Beatles vs. Stones

by John McMillian

  The diminishing comparison to the Beatles might have stung Jones a bit, but presumably the repeated descriptions of the song as “commercial” may have rankled more. After all, he had been crafting his whole identify out of his love for, and identification with, revved-up American blues. In the band’s earliest days, Watts recalls, Brian “would sit for hours composing letters about R&B. The letters would go on forever—he used to write to Melody Maker” telling them that advertisements for Stones performances “must include the description ‘R&B’; it couldn’t be just a band. . . . It was a crusade to him a) to get us on the stage in a club where we could be paid half a crown and b) to be billed as an R&B band.”

  Yet now, Jones, once the most fiercely partisan of music fans, was laboring to justify his apostasy: “When we left the club scene,” he explained to a reporter, “we also left the diehard R&B fanatics and we temporarily made a compromise to cope with the pop fans we came across in dance halls and on tours. It’s all very nice, I suppose, to know you’re appreciated, but it’s also rather frightening.”

  Several of the varieties of denial that psychologists talk about can be found in just that short statement. Brian passively acknowledges that the Stones have shifted their approach, only he gets it wrong: they didn’t “temporarily” compromise their artistic integrity in order to “cope with” the legions of pop fans that were flocking to see them in dance halls and on tour. When they released “Come On” in the spring of 1963, they had yet to play in any such venues; they were still confined to a few tiny clubs in London. In addition to reframing the situation, he shows willful blindness. The plain fact is, from the moment they signed with Decca, if not before, the Stones ceased being blues purists. True, they would continue reworking obscure R&B songs on some of their early albums, but the singles they released were meant to be broadly appealing. The whole band was on board with that approach, but Wyman said that Jones “was the most uneasy of all of us over the route to mass popularity we were driven along by Andrew Oldham.”

  Nor was Jones nearly as ambivalent about fame as his statement suggests. As the band’s founder, he always believed it was desirable and necessary that he should also be its central figure, its biggest star. With Jagger in the group, that was always a ludicrous proposition, but it was something he never wavered from. “Brian was the only guy in the world who thought he could take on Mick as an onstage personality,” Keith marveled. The contrast between the two was only heightened when Brian would spend hours practicing his stagecraft—literally rehearsing his moves in front of a mirror, and performing the identical feints, twists, and jives, night after night—whereas Mick’s onstage vamping always seemed like a spontaneous expression of his personality.

  Already insecure and paranoid, Jones also had the misfortune of being in a group whose members, on occasion, really did plot against one another. Mick and Keith, especially, seemed to revel in subjecting their bandmates to caustic jokes and sulfurous denunciations. “From the moment I joined,” Wyman says, “I realized they had to have someone to poke fun at, not always in a humorous way, often spiteful and hurtful. They had to have a scapegoat or a guinea pig and in the early days it was me, followed by Brian.” They teased him about his immoderately shampooed hair, his faint lisp, and his stubby arms and legs. They berated him for being an unreliable lush and a selfish egomaniac. Knowing full well that Brian was asthmatic, they often refused to even stub out their cigarettes in his presence, even while in a crowded van on tour.

  Things got even harder for Jones around the fall of 1963, when Oldham started sharing a flat with Mick and Keith at 33 Mapesbury Road, in North West London. Jones took this as sign that the three were now in league together. He felt, and was made to feel, disconnected from the band’s center of gravity. By about the middle of 1964, the whole band would occasionally treat Jones from on high, as if he were merely a session musician. Later that year, they began fitfully discussing whether to just get rid of him.

  Then again, Brian orchestrated a lot of his own misery. Keith later explained the unhealthy dynamic this way:

  You’re on the road 350 days of the year and suddenly you’ve got this guy who is the one cog in the machine who doesn’t seem to be considering how much the machine can help him. . . . If you’ve got to travel with somebody in a car for eight hours, do three gigs in the same night and then move on, you have to be a smooth team and support each other. But Brian either wouldn’t turn up, or if he did he’d just make a lot of snide remarks, and he also developed some very annoying personal habits like his obsession with his hair. When you’re alone with the guy so much, you start to mimic him. Then Brian would get pissed off that we were taking the piss out of him, and the whole thing became compounded.

