Beatles vs. Stones

by John McMillian

  Oldham has been rightly credited for helping Jagger and Richards realize their previously undiscovered talent for songwriting, but Lennon and McCartney played an important role as well. It wasn’t just that they set a powerful example by writing their own material (though there is that). They also personally and vividly showed the Stones just how it was done, huddling up in a corner and writing the middle eight to “I Wanna Be Your Man” on a moment’s notice. In this crucial period, the Beatles also gave the Stones precious words of encouragement. Jagger seems never to have forgotten this. In 1972, he sat down with the Australian pop music magazine Go-Set. “Even though people don’t like giving them credit for it now, these days, because they’re gone and they’re passé almost,” he said, “the Beatles told me we could write our own songs.”

  Why Oldham insisted that Jagger and Richards should start producing original material, without ever demanding the same from Brian Jones, has never been entirely clear. Obviously, Oldham’s gambit paid off. Even if their earliest material wasn’t quite right for the Stones, many of the smarmy ballads and pop songs that Jagger and Richards came up with were still good enough to donate to other artists, and several of them impacted the British music charts. In less than a year, Jagger and Richards had authored the Stones’ first batch of hits, including “The Last Time,” “Play with Fire,” and (of course) “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” all of which appeared on the American version of their 1965 LP Out of Our Heads (an album that was nevertheless dominated by cover songs).

  During this same period, however, it became increasingly obvious that Jones almost completely lacked the gift for songwriting. When it came to playing the riffs around which many Stones songs were built, he was always nimble and often brilliant. During rehearsals, his contributions could be valuable and creative. The raunchy slide guitar that he added to “I Wanna Be Your Man” is a case in point; dirtying the song up the way he did helped to make it almost indisputably superior to the Beatles’ version, and it became the Stones’ first bona fide hit, peaking at number 12 on the UK charts. Later, he’d add a sitar to “Paint It, Black” and marimbas to “Under My Thumb.” No one else in the group had the ingenuity or the musicianship to attempt such things. But try as he might, when it came to authoring his own compositions, Brian was frustrated.

  By some accounts, Jones was simply “incapable” of songwriting (Ian Stewart). Others remember him toiling away for hours on his own, often late into the night, only to come up with material that he was simply too fragile and insecure to present for the band’s consideration. (To varying degrees, Keith Richards, Bill Wyman, Marianne Faithfull, Alexis Korner, and Jones’s old girlfriend, Linda Lawrence, have expressed this point of view.) And on those rare occasions when Jones did bring songs to the Stones, Wyman says that they were invariably dismissed, not fairly or kindly, “but out of hand: ‘You can’t write songs!’ ” Oftentimes, Lawrence recalls, Jones would come home “quite upset, almost crying” after a rough day of rehearsal.

  All of this begs the question: When Oldham metaphorically locked Jagger and Richards in that kitchen and told them not to come out until they’d written a song, was he trying to foment a change in the Stones’ equilibrium? If so, his plan succeeded brilliantly.

  In his 2000 memoir, Oldham sounds almost Svengalilike when he describes moving in to Mick and Keith’s cramped second-floor apartment in West Hampstead, London, in late 1963: “Now there was no distance to complain of, and three of the Rolling Stones’ leading lights beamed as one.” With Oldham’s encouragement, Jagger and Richards soon began fitting songwriting sessions into their schedules wherever possible (usually after gigs). The three “leading lights” also typically stuck together whenever they hit the road: Mick, Keith, and Andrew would travel in one car, while Brian, Bill, and Charlie rode with Stu in his van. (Oldham and Jagger grew particularly close in this period.) Meanwhile, Charlie Watts was on his own, Wyman lived with his wife, and Jones was cohabitating with his pregnant girlfriend in a home he had inaptly christened—perhaps out of a desire to make it seem like a locus of activity—“Rolling Stone.”

  “Until that time Brian was pretty much the group’s spokesman,” remembered Glyn Johns, the engineer who first recorded the Stones. “Then Mick and Keith were encouraged to write and sell their songs, and the whole balance of power shifted to them. They and Andrew took over directing the band.”

