Andy Warhol, political leaders like Martin Luther King Jr.” After sweeping past a roomful of people who had been waiting patiently to see the Beatles, and finding that John, Paul, George, and Ringo were just finishing up their room-service dinners, Dylan produced a lumpy bag of marijuana and started rolling up some joints. Though it has been said frequently that Dylan turned the Beatles on to pot for the first time, that may be just shy of the truth. According to Harrison, a Liverpool drummer had once treated the band to some low-grade schwag. But this was the first time the group had gotten themselves really and truly high. And it was under these combined influences, of Dylan and marijuana, that the Beatles began dramatically refashioning their attitudes, writing weightier and more experimental songs, and embracing personal styles that were truer to their bohemian origins.

  By contrast, the Beatles had a dreadful time meeting with Elvis Presley a year later (at a rented Bel-Air mansion, on August 27, 1965). Whether sedated, stoned, or both, Elvis seemed strangely bored by the Beatles, and at one point he threatened to ditch the party and go to bed early. For their part, the Beatles seemed not to know how to behave in the company of their boyhood idol, and so mostly they just sat there gawking, except for Lennon, who committed numerous unpardonable solecisms. First, he broke into a bizarre Inspector Clouseau routine that he seemed reluctant to let go. Then, when he finally stopped speaking to Elvis in a cheeky French accent, he had the brass to chide him about his mid-career slump: his trite singles and lame movies. Later, Lennon explained that his impertinent behavior arose from his disappointment with what Elvis had become. “It was like meeting Engelbert Humperdinck,” he sneered.

  Seeing the Rolling Stones was altogether different. The Beatles were plainly curious about this new band that Giorgio had been exclaiming about, but they could not have been that excited. None of the Stones’ music had yet been released. At the time, the Beatles were awed just to be living in London. “[W]e were provincial kids coming to the big city, so it was all magic to us,” McCartney said.

  By contrast, the Stones had been following the Beatles avidly. The richest firsthand account of the group’s early behavior and attitudes comes from Jimmy Phelge, a flatmate to Brian, Mick, and Keith at Edith Grove (who claims to be the “Mr. Jimmy” that’s referenced in the third verse of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”). In his 1998 memoir, Nankering with the Stones, Phelge reveals that the Stones heard the Beatles for the first time on a BBC radio program (probably Saturday Club, which featured the Beatles on January 26, 1963). Jones, in fact, had tuned in that day specifically in order to hear the Beatles, his curiosity having been piqued by the enthusiastic bits of press coverage they were garnering. But the moment he heard the first bars of “Love Me Do” blaring out of the radiogram, Phelge says that “Brian’s face dropped,” and he barked at Keith to come over from the next room.

  “Love Me Do” was written in what the Beatles probably considered a bluesy idiom, but as musicologist Ian MacDonald points out, the song’s most conspicuous element—Lennon’s wailing harmonica riff—was played in a technically “overblown” style and was completely lacking in bent notes. As such, “it had little in common with any of the American style blues.” Still, harmonicas were rarely used in British pop. Probably the Beatles got the idea to incorporate
the harmonica from Bruce Channel, the Texas-born American crooner whose “Hey! Baby”—a number 2 hit in the UK in 1962—they used to cover. Regardless, it was enough to send the Stones into a tizzy. Phelge recounts the scene this way:

  “Oh no,” said Brian. “Listen to that. They’re doing it!”

  “Hang on, let’s hear the guitar,” said Keith, listening intently.

  “Fuck it.”

  “They’ve got harmonies too,” said Brian. “It’s just what we didn’t want.”

  I listened and thought the Beatles sounded OK, but so what? Just another group. “What’s the problem?” I asked.

  “Can’t you hear?” said Keith. “They’re using a harmonica—they’ve beaten us to it.”

  “They’re into the same blues thing as us,” said Brian. “We’ll have to listen to see what they do later.”

