Beatles vs. Stones

by John McMillian

  Whenever the Beatles returned to Liverpool clubs and dance halls, they brought a little bit of Hamburg with them. “They liked us because we were kind of rough, and we’d had a lot of practice in Germany,” said Harrison. “There were all these acts going ‘Dum de dum’ and suddenly we’d come on, jumping and stomping. Wild men in leather suits.” An early fan described them as “raw. . . . They were always in their leather jackets, Cuban heels, and their hair everywhere. It was so different from the run-of-the-mill groups at the time with their suede-collared jackets and matching colors, all blues and yellows.” Liverpool disc jockey Bob Wooler remembered Lennon “commanded the stage . . . the way he stared . . . and stood. His legs would be wide apart, that was one of his trademarks. And of course it was regarded as being very sexual. The girls up front would be kind of looking up his legs, keeping a watch on the crotch, as it were. It was a very aggressive stance that he adopted.” The group continued taking Prellies and Purple Hearts (supplied by Paul’s girlfriend, who stole them from a pharmacy she worked at), and when the band played lunchtime engagements, Lennon would banter sarcastically with the audience—especially with those who worked in nearby offices. “ ‘Shurrup, you with the suits on,’ became a regular Lennon message,” one biographer said. “He mocked them for taking ‘regular jobs.’ ” And since the enthusiasm that the Beatles stimulated in teenage women sometimes elicited an inverse response from Merseyside’s tough young men, the Beatles still got into the occasional brawl. According to Best, George was too puny for real fighting, and sometimes called for rescue, but “John . . . was always ready to have a go.” After Stuart Sutcliffe died from a brain hemorrhage in 1961, an autopsy found an indentation in his skull, and some have speculated that the trauma might have occurred when a group of Liverpool teddy boys attacked him earlier that year.

  When Brian Epstein saw the Beatles for the first time, at Liverpool’s Cavern Club in late 1961, they were much improved since their first Hamburg engagement, almost two years prior. For all their louche behavior, the Beatles still maintained a brutally demanding schedule in Germany. (In one year-and-a-half stretch alone, they are thought to have played 270 shows, clocking in more than 800 performance hours.) Epstein saw the Beatles as a four-piece band (Sutcliffe having recently left, to be replaced by McCartney on bass), and soon Ringo would take Pete Best’s perch behind the drums. But the group was very different back then from the one that most people recognize today as “The Beatles.” Before they were catapulted to fame, they lived very roughly, sleeping around, popping pills, drinking a lot, and occasionally getting into fights. When they weren’t attired in matching leathers, they dressed slovenly. Their reputation was not based upon any recorded work, but rather on their kinetic live performances. Led by a charismatic frontman who was known to greet even fans with practiced arrogance, they projected a thoroughly disreputable, slightly dangerous aura. British music journalist Chris Hutchins described them this way: “The Beatles when they lived in Hamburg were what the Stones became.”

  • • •

  In his capacity for making mischief and harming others, Brian Jones, the Rolling Stones’ founder and guitarist, was no slouch. His background, however, was altogether different from Lennon’s. Both of Jones’s parents were university educated, and Jones was himself a talented student; at age fifteen, he got nine O-level passes in the General Certificate of Education (the British national subject exam) and entered the sixth form (the optional and selective last two years of school in England). “He was a rebel . . . but when examinations came, he was brilliant,” remembered one childhood friend. Brian’s mother, Louisa, wistfully recalled that young Brian “sometimes talked of becoming a dentist, and we were all behind him—especially when he did so well at school.” Jones also showed youthful athletic promise, and growing up in Cheltenham—a ritzy but dull spa town that Keith Richards once described as “an old ladies’ resting place”—he learned how to comport himself in a respectable manner. He had a stable home life, and very early on his parents recognized and encouraged his prodigious musical talent.