  “Brian wasn’t really a writer,” Charlie Watts added, “so suddenly the band was going off in a direction he couldn’t hold on to. Brian loved being what one would call a ‘star.’ ”

  It was the Beatles, of course, who gave Jones his first real taste of stardom, not as a remote fantasy (in the facile way that every young person who plays rock ’n’ roll privately dreams of glorification) but in actuality. Hobnobbing with the Fab Four, carrying their gear out of the back of the Royal Albert Hall, and getting surrounded by a bunch of girls in the throes of teenage ecstasy—all of this gave Jones a sudden, visceral, and even a thrilling idea of what pop superstardom was all about. The fact that it was also a tragically limited understanding is somewhat beside the point; he didn’t know otherwise. Having originally set out merely to revivify a blues aesthetic, primarily for an audience of London scenesters, now Jones suddenly possessed the same sort of vaulting ambition as the Beatles.

  There was something about the precise nature of the Beatles’ success, too, that seemed to hasten a transformation in the Stones: it was the fact that the Beatles wrote so much of their own material. Flush with confidence even to the point of being cocky, Lennon and McCartney planted the idea that the Stones didn’t have to keep scrounging around looking for obscure American blues songs to cover. Instead, they could come up with material of their own (and make hefty amount of loot while doing so). It was the right direction for the Stones to begin moving, but Jones was left in the lurch. The creative stream that nourished Jagger and Richards’s songwriting partnership in the mid-’60s just wasn’t something that Jones was ever able to tap into.

  Had Jones had an altogether different emotional makeup, he might have made peace with that fact. Had he been less needy, more agreeable, and more stable, he might have understood—the way Wyman and Watts seemed to understand—that the Stones was a band with multiple powerful and abrasive personalities whose talents nevertheless complemented each other’s. From that point, he might have coyly reconciled himself to playing a more supportive role. But that was impossible. When the Stones alchemized into a Jagger-Richards-dominated band, his fate was sealed. He would have only a few years left on earth, and they would be unhappy ones.

  Of course, no one knew that at the time. Outwardly, the prognosis for the Stones continued to look very good. On the afternoon of September 15, 1963, they even made a triumphant return to the Royal Albert Hall. This time, however, the Stones didn’t show up as hangers-on or to help schlep anyone’s gear out of the back door. They were performers! Along with eleven other acts, they were part of the Great Pop Prom, an annual benefit concert, hosted that year by the legendary DJ Alan “Fluff” Freeman and sponsored by the teen magazines Valentine, Marilyn, and Roxy. The Beatles, of course, headlined the bill, but the Stones—now Decca recording artists and just two weeks shy of launching their first national tour—were looking eagerly to whatever lay ahead. They were not yet “rivals” of the Beatles, in any plausible sense of the word, but they were certainly admiring and envious of them. And though the Beatles did not quite feel threatened by the Stones, Lennon would soon make it plain that he was frustrated with the way newer bands from London were nipping at the Beatles’ coattails.

  But none of this mattered a great deal. The two bands were getting along, working hard, and loving life. According to McCartney, at some point on the fifteenth, the Beatles and the Stones even found time to gather outside the Royal Albert Hall for a joint photo session. Alas, the photos that Paul recalls posing for have never surfaced; there does not seem to exist a single photograph of all the Beatles and all the Sto
nes together. So Paul’s memory may well be incorrect.

  Then again, it is pretty specific memory. It was a sunny day, he said, and the Beatles and the Rolling Stones stood together atop the wide flight of stairs near Prince Consort Road. There we were, Paul said, “all in our smart new clothes with the rolled collars, and we looked at each other and we were thinking, ‘This is it! London! The Albert Hall!’ We felt like gods! We felt like fucking gods!”

  CHAPTER THREE

  A PARTICULAR FORM OF SNOBBERY

  Would you let your daughter go out with a Rolling Stone? For a few years in the mid-’60s, that wasn’t so much a question, but a slogan.