  It is difficult to exaggerate just how sullen and difficult Jones could be. Photographer Nicky Wright, who did the cover for England’s Newest Hit Makers, shares a story:

  Brian could be sweet—he was intelligent, would listen to your conversation carefully, and was very charming. But he could also seem totally psychotic and schizophrenic. We were coming back from Folkestone one night about nine o’clock, sometime in 1963, and had stopped to look for something to eat. We found a fish shop, but it was closed. We banged on the door and this chap came to the door and told us, “We’ve switched everything off, the fat’s cooled down, we’re closed.” No-one argued until I shouted, “This is the Rolling Stones!” This little husband and wife were really sweet, and said come in and sit down while we see what we can do. So everybody’s ordered their fish and chips, steak and chips, and it takes quite a long time while they heat up the fat or whatever. Finally they bring it to the table. Keith’s happily eating away, so are the others, then Brian tries a forkful, and starts complaining: “I don’t like this! It’s soggy! I can’t eat this!” He stands up, takes this bottle, and squirts ketchup over the table and knocks his food onto the floor. It was heartbreaking—there’s this couple thinking, “Great, it’s the Rolling Stones,” then this happens.

  On a few occasions he went so far as to undermine some of the band’s live performances. Sometimes when the Stones performed their hugest hit, “Satisfaction,” he would screw it up on purpose by playing, as a countermelody, the riff from “Popeye the Sailor Man.” (He thought the two songs sounded alike.)

  Even more self-sabotaging was Brian’s constant jockeying for position in the band. When Oldham and Easton had approached the Stones about the possibility of a management deal, Brian privately told both of them that if they deemed it necessary, he was okay with the idea of sacking Mick Jagger (presumably to replace him with someone who sounded less black). Later, Brian unwisely tried pitting Mick and Keith against each another. On tour, he began finagling his way into slightly better hotels than the rest of the group, and somehow he persuaded Easton to pay him secretly £5 a week more than the others received. (Inevitably, the rest of the group found out. When they did, they were all appropriately furious.) He was also becoming increasingly fuddle-brained and erratic as he increased his intake of booze and started gobbling all sorts of drugs. He missed rehearsals, showed up late for gigs, and complained about all manner of ailments, whether real or imagined. Occasionally while on tour, he would get himself into predicaments that were embarrassing and debilitating even by the Stones’ loose standards.

  With all of this in mind, it is easy to assume that the Rolling Stones simply were not the type of outfit in which someone as petty minded and psychologically troubled as Brian Jones could be expected to thrive (at least not in the long term).

  But did the Beatles’ success also contribute, even in a small way, to Jones’s downfall? Admittedly, the idea has not gotten much traction. You won’t find that it has been pursued by the legions of journalists and biographers who have already said so much about the Stones. Nor is it a notion that is likely to strike a chord with your typical rock connoisseurs—the types of guys (usually they’re guys) who normally find these sorts of imponderables so invigorating.

  It is not
, however, a novel idea. In fact, a couple of men who were particularly close to Brian in this period have put it across before. They put it across pretty emphatically.

  “Brian embarrassed himself first, then he embarrassed us,” Andrew Oldham concluded. “I believe it was seeing the Beatles at the Albert Hall that did it. He came out a two-headed monster. He wanted to be a pure artist, and he wanted out-and-out fame and he was never able to put them together and have a life.”

  Bill Wyman concurs: “Rubbing shoulders with the Beatles” at Edith Grove and the Royal Albert Hall “really whetted [Brian’s] appetite. He suddenly seemed desperate for success—and quickly. It was obvious to all around him that he badly wanted to be a star, but a battle was going on inside him: he didn’t want to compromise his musical integrity, or that of the band.”