  According to Brian’s beleaguered father, Lewis, the onset of his son’s problems with authorities struck abruptly, and forcefully, when he was about seventeen or eighteen—not long after he’d taken up the alto sax and become consumed with improvisational jazz (especially as practiced by Charlie Parker). “He started to rebel against everything—mainly me,” said Lewis. When Brian was confronted about his disorderly behavior at school, which led to at least two suspensions, his father lamented that Brian was “terribly logical about it all.” “You want me to do the things you did,” Brian explained. “But I can’t be like you. I have to live my own life”—a life that in short order would mean leaving his studies behind, drifting about, flirting with poverty, and evading adult responsibilities.

  In 1959, when Jones was seventeen, he was expelled from Cheltenham Grammar School after his fourteen-year-old girlfriend became pregnant and declined to have the abortion that Brian had assiduously lobbied for. This was the first of at least several (some have claimed five) “illegitimate” children. The following year, a one-night stand led to another woman’s pregnancy. Then in 1961, after making his way through several low-wage vocations (shop assistant, deliverer of coal, bus conductor, apprentice at the local housing office), Brian made a young woman named Pat Andrews pregnant. She likewise carried the baby, apparently with the understanding that, given the mores of the time, as well as Brian’s personal reassurances, he would soon marry her.

  He did not. Instead, he beat his way to London to work in an optician’s office, forcing Ms. Andrews to track him down, baby and belongings in tow, and demand that he take them in. It would be difficult to describe the shame this must have brought upon Brian’s family. After the optician job, Jones worked at a department store from which he was fired for theft. Later he would leave the employ of a record store, and then a newsstand, after committing the same offense at both places. “Brian was totally dishonest,” remembered Ian Stewart, the Stones’ regular keyboardist.

  When the opportunity arose, he could also be a world-class bully. Keith Richards recalled how Brian used to torment their insecure, sycophantic roommate Dick Hattrell:

  Within two weeks Brian took him for every penny, and he conned Dick into buying him this whole new Harmony electric guitar, having his amp fixed and getting him a whole new set of harmonicas. Dick would do anything Brian said. It was freezing and the worst winter. Brian would say, “Give me your overcoat,” and he gave Brian his army overcoat. “Give Keith the sweater,” so I put the sweater on. “Now you walk twenty yards behind us,” and we’d walk off to the local Wimpy Bar. “Stay there. You can’t come in. Give us £2.” Dick would stand outside this hamburger joint, freezing. Brian would invite Dick to lunch and the three of us would go to what we considered a really good restaurant, and have a hot meal, which nobody could afford, of course! Then we’d just walk out and leave Dick with the bill.

  One winter evening, Brian even locked Hattrell out of the house, forcing him to pound on the front door for hours, begging to be let back in, “by which time he’d turned blue.” Worst of all, according to bandmate Bill Wyman, “One night Brian punched [Pat Andrews] in the face and she ran home with a black eye, crying. A few hours later, Brian, the true romantic, arrived outside her home, throwing pebbles up at her window and shouting his apologies. They were quickly reunited.”

  Philip Norman, the Stones’ best biographer, observed that when “Brian fixed anyone with his big baby eyes and spoke in his soft, lisping, well-brought-up voice, it was impossible to imagine the chaos accumulating behind him.” Someone else called him a “Botticelli angel with a cruel streak.” His genteel background and, at times, shy and quiet persona masked an incredible capacity for harming others. In its own way, Jones’s softness must have been just as disarming as Lennon’s impish humor and quick wit. Though rarely as outwardly aggressive as Lennon, he clearly shared some of Lennon’s capacity for antisocial be
havior. But when we examine the backgrounds of the other future Rolling Stones, we find very little to suggest that they were destined to become the archetypal “bad boys” of rock ’n’ roll.

  As a teenager, Michael Jagger was accustomed to middle-class creature comforts, and he even had the means to become a regular mail-order customer of Chess Records, the famous Chicago blues label. “I never got to have a raving adolescence between the age of 12 and 15,” Jagger explained, “because I was concentrating on my studies . . . but then that’s what I wanted to do, and I enjoyed it.” About the notorious teddy boy subculture, which anyhow was on the wane by the time he was old enough to participate, Jagger said he “wasn’t particularly impressed.” It is true that at around age fifteen, he began fashioning an insubordinate sort of attitude—his academic performance slipped as he became interested in girls and rhythm ’n’ blues, and his love of sports gave way to less salubrious habits, like beer and cigarettes—but never was he at any risk of failing out of Dartford Grammar School (the rough equivalent of a selective American high school). In fact, he passed seven O-levels, entered the sixth form, and was admitted into the prestigious London School of Economics, where he blended in perfectly and began laying plans for an elite career in politics or business.