  It didn’t arise organically, however. Andrew Oldham recalls puckishly delivering the line to a Melody Maker journalist in early 1964; a bit later it reappeared, in a slightly different iteration, as a headline. That hardly could have come as a surprise. To a publication like Melody Maker, which had refashioned itself from a kind of trade magazine for dance hall bands and popular crooners, into something more favorable to the newly effervescent teen culture, the hype that Oldham was peddling was like catnip. A generational feud was brewing in England, he implied, and the Rolling Stones—long-haired, sullen, and libidinous—were on the side of rebellious youths. Oldham pushed this line of reasoning with such avidity that whenever things seemed to go badly for the Stones—if ever they were denied service at a hotel or restaurant, or treated roughly by the police, or jeered by the media—he reasoned that that was good news. “I’ve made sure the Stones won’t be liked by too many older people,” he boasted.

  It helped that the Stones became closely identified with Swinging London—the trendy, youth-oriented cultural scene that emerged out of London’s West End in the early 1960s. To older observers (and to some outsiders), the spirit presiding over Swinging London could hardly have been any more vulgar and narcissistic. In turn, the Stones and their cohorts—some of them models, photographers, fashion designers, and gallery owners—always made a point of underscoring that they did not care what the older generations thought. Their insolence was that calculated. Besides, having come of age amid a drab era of postwar austerity and sexual repression, they reasoned that England could use a good splash of Carnaby Street color.

  That was precisely opposite the tack the Beatles wished to take. “Don’t for heaven’s sake say we’re the new youth,” Paul McCartney told a journalist who profiled them in the Evening Standard in 1963, “because that’s a load of rubbish.”

  McCartney wasn’t denying that youths idolized the Beatles. How could he? At the time, the group’s popularity was strongest among young girls. With their good looks, nutty humor, and kindly dispositions, the Beatles knowingly and aggressively cultivated the teen market. But that is rather different from saying that they set out to tap into the volatile energies of those British youths who derided the old class system or who loathed the status quo. No, the Beatles were enjoying mass appeal. In England, it was not just teens that adored them, but also their parents, politicians, even the British Royal Family. Everyone touted them as a national treasure. Privately, the Beatles were a bit mystified by all the ballyhoo, but mostly they decided to roll with it.

  The Beatles’ musical versatility also helps to explain why they were more broadly appealing than the Stones. Having already spent years together, working the nightclub circuit and scrounging for bookings, they developed an enviable repertoire. By the time they ventured into Abbey Road Studios to record their first single, on the afternoon of September 4, 1962, they were well versed not only in souped-up rock ’n’ roll, but also plangent ballads, covers of Motown girl groups, and even Broadway show tunes. And while the era’s analog recording methods did not allow for much ingenuity in the studio, George Martin was nevertheless able to provide the Beatles with the type of slick, polished sound that commercial-minded record executives slavered over.

  By contrast, the Stones concentrated most of their energy on Chicago and Mississippi blues. True, they covered a couple of the same songs as the Beatles (Chuck Berry’s “Carol” and Barrett Strong’s “Money”), and they shared some of the Fab Four’s enthusiasm for Motown. But mainly they were preoccupied with legends like Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, and Bo Diddley—artists that, outside of the art school crowds, weren’t all that popular in England. One of the Stones’ big achievements, in fact, is that they led a pack of artists including the Animals, John Mayall, and the Yardbirds, that helped to make the electric blues more popular. Even then, however, it remained a niche genre, not nearly as accessible as what the Beatles were performing. Meanwhile, Mick Jagger’s mush-mouthed vocals, the primitive quality of the Stones’ early recordings, and the bawdiness of some of their songs all lent credibility to Oldham’s boasting about the Stones being “the band that parents love to hate.”

  Of course, there was never any good reason why teenagers across the world couldn’t gush with equal enthusiasm over the Beatles and the Stones; obviously, many of them did just that. But to the degree that both bands took on totemic qualities in the early ’60s, the Stones were always regarded as the more authentic group, and as a result, they won the fidelity of hipper and more pretentious youths. The Stones would never match the Beatles’ phenomenal popular success, but especially in England, they drew a heftier measure of respect from Swinging London’s tastemaking aristocracy—the frowzy, post-Beat bohemians who, even if they conceded the Beatles’ creativity, nevertheless retained a bit of skepticism about their shiny pop songs and teenybopper fans.