  I liked the song and I could hear the harmonies, but I did not think the music sounded anything like the Stones. Brian’s point was that the Beatles were using the bluesy sound and that if they took off successfully, everyone else would copy it. The Stones would be just another group, it was important to be first. The Beatles did some more songs and later in the broadcast the Stones’ spirits dropped further when they performed a Chuck Berry song. Mick heard this too and much debating was to take place later about whether the Beatles had professional arrangements or whether they were that good on their own account. The overall answer was a bit of each.

  “It was an attack from the North,” Keith Richards said. “We thought we were the only guys in the world.” Twenty-five years later, when he inducted the Beatles into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Jagger likewise admitted that he was taken aback when he first heard about the Beatles. “They had long hair, scruffy clothes but—they had a record contract!” he said. “And they had a record in the charts, with a bluesy harmonica on it, called ‘Love Me Do.’ When I heard the combination of all these things, I was almost sick.” However strenuously the Stones would argue later on that their rivalry with the Beatles was invented on press row, it is plainly evident that when they heard the Beatles for the very first time, they felt deflated and threatened.

  In subsequent months, though, the Stones learned to respect the Beatles begrudgingly, if only because of the resounding impact the Liverpool foursome was having on the British music scene. By the early spring of 1963, the entire landscape for beat and rock ’n’ roll music was shifting under the Beatles’ influence. In virtually every city and town, fresh-faced teens began assembling themselves into new groups, many of them bent on composing their own material. Mail-order companies that sold guitars and drum kits did booming business. Nightclubs and dance halls emerged to accommodate this sudden spike in interest. Suddenly, attention shifted to the North, where talent scouts could be found scampering to try to sign The Next Big Thing. Meanwhile, the local and national press was turning volte-face from its previous attitudes toward pop and rock; now they began treating it all seriously, rather than from on high. By April, the Beatles were atop the British music charts with “From Me to You”—another original song that featured Lennon playing the mouth organ.

  It is little wonder, then, that Gomelsky had left the Beatles at their taping and rushed back to Richmond, where he found the Stones conversing over sandwiches before their first set.

  “That’s when I told them, ‘Hey, something nice might happen today,’ ” Gomelsky said.

  “What?”

  “The Beatles might come to . . .”

  Brian responded with an astonished whisper: “ ‘What? The Beatles? You’re joking! What, wha?’ This was all the encouragement they needed.”

  Gomelsky continues: “The club used to open at seven, the Stones used to go on first time at eight-fifteen to nine o’clock. Then a break, have to finish by ten-thirty, Sunday pubs close, and be out of the place by eleven. So first set they didn’t come. Brian came and said, ‘They didn’t come, they didn’t come.’ I said, ‘Brian, I told you they’re probably finishing now they’ll be here by nine-fifteen, nine-thirty.’ He said ‘all right.’ He was so nervous.”

  Sure enough, shortly after the Stones launched their second set, Wyman says he was “staggered” to look up and see “four shadowy figures” standing shoulder-to-shoulder in the audience, all of them dressed in matching suede overcoats and leather caps. “Shit, that’s the Beatles!” he exclaimed to himself. Richards tells the story similarly. “We were playing a pub, the Station Hotel, Richmond. . . . And we’re whacking our show out and everybody’s having a good time, you know. I suddenly turn around: there’s these four guys in black leather overcoats standing there. Oh, fuck me! Look who’s here!” Mick’s reaction? “I didn’t want to look at them,” he recalled. “I was too embarrassed.”

