Beatles vs. Stones Page 7

Another big topic was how to make money in the business. Until that point, no British pop act had ever been able to maintain their success over the long term, and everyone thought it was only a matter of time before the Beatles’ pubescent fans began moving on in search of some other act to idolize. The Beatles even believed this themselves. At the time, they were chiefly concerned with parlaying their brief burst of popular success into the biggest possible financial windfall. The most the Stones could possibly have hoped for is that they, too, would have a brief run at the top—although they must have known that would require them to move in a more commercially oriented musical direction.

  “Mick says [that meeting] is what made him want to get into rock ’n’ roll,” McCartney told his friend, Barry Miles, many years later.

  He saw us come in and he thought, “Fuckin’ hell! I want one of those coats! I want a long coat like that, but to do that, I’ll have to earn money.” This is what he said, and that was when he described us as a “four-headed monster.” Which was true. It was one of our things to go around together because there was a great common bond between us.

  Jagger was also impressed to hear John and Paul boast of having already written one hundred songs together (in reality it was probably about half that many), and he was surprised to learn that Lennon and McCartney also had a share in their own music-publishing company, Northern Songs Ltd. If Mick sought out particular information about all this, however, he was probably disappointed. John and Paul knew they were getting rich—and quickly!—from royalties and publishers’ rights. But at the time they were largely ignorant about music industry mechanics. Only later would they discover that they’d enmeshed themselves in several lousy deals.

  The party carried on until very late, probably around 4:00 a.m. It has been said that just before the Beatles left, Brian Jones asked them to autograph a magazine photo, which he then proudly pasted onto the wall above the fireplace—just like any starstruck fan. But that is probably a myth. There is little doubt, however, that the Stones were favorably impressed. “They were very cool guys,” Keith said.

  Finally, though no one has ever mentioned it, it seems exceedingly likely—in fact, we can be almost certain—that at some point in the evening, Brian would have produced, for the Beatles to read, the very first press clipping that the Stones had garnered: a full-page rave that appeared in the Richmond and Twickenham Times. Written by a young reporter named Brian May, the piece was datelined April 13, 1963—just one day prior—but the Stones had just gotten hold of it that night, literally only a few hours before the Beatles showed up at the Crawdaddy.

  “A musical magnet is drawing the jazz beatniks to Richmond,” the write-up began. It went on to describe a thrilling “scene” that was coalescing around the Stones’ brand of “deep earthy” R&B, a style of music that was said to give “all who hear it an irresistible urge to stand up and move.”

  Naturally, everyone was pleased by the effusive review, but no one took it to heart more than Brian Jones. He was flattered beyond measure. Even after the whole group had read it, Phelge recalled, “Brian read it again aloud to make sure we understood every word.” For months afterward, Wyman said, Jones carried a matted copy of the clipping in his wallet, “showing everyone—proof to all the cynics that we were moving.”

  When he showed it to the Beatles, though, they would have noticed something else about the piece. A little deeper into the article, May reported that the Stones “wear their hair Piltdown-style, brushed forward from the crown like the Beatles pop group.” Sounding a bit sheepish, Jones was quoted this way: “We looked like this before they became famous.”

  • • •

  Bumping along in a London taxi just four days later, on April 18, 1963, Brian, Mick, and Keith must have felt exuberant. Accompanied by Giorgio, they were heading to Kensington, where they would see the Beatles perform for the first time. Not only that, but they would be watching from the front row as the Beatles’ special guests. As the Edith Grove rendezvous was winding down a few nights earlier, the Beatles had personally invited them.

  That was a milestone date for the Beatles, too, but for an altogether different reason: it was the first time they would play the Royal Albert Hall, a theater of such impressive majesty that the Beatles could only have been awed at their developing good fortune.

  Logistically, though, the show—a BBC program called Swinging Sound, ’63—must have been a little aggravating for the Beatles, who appeared alongside over a dozen acts; as such, they had to share their rehearsal time with Del Shannon, the Springfields, and many others. According to a performance log, they were called out for rehearsals in the midmorning and early afternoon, but they didn’t play until the evening, at which point they performed just two songs at 8:40 (“Please Please Me” and “Misery”) and two more at 10:02 (“Twist and Shout” and “From Me to You”). As a result, they spent most of the afternoon goofing around in their communal dressing room, and bickering with the show’s producers about how loudly they could play.