  About Keith Richards, one must resist the temptation to make too much of the fact that he was, literally, a choirboy. In 1953, at age nine, he even had the honor of singing in Westminster Abbey at Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation. When he was twelve, though, he was sent to the lowly regarded Dartford Tech, and in 1959, school officials expelled him for truancy. By this point, Keith was styling himself in dark glasses, pink socks, and black drainpipe trousers, and carrying his guitar everywhere, slung over his back. “Rock and roll got me into being one of the boys,” he recalled. “Before that I just got me ass kicked all over the place. Learned how to ride a punch.” His next stop was Sidcup Art College—a tax-subsidized training school of last resort for people like Richards who, it was hoped, might be able to acquire some kind of marketable skill in the realm of commercial art. Instead, Richards found himself surrounded by many other alienated and vaguely bohemian musicians. It was at Sidcup that Richards made his first forays into recreational drugs (amphetamines and painkillers), but according to a biographer, he was not then regarded as a degenerate or a major troublemaker, but rather as a “free-spirited . . . pest,” blessed with a quick wit.

  Nor did Charlie Watts or Bill Wyman arouse any great fury as young adults. In fact, Watts was considered “the most stylish young man” at his advertising agency, “wearing charcoal-colored trousers and good quality sweaters when he did not wear a suit.” According to a friend, “Charlie’s concession to joining the Stones was taking his tie off at gigs.” Furthermore, around the time he hooked up with the Stones, his premier interest was not in rock or blues, but jazz. Bill Wyman also did not share the same musical interests as Jones, Jagger, and Richards when he joined the Stones; instead of R&B, he’d been playing “white rock ’n’ roll” in the Cliftons; but as he wrote in his memoir, “The major difference between the Stones and me when we met mattered even more than the music. I was a young family man with a wife, a nine-month-old child and a day job.” Wyman was also about six years older, on average, than the rest of the Stones.

  It is true, though, that early in the Rolling Stones’ saga, when Brian, Mick, and Keith all lived together, they seemed to deliberately slum up their Edith Grove flat in an attempt to fashion bohemian lifestyles. “The place was an absolute pit which I shall never forget,” wrote Wyman. “I’ve never seen a kitchen like it—permanently piled high with dirty dishes and filth everywhere. They took a strange delight in pointing out the various cultures that grew in about forty smelly milk bottles laying around in mold and on congealed eggs.” They lobbed disgusting gobs of spit onto their own walls and let rubbish accumulate everywhere. What little heat they had emanated from an electric coin meter, but sometimes it was so cold they stayed in bed all day. A single, bare light bulb hung from the ceiling, and even food was scarce. “I never understood why they carried on like this,” Wyman later said. “Although Keith came from a working-class background, Brian and Mick were from well-to-do families. It could not have been just the lack of money that caused them to sink.” Instead, he concluded there was a voguish quality to their behavior; they must have been afflicted with some kind of “Bohemian Angst.”

  The image the Stones later embraced, then, was not entirely a surprise. People remember that although Mick Jagger was always interested in achieving financial success, he was also a skilled poser. Even before he joined the Stones, he’d traded in his given name, Michael, for the more laddish-sounding Mick, and he was known to switch easily between his proper London accent and a faux-Cockney tongue that might have fooled someone into thinking he was from the East End. But beyond this, and with the partial exceptions of Brian Jones (whose sociopathic tendencies were not immediately discernible), and Keith Richards (whose unruly demeanor really wasn’t all that unruly), we don’t find anything in the backgrounds of the future Rolling Stones to suggest that they would one day arouse such tremendous fear and indignation. No one would have expected them to become antiestablishment icons—objects of tabloid fury and rough justice from the courts.