  Make no mistake, Wyman clarified: Mick, Keith, and Andrew all likewise “idolized the Beatles and loved to be seen alongside them.” But it was Brian who most craved their degree of fame. And just as soon as it seemed to be on the horizon, Mick, Keith, and Andrew all began shoving him to the margins.

  In a sideways kind of way, the Beatles had something to do with that, too.

  • • •

  It was September 10, 1963, and the Rolling Stones were in a terrible mood. They were rehearsing at the Ken Colyer Jazz Club (also called Studio 51), but nothing was coming together. The band’s debut single, “Come On,” had registered on the UK charts, but only very faintly. They were now hard pressed to deliver a follow-up—something both commercial and distinctive—and yet they were flat out of good ideas. Initially, they’d hoped to release a 45 rpm with the Coasters’ “Poison Ivy” on one side, and Benny Spellman’s “Fortune Teller” on the other. But they didn’t sound good (Dick Rowe called them “ghastly”). None of the other songs they were working on sounded good either.

  In order to give the group some breathing room, as well as to cast off his troubled mood, Andrew Oldham decided he’d head out for a midafternoon stroll. He was not far along when he thought he overheard a couple of distinctive, adenoidal accents. Then he spotted two familiar figures popping out of a black taxi near right near him.

  Dressed in matching wool suits, white oxfords, skinny ties, and Cuban-heeled boots, Lennon and McCartney looked for all the world as if they might have been en route to yet another of their marquee performances. In fact, they were just returning from a Variety Club luncheon at the Savoy Hotel, where soon-to-be British Prime Minister Harold Wilson had bestowed the Beatles with plaques that designated them “Top Vocal Group of the Year.”

  A photograph from the luncheon shows the Beatles smiling widely as they display their awards for the cameras, but they were never comfortable hobnobbing in such stuffy environments. Perhaps as a result, Lennon and McCartney had apparently gotten themselves well lubricated. Oldham recalled that while Paul seemed only “slightly tipsy,” Lennon was “swaying visibly” as he counted out shillings to pay their driver. Not having seen any of the Beatles since he’d left Epstein’s employ about nine months earlier, Oldham was a tad nervous about how he’d be received by John and Paul, but in fact they were happy to see him. They were not only cheerful but, once they discerned that he was in a troubled mood, solicitous. “The dialogue,” Oldham said, “really did go like this:

  “ ‘You’re looking unhappy. What’s the matter?’

  “ ‘Oh, I’m fed up. The Stones can’t find a song to record.’

  “ ‘Oh—we’ve got a song we’ve almost written. The Stones can have that to record if yer like.’ ”

  The three of them immediately headed over to the Stones’ rehearsal space, where everyone greeted each other effusively. Lennon went on to explain that he and McCartney had been working up a Bo Diddley–ish number for Ringo to sing on their next album. Something they called “I Wanna Be Your Man.”

  “I remember teaching it to them,” Lennon said. “We played it roughly [Paul, being left-handed, played Wyman’s bass backward] and they said, ‘Yeah, OK, that’s our style.’ ”

  Only problem was, it wasn’t quite finished. “So Paul and I went off to the corner of the room and finished the song while they were still there, talking. . . . Right in front of their eyes we did it.”

  The Stones were impressed. “We liked the song,” Richards said. “And the fact that John and Paul came down to a rehearsal of ours, and laid it on us, you know . . . It was just one of those jams! They got enthusiastic, and we got enthusiastic, and we said, ‘All right, we’ll cut it tomorrow.’ ”

  Jagger would later flatter himself by expressing surprise “that John and Paul would be prepared to give us one of their best numbers.” But Lennon said he judged the song a throwaway. “We weren’t going to give them anything great, right?”

  Oldham says the level of serendipity involved in all this left him with a hang-up he has never quite gotten over. “Instead of patting myself on the back and saying ‘Only you, you lucky bugger, would have the luck to run into John and Paul and have them hand you a potential hit,’ I get only mad internal chatter in my head about the what and why of it all. What if I hadn’t left the Rolling Stones rehearsal at that particular moment? What if I had turned right? What if I’d turned left towards Covent Garden? What if I hadn’t run into John and Paul?”