  Whatever time the three Stones showed up is not clear, but it was probably on the early side, since the three bandmates who came to see the Beatles were also the three ones who weren’t encumbered with day jobs. At some point, though, the Beatles must have welcomed them back stage. According to rock writer Stephen Davis, the Stones were “astonished to see the Beatles putting on stage makeup.” If the anecdote is true (and it may not be), the Stones must have thought the procedure was effeminate. Davis says that McCartney said that the next time he saw the Stones perform, “Mick was made up like a tart.”

  When it finally came time for the Beatles to perform, the Stones were awestruck by how they were received. The evening’s master of ceremonies later recalled that, try as he might, he couldn’t even properly introduce the band that night: “In the end I just gestured into the stairwell, mouthed ‘The Beatles’ and walked off.” A short article in Radio Times, the BBC’s weekly newssheet, added that when the Beatles bounded onto the stage, the waterfall roar of the crowd “reached the threshold of pain.”

  One of the Stones, however, was particularly impressed. After the program’s grand finale, during which all of the evening’s performers crammed onto the stage for a three-minute instrumental version of “Mack the Knife,” Brian and Giorgio helped the Beatles’ two road managers, Neil Aspinall and Malcolm Evans, carry the group’s gear out of the back of the theater.

  “And there’s a bunch of girls,” Gomelsky remembers. “They start grabbing Brian Jones, ‘Oh, can I have an autograph? Can I have an autograph?’ And Brian was like, ‘But I’m not a Beatle!’ The girls hadn’t been inside, so they didn’t know. He had the long hair, looked like a pop star. I told him to sign anyway, and he did. As we’re walking down the steps of the Albert Hall to go to my apartment not far from there, Brian looks at me and says, [he does the Jones lisp, with fervid intensity] ‘Giorgio, Giorgio, that’th what I want! That’th what I want!’ ”

  According to Wyman, Jones even continued in this vein long after the incident. “ ‘This is what we like,’ he kept saying, ‘being mobbed by people! This is what we want!’ ”

  • • •

  In envying the Beatles’ success, the Rolling Stones were hardly alone. By the spring of 1963, it was widely assumed that Pete Best must have felt like the most hapless character on the whole British Isle (for getting kicked out of the Beatles right before they became famous). Another inconsolable figure, however, was record executive Dick Rowe. He was Decca’s “A&R man”—the guy responsible for discovering and nurturing new talent at his label. At the time, Decca and its archrival, EMI, controlled nearly all of British music publishing. Not only had Rowe passed up an opportunity to sign the Beatles (after hearing just one audition tape and never bothering to see them perform live); his gaffe had also made it difficult for Decca to sign many other Mersey Beat artists. Now suddenly in high in demand, bands like Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, and the Swinging Blue Jeans all wanted
to go with EMI, the same label as the Beatles. According to a rumor, for years afterward, Decca executives held annual wakes during which they opened up their vaults, wiped the old Beatles audition tape clean of dust, and raised a ceremonial glass in mourning of their lost profits.

  Desperate to redeem himself, Rowe had high hopes when he sat at the jury table of the Lancashire and Cheshire Beat Group Contest, which was held at Liverpool’s Philharmonic Hall in the spring of 1963. It was a terrific opportunity to scout out new talent. What’s more, George Harrison would be there, too; he was another of the judges.

  “Nobody had ever played the Philharmonic—they wouldn’t even let you in, let alone to do a rock concert,” Harrison mused. But now, virtually every northern band was commanding respectful attention. “Groups were forming, right, left, and center to try to cash in on Liverpool’s supposedly swinging scene,” he said.

  A local music writer concurred. “At the height of ’Pool mania,” he said, “agents were getting off the train at Lime Street Station and signing up each other while, at the Cavern, it was difficult for a press photographer to get a shot which didn’t include another photographer on the other side of the room.”

  Unfortunately, though, the showcase was a bust. The Liverpool scene had been tapped and drained. As the event plodded along, and a parade of lackluster performers rotated on and off the stage, Rowe says he turned to Harrison and wanly said, “I’d really had my backside kicked over turning your lot down.”