  “I thought of the Beatles as a boy band, a very manufactured group when they started out,” celebrity photographer David Bailey recalled. By contrast, “the Stones seemed to grow organically. The Beatles’ haircut was old-fashioned—it only seemed ‘modern’ to people who didn’t realize it had been around a long time—and I personally didn’t find lyrics like ‘I want to hold your hand’ very interesting.” Virginia Ironside, a young pop music journalist from the Daily Mail, expressed a similar attitude: “Like a lot of my friends, I had reservations about the Beatles in those little suits and cute mop tops,” she said. “They weren’t really revolutionary enough. The Stones were much more interesting and much more honest.” “Spanish” Tony Sanchez, who would become Keith Richards’s drug supplier, remarked, “The Beatles were richer and sold more records [than the Stones]. But they had compromised their integrity with neat hair and command performances.” Christine Ohlman, now a professional singer, said “Even in 1965 we Stones fans prided ourselves on being more on-the-edge. . . . We dug the Beatles—loved them—but there was no danger there.”

  One of the problems with this structuring opposition—the Stones as scruffy and authentic iconoclasts, the Beatles as heavily prefabricated—has already been suggested: both bands engaged in a bit of image mongering in this period. In some ways, the bohemian hauteur that the Stones cultivated was just as contrived as the happy-go-lucky image that the Beatles projected.

  Another problem is that this dichotomy reeks of what critics nowadays might call “rockism”—an aesthetic that reflexively dismisses any music that seems as if it is calculated or contrived to generate mass enthusiasm, and therefore might be too popular. Coined in 1981, and popularized in the early 2000s, rockism holds that so long as it is put across sincerely, raw and unpolished rock ’n’ roll almost always trumps slick and professional popular music. It favors unadorned, visceral rock; it privileges feelings over technique, and emotion over craft. Rockism means, according to music journalist Kelefa Sanneh, “idolizing the authentic legend (or underground hero) while mocking the latest pop star; lionizing punk while barely tolerating disco; loving the live show and hating the music video.” It is a particular form of snobbery.

  • • •

  How did the Beatles ever manage to inspire such frenzy in the first place? People used to ask them all the time, and even they weren’t entirely sure. When it comes to explaining Beatlemania—a phenomenon unlike anything the world has ever seen, before or since—it would seem t
hat we’ve all been afflicted by a tremendous failure of collective discernment.

  Hardly anyone disputes that the Beatles were talented, handsome, and charming. They also had the extraordinary luck to come along at precisely the right moment. Had any of the four been born just a few years earlier, the Beatles would not even have existed (since England didn’t abandon its compulsory National Service program until 1960). Thankfully, instead of being shuffled off to various military bases for two years apiece, the four were able to find each other and devote several years to playing music together, burnishing their chops in front of small but adoring audiences. By the time they finally began hitting their creative stride, the first wave of post–World War Two baby boomers were reaching their teens. It was a time of unprecedented economic prosperity in the West, and for many listeners, the Beatles’ joyous and optimistic music seemed as suited to the era as a soundtrack.

  But this scarcely begins to explain the mass pathology that the Beatles inspired: teenage girls fainting, weeping, and peeing themselves en masse, even as battalions of policemen herded them behind fences and barricades. On more than a few occasions, distraught parents begged the Beatles to please just touch their disabled children, as if the group possessed shamanic healing powers. And always, of course: the screaming. It was more than a little disconcerting. Journalists compared the sounds made at Beatles’ concerts to the nerve-shredding cries of pigs being brought to slaughter, or to the screech that New York City’s subway trains make as they grind along the rails. When the group played Shea Stadium in 1965, the New York Times reported, the crowd’s “immature lungs produced a sound so staggering, so massive, so shrill and sustained that it crossed the line from enthusiasm into hysteria and soon it was in the area of the classic Greek meaning of the word pandemonium—the region of the demons.”