  In fact, the very idea that Stones would soon become synonymous with debauchery and rock ’n’ roll excess—first across the British Isle, and then the world—would have seemed preposterous to the band in its earliest incarnation. When the “Rollin’ Stones” began performing together in July 1962 (consisting of Brian, Mick, Keith, Dick Taylor on bass, Ian Stewart on piano, and Tony Chapman on drums) they didn’t fancy themselves as rock ’n’ rollers, but rather, as R&B purists. They specialized in covers of black American artists like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and Bo Diddley, which they performed while sitting down. Someone who caught the Stones early on described them this way: “They seemed accomplished and rather like art-school nice guys, no posturing; they were almost like jazzers. . . . They were gauche, naïve, friendly, and generally without any charisma, they were just doing their music.” Bill Wyman said something similar. When he got in league with the Stones in December 1962, he of course recognized Brian’s and Mick’s naturally projected sex appeal, “but on stage they were keen on projecting the music. Selling themselves as sexy pop stars had not crossed their minds.”

  “R&B was a minority thing that had to be defended at all times,” Jagger recollected. “There was a kind of crusade mentality.” By contrast, rock ’n’ roll seemed weak—artistically compromised and commercially corrupted. A substantial portion of the Stones’ audience consisted of bohemians and intellectuals, many of whom were men, and it wasn’t difficult to perceive a measure of snobbery in the Stones’ attitude, which seemed calculated to draw a distance between themselves, and what Jagger called “waffly white pop.” “But I mean there’s always going to be good-looking guys with great haircuts,” he added. “That’s what pop music is about.”

  • • •

  Brian Epstein was twenty-seven when he discovered the Beatles, and until then, he’d never expressed any interest in pop management. In fact, when he was sixteen, he carefully crafted a letter to his parents in which he surveyed various careers that he’d decided he was not interested in—business, law, the ministry—before announcing that he’d finally realized what he wanted to do: he would make his fortune designing dresses. Given his extraordinary interest in fashion, it might not have been a bad path, but Brian’s father—the well-to-do son of a penniless immigrant, known for his serious mien and tenacious work ethic—was horrified at the notion. He’d have preferred, first, that Brian stay in school, but his unhappy son had been such a chronic underachiever that he resolved instead to steer him into the family business: retail furniture. Surprisingly, Brian quickly began showing acumen as a salesman; he spent hours arranging the furniture displays in the windows, and he always showed up for work immaculately dressed. As a young man, his biographer
posits, he may even have been “Liverpool’s best-dressed bachelor. His thick hair was styled at the Horne Brothers salon, his clothes came from the top tailors, and he found himself popular among girls,” even though he was secretly gay (homosexuality being illegal in England until 1967). As hobbies, Epstein took up foreign languages (Spanish and French), and he immersed himself in Liverpool’s theater community.

  In the late 1950s, Brian’s dad launched NEMS (North End Music Stores) and hired his son to run the record department. Brian was a demanding, fastidious boss, and his regal bearing could rub some people the wrong way. He insisted that his employees should always look their very best, and that they address every potential customer as “sir” or “madam”—even the four particularly disheveled lads in jeans and leather jackets who were always dropping by in the middle of the afternoon to listen to records but rarely to purchase any. “They used to drive us crackers,” an employee said about the group she later discovered was the Beatles. Often they were looking for “way-out American music” that was not in stock.

  Epstein had a policy of ordering any record that a customer asked for, and in late 1961, he was briefly stumped when requests started trickling in for a new single called “My Bonnie,” supposedly by “the Beatles.” Brian searched hard for the record, but it simply didn’t seem to exist in any of his ordering catalogues. Finally, he was able to determine that the disc people were seeking, which was recorded in Germany, was actually put out by the English singer-guitarist Tony Sheridan, who had merely used the Beatles as a backup band. What’s more, the Beatles weren’t properly mentioned on the record; instead, they were listed as the “Beat Brothers,” because the company that produced the single thought “Beatles” sounded too much like peedles, German slang for “penis.” Nevertheless, Epstein ordered twenty-five copies of “My Bonnie,” which sold out in a day. Then he ordered fifty more discs, and very quickly they, too, disappeared from his record bins.