  But Harrison brushed the whole matter aside. “Well, I wouldn’t worry too much about that. Why don’t you sign the Rolling Stones?”

  Rowe continues: “ ‘I said ‘the Rolling who?’

  “ ‘The Stones!’

  “I said, ‘I’ve never heard of them! What do they play? Where can I see them?’

  “ ‘You’ll find them at the Railway Hotel, in Richmond.’

  “Well,” Rowe says, “I left him right there on the spot.”

  With minor variations, the story figures prominently in Beatles-Stones lore. By some accounts, Rowe didn’t even bother to say good-bye before he exited the theater. “When George turned around, he found he was talking to himself. Rowe’s chair was empty,” says Philip Norman. Rowe had dashed out of the Philharmonic, boarded the first train to London, and then rushed to the Crawdaddy Club, where he would catch the Stones that very night.

  Beatles biographer Bob Spitz tells the same story: “He took the next train to London, picked up his wife, and drove directly to see the band that captured George’s attention.” Stephen Davis, yet another bestselling biographer, puts just a tiny spin on the legend. Rather than taking a train, Rowe “drove all day to be at the Crawdaddy Club in time to catch the Rollin’ Stones raucous rite of spring.”

  The only problem with this charming little tale is (as you may have guessed) it didn’t happen. It rather strains credulity to suppose that Rowe would have so abruptly abandoned his jury responsibilities at a talent show (one that was sponsored by his employer, no less). Nor would he likely have left without so much as a “good-bye” to George Harrison. (Rowe is said to have been an exceedingly polite man.) Besides, the Lancashire and Cheshire Beat Group Contest was held on May 10, 1963—a Friday. The Stones played the Crawdaddy Club on Sunday nights. It would have been impossible to see the Stones on May 10 because on that date they were busily working at Olympic Studios, where Oldham had just plopped forty quid for a late-night, three-hour session so they could record their first single.

  Rowe’s ex-wife, Pat Smith, recalls a more plausible and ordinary sequence of events: “Upon his return [from Liverpool] Dick mentioned that George Harrison had said he should listen to a band called the Rolling Stones. There was no urgency.”

  Furthermore, since it was Rowe’s policy never to speak directly with a band that interested him, but rather to always go through their manager, he would have first needed to get to a phone and canvass the main London agencies in order to figure out who represented the Stones. At that point, he would have been pleased to discover that one of the men the Stones had teamed up with was Eric Easton, a minor record industry acquaintance. Then, before the couple could venture to Richmond, they would have needed to arrange for a nanny to supervise their five-year-old daughter. In all likelihood, that was accomplished on May 12, 1963.

  “When we arrived” at the Station Hotel, Smith continues, “the Rolling Stones were just setting up and it was clear we were expected by both the band and Andrew Oldham; we shook hands and had a nice conversation. I remember them as very respectful and nice young boys.”

  Another common misapprehension is that Rowe was so impressed by the Stones’ earthy brand of R&B that he immediately rushed to sign them. Odd as it may sound, their music wasn’t quite his main concern (and if anything, he worried that the band might be too rugged and unpolished to warrant a recording contract). Instead, he was most interested in the band’s marketability—their looks, mannerisms, stagecraft, and ability to attract a devoted following. And the thing that piqued his interest above all else was the Stones’ hip and enthusiastic audience, which consisted almost entirely of young men. “There wasn’t a girl to be seen,” he remembered. The tiny club was packed wall-to-wall with “crowds of boys, rising and falling on their feet.” This was something new, and intriguing.

  Oldham later said that he’d always thought that Decca was “the most logical place” for the Stones to wind up. “After all,” he reasoned, “they’d turned the Beatles down, so maybe they’d panic and sign us.” It is little wonder, then, that he and Easton both worked Rowe’s tender spot, thickly laying on the idea that the Stones represented his shot at redemption. No British band could capture the attention of British teenagers for much longer than a year, they said. The Beatles were nearing their expiration date. The Merseyside wave was cresting. But the Stones! The Rolling Stones would be the next really big thing, the next Beatles. Decca simply mustn’t make the same mistake twice.