  The Stones were just flabbergasted by the ease with which the two Beatles completed the song. And they watched them do it at the very time that they were growing anxious about their lack of suitable songs to cover. Until then, none of them had ever thought much about authoring their own material; they were just interpreters and performers. “A songwriter, as far as I was concerned, was as far removed from me as somebody who was a blacksmith or an engineer, a totally different job,” Keith remarked. “I had the mentality of a guy who could only play guitar; other guys wrote songs.” The Beatles, however, were changing the rules of the game; their first two LPs, Please Please Me and With the Beatles, each contained six cover songs and eight originals.

  Oldham, especially, thought it was important that the Stones should follow suit. Richards remembers him saying: “Look at the other boys, they’re writing their own songs.” At first, the band was resistant; they said they were too busy, or too tired, or too distracted to try composing original material. Some, however, suspected a different sort of problem: perhaps they were too timid? “The Beatles had set this trend—you had to write your own material,” recalled the Who’s guitarist, Peter Townshend. “The Stones had not yet proven they could write . . . and I think there was a lot of panic that they might not be able to do it.”

  Richards always claimed, outlandishly, that Oldham finally became so fed up with Jagger and Richards’s equivocating that he literally locked them in the kitchen of their Mapesbury Road flat and refused to let them leave until they’d written an entire song. “We spent the whole night in that goddamn kitchen,” Richards said. “We’ve got some food, piss out the window or down the sink, it’s no big deal. And I said, ‘If we want to get out of here, Mick, we better come up with something.’ ” The result, he said, was a ballad, originally titled “As Time Goes By,” and later renamed “As Tears Go By,” on which Oldham eventually got a co-songwriting credit. Marianne Faithfull recorded it in 1964, and the Stones recorded it in 1965.

  Jagger’s memory is different. “Keith likes to tell the story about the kitchen, God bless him.” In actuality, he explains, an exasperated Oldham might have jokingly said something along the lines of “I should lock you in a room until you’ve written a song!” But at no point were the two actually trapped anywhere. (And it would have been an odd kitchen if it locked from the outside.) The two also disagree about which was the first song they composed. Jagger says it was “It Should Be You,” a monstrosity that the Stones recorded at Regent Sound in November 1963, but never officially released.

  Either way, Jagger and Richards had taken their first tentative steps together as songwriters. Their initial efforts weren’t worth much. “As Tears Go By” was a pretty
and sensitive song, and it was perfect for an ingénue like Faithfull—the virginally beautiful daughter of an Austrian noblewoman, an ex-convent girl, and soon to be a Swinging London debutante, whom Oldham was grooming for mass success. (“I saw an angel with big tits and signed her,” Oldham liked to say.) But at the time, it didn’t really suit the Stones. The same held true for most of their early compositions, although a few of them were recorded by other artists (mostly Oldham protégés, like George Bean, Adrienne Posta, and the Mighty Avengers) and the American crooner Gene Pitney scored a Top 10 hit in the UK with a majorly rearranged version of a song of theirs called “That Girl Belongs to Yesterday” (originally titled “My Only Girl”). Had Jagger and Richards brought any of these cloying and sentimental songs to the rest of the group, however, they surmised they would have been laughed out of the room.

  Of the twelve songs considered good enough to make it onto the Rolling Stones’ 1964 debut album, only one of them, the Jagger-Richards composition “Tell Me,” stands out, not because it’s especially good, or bad, but because on a record that mostly consists of revamped R&B numbers, it is pleasant, popish, and not at all dissimilar from sound that the Beatles had hatched up in Liverpool. (Later they released it in the US as a single, where presumably it seemed a little less derivative, and it reached number 24 on the charts.) However uninspired, the song clearly indicated that the Glimmer Twins, as Mick and Keith would later call themselves, were gaining confidence.