  However goofy and good-natured the Beatles came across in their early television and radio appearances, in real life they often struck people differently. Writer Barry Miles observed that in this period the Beatles were bent on projecting “an intentionally intimidating image,” and journalist Chris Hutchins, who was friendly with the group since their Hamburg days, agreed; he said their long leather jackets gave them the look of “gunfighters.” About a month before the Beatles met the Stones at the Station Hotel, Andrew Oldham had watched in the wings while the Beatles recorded a television appearance in London. Away from the klieg lights and cameras, he said, they exuded a kind of “Fuck You, we’re good and we know it” attitude. In early 1963, the teen-oriented Boyfriend magazine described the Beatles as “almost frightening-looking young men.” (They looked friendly when they smiled, the journalist continued, but that was “not often.” “The rest of the time they look wicked and dreadful and distinctly evil, in an eighteenth-century sort of way. You almost expect them to leap out of pictures and chant magic spells.”) Even the preternaturally cool Mick Jagger would later admit that when he first laid eyes on the Beatles, they struck him as “four-headed monster.”

  Aspinall thought the Stones were just “okay” that night—not particularly better or worse than a typical Liverpool band playing at the Cavern Club. “They could do their stuff and that was all you needed to do. A lot of people couldn’t.” The Beatles, however, were much more effusive. “I remember standing in some sweaty room and watching them on the stage,” Ringo recalled. “Keith and Brian—wow! I knew then that the Stones were great.” Harrison was struck by the tremendous enthusiasm of the Stones fans. “It was a real rave,” he reminisced. “The audience shouted and screamed and danced on tables. They were doing a dance no one had seen until then, but we all know now as the Shake.”

  Afterward, no one lingered around or chatted with fans for very long after the gig, since Jones had invited the Beatles and their crew over to the Stones’ slummy Edith Grove apartment. When the Beatles arrived, Phelge remembers, they “carried themselves with the air of a professional outfit. . . . All the members of their entourage were smartly dressed in the same dark-colored overcoats as the band, giving the appearance of one big team.” A few in the Beatles camp may have been disgusted by the putrid condition of the Stones’ dimly lit flat—the piled high dishes, overflowing ashtrays, and accumulated rubbish—but Phelge says that after Paul surveyed the environment, “He did not seem unduly perturbed by anything—the look on his face said, ‘I’ve been here before.’ ”

  From interviews and firsthand accounts, we know just a few more things about what went on at Edith Grove that night. All evening long, records spun successively on the turntable, and members of both groups shared their musical likes and dislikes. Conversations proceeded energetically, with much crosstalk. “It was difficult to keep track of all that was being said,” Phelge recalled. “Occasionally Mick or John would mention an artist or song and say, ‘I like that. We used to do that.’ . . . Everyone was trying to find out as much as possible in a short period of time.” The Stones played the Beatles the five demo tracks they’d recently recorded at IBC Studios, and they were eager to show off their treasured collection of American imp
orts.

  “John was really nice,” Mick said later. “I said, ‘You play the harmonica don’t you?’—he’d played harmonica on ‘Love Me Do’—and he said, ‘But I can’t really play like you guys, I just blow and suck. We can’t really play the blues.’ ” The Stones were caught off guard, however, by Lennon’s curt dismissal of one of their heroes, the blues legend Jimmy Reed.

  When Lennon fell into conversation with Brian Jones, the two men discovered they both had infant sons named Julian. (Lennon’s son, in fact, was only six days old.) Lennon was also impressed with Brian Jones’s deep musical knowledge, though he may also have felt a little insecure in Jones’s company. Years later, Lennon seemed to admit as much when he recalled that Brian had asked him that night whether it was a harmonica or a harp that he played on “Love Me Do.” Apparently not understanding the subtle distinction between the two types of harmonicas, Lennon said he replied “A harmonica with a button,” meaning a chromatic harmonica, of the type that was used by jazz and big band acts of the 1940s and 1950s. (Lennon had shoplifted it from a music store in Arnhem, Holland, in 1960.) With an extra set of button-activated reeds, a chromatic harmonica provides access to all twelve notes of the Western musical system. By contrast, a diatonic harmonica—also called a “harp”—offers fewer notes but allows players to get a wailing bluesy sound by bending pitches. All the classical bluesmen used harps, and, of course, an aficionado like Jones would have regarded chromatic harmonicas as passé.