  Rowe wasn’t the only one susceptible to that line of thinking. So too was Sir Edward Lewis, Decca’s major shareholder. Lewis was a dour old man, with little passion for rock ’n’ roll. But he had a great enthusiasm for moneymaking.

  “I remember taking [the Stones’ audition tape] to him,” Rowe said, “and I wondered if it was too raw. But he was so annoyed that we had passed on the Beatles, that he was determined that the Stones were going to make it. He hadn’t got the slightest idea what [the Stones] were about. And he said ‘fantastic!’ And I remember looking at him [and thinking to myself] ‘fantastic?’ ”

  On May 14, 1963—just a couple days after Dick Rowe first laid eyes on them—the Stones signed with Decca. And whereas the Beatles, lacking any real bargaining power, had found it necessary to accept EMI’s chintzy royalty rate of just one penny per double-sided single sold (i.e., about 1 percent of the retail price), Rowe was proud to be able to offer the Stones a much better deal: 5 percent of the price of each record they sold.

  The Stones’ contract with Decca had another notable feature. Sometime earlier, pop producer Phil Spector had advised Oldham that if he ever managed a group, under no circumstances should he have them lay tracks in a studio that belonged to, or was paid for by, their record company. Instead, he should reach into his own pockets in order to finance independent studio sessions, and then lease the band’s master tapes to their record company. These terms were virtually unheard of in England, but when Decca agreed to them, the Stones retained the copyright on their music. In this way, they also secured more artistic control over their work, and ultimately, they were able to garner much more money than they would have otherwise. “He had us totally beaten there,” remarked Chris Stamp, the comanager of the Who. “[Other managers] didn’t even know about that shit. When Andrew got that tape-lease deal . . . it was visionary.”

  It is unclear whether Decca executives acceded to this arrangement because they didn’t fully understand its implications, or because of their determination not to be left in the lurch aga
in, no matter the cost. Either way, it was the culmination of an incredible string of good fortune for the Stones. In little more than a month’s time, they’d received their first glowing press report, befriended the Beatles, been discovered by a pair of talented agents, and signed a lucrative recording contract with one of Britain’s two most prestigious record companies.

  The Rolling Stones weren’t yet stars, but they knew they had just been blessed with an extraordinary opportunity. About a year later, by which time the Stones truly were riding high, someone asked Brian Jones: “Who has been most helpful to you since you turned professional?”

  Brian answered, “Our comanagers Eric Easton and Andrew Oldham, of course. But I’ll never forget the early words of praise from the Beatles.”

  • • •

  In a 2001 interview, Gomelsky reminisced about that night at the Royal Albert Hall way back in the spring of 1963, when a gaggle of teenage girls mistook Brian Jones for a pop star and then proceeded to tug at his clothes and beg him for autographs.

  Jones told him: “Giorgio, Giorgio, that’s what I want.”

  “And I said, ‘Brian, you’re going to have it. Don’t worry about it. But when you get it you might not want it.’ I was wrong—he never got enough of it . . .”

  Some of the consequences of Jones’s rising fame lust were predictable. First, he began backpedaling on some of his esoteric blues purism. Meanwhile, he started evincing a new willingness to compromise the band’s “authenticity” (that was always the byword) in exchange for the possibility of greater commercial success. The trend was set in motion when the band released their first single in June 1963—a starchy cover of Chuck Berry’s “Come On” that (even the Stones admitted) didn’t really resemble what they were doing at the clubs. “In these hectic days of Liverpool chart domination it has become almost an event for any group outside Merseyside to break into the hit lists,” observed Hit Parade magazine, “but that is just what the London-based Rolling Stones did” with their first single. (It peaked at number 21 on the UK charts.) A Record Mirror reviewer, however, damned the single with faint praise: “It’s good, punchy, and commercial, but it’s not the fanatical R&B that audiences wait hours to hear. Instead it’s a bluesy very commercial group that should make the charts in a smallish sort of way.” On a jury show, British pop singer Craig Douglas was more critical, proclaiming the song “Very, very ordinary. If there was a Liverpool accent it might get somewhere, but this is definitely no hit.”