Beatles vs. Stones

by John McMillian

  Nevertheless, it is clear enough that in addition to their great talent and fortuitous timing, the Beatles had some other unusual qualities that their younger fans found appealing. One is that, from the outset, they acted and behaved just as they saw themselves—as a tightly knit group. Previously, in both England and America, most successful pop and rock acts emphasized individuals: either those who performed solo, like Elvis Presley, or who fronted a well-known backing band, like, Buddy Holly and the Crickets or Bill Haley and the Comets. British pop, especially, seemed beholden to a formula where a lead singer with a flashy stage name, such as Billy Fury or Marty Wilde, performed in front of a generic backup group.

  When the band we now know as the Beatles was first getting going, they easily could have put Lennon up front, and in fact they very briefly styled themselves as Johnny and the Moondogs. But they never seriously pursued that approach. Lennon later remarked that the day he first laid eyes on Paul—who at age fifteen already owned his guitar, on which he could perform a stellar rendition of Eddie Cochran’s “Twenty Flight Rock”—he realized he’d stumbled into a dilemma. “I had a group [the Quarry Men],” Lennon said. “I was the singer and the leader; then I met Paul, and I had to make a decision: Was it better to have a guy who was better than the guy I had in? To let the group be stronger, or to let me be stronger?”

  Lennon chose what was best for the group, and right away, he and McCartney struck up an energetic rapport. Oftentimes they would ditch school together in order to hang out at Paul’s father’s house, where the two taught each other what they knew about the guitar and took their first stab at cowriting songs. (Presumably, this is where they made their famous pact that everything they wrote would be credited “Lennon-McCartney,” even though one or the other was usually the majority songwriter.) About a year later, in February 1958, Paul recruited George into the group. Though just shy of fifteen, Harrison looked to be only about twelve, and at first Lennon only barely tolerated him. “He used to follow me around like a bloody kid and I couldn’t be bothered,” Lennon said. “It took me years to come round to him, to start considering him as an equal or anything.” Eventually, though, the three discovered they shared an extraordinary musical and personal chemistry.

  In contrast, drummer Pete Best rarely seemed to click with the others; he was said to be too ordinary, too slow, soft-spoken, moody, a loner. When the rest of the band got hopped up on speed in West Germany, Best stuck with beer; when they started brushing their hair forward over their foreheads in the “exi” (short for “existential”) style admired by Astrid Kirchherr, he kept his in a carefully sculpted quiff. The only reason the Beatles took him on in the first place, in August 1960, is because they desperately needed a drummer in order to take up an offer they’d received for a steady engagement in Hamburg; Best was the only one they auditioned. Two years later, when they fired him, they could hardly have been any more coldhearted about it: they told Epstein it was his responsibility to break the bad news, and then they never spoke to Pete Best again. Considering all the work he’d put into the band, the poor guy must have been mortified.

  Then again, no one sanely doubts that it was the right decision. In addition to being the better drummer, Ringo had a goofy look, droll humor, and an amiable nature that suited the Beatles just perfectly. There was something intangible in his personality—Lennon called it “that spark [that] we all know but can’t put our finger on”—without which the Beatles might never have cohered enough to be called “the Fab Four.” Nevertheless, when the Beatles launched their recording career at EMI, producer George Martin came perilously close to insisting that they follow the custom and designate one of themselves the front man: either John or Paul. As he mulled over which of the two should become the leader, however, he also considered how well the Beatles got along together and how much he enjoyed their collective charisma. They “had that quality that makes you feel good when you are with them and diminished when they leave,” he once said. Finally, he decided he wasn’t prepared to force the issue if it might upset the group’s lovely alchemy.

  As a result, when most fans were introduced to the Beatles, they saw an indivisible group in which each member nevertheless had distinctive attributes: John was typecast as the clever, intellectual one; Paul, the romantic charmer; George, quiet and mysterious; and Ringo, the easygoing goof. They’d been tested by adversity, and together they reached a level of success that was so extraordinary and improbable that they soon began suffocating under its weight, at which point they began forging an even tighter bond: the special camaraderie that came from being the only ones on the planet who truly knew, firsthand, what it was like to be a Beatle. As a result, their inner circle became virtually impenetrable. “They became the closest friends I’d ever had,” Ringo later said about the others. “We really looked out for each other and we had many laughs together. In the old days we’d have the hugest hotel suites, the whole floor of a hotel, and the four of us would end up in the bathroom, just to be with each other.”

  The Beatles were also distinctive in the ways they related to their female followers. In his book Magic Circle: The Beatles in Dream and History, scholar Devin McKinney shrewdly observes that when the Beatles first touched down at New York City’s JFK airport, on February 7, 1964, the newsmen who covered the story all turned to military metaphors: the Beatles were “invading” and “conquering” America; they were “ruling” and “dominating” the music charts. “Had those reporters been women,” McKinney speculates, the “defining words of Beatlemania would have been different.” (Perhaps along the lines of “The British Seduction.”) Meanwhile, the Beatles arrived Stateside just as a gargantuan teen market was emerging, and American society was becoming increasingly sexualized. For reasons that even psychologists could not agree upon, the Beatles seemed to exude a kind of sublimated sexual energy, coupled with a tender sensibility, which left young girls absolutely obsessed.

  Although it has often been said that the Beatles settled upon their name as way of paying homage to Buddy Holly’s backup band, the Crickets, there is at least a remote possibility that they were named after a group of young women. In the 1953 outlaw biker film, The Wild One, starring Marlon Brando, members of Johnny Strabler’s motorcycle gang referred to their sexy girlfriends as “beetles.” In a 1975 radio interview, Harrison suggested that this might have been the inspiration for “the Beatles,” and he added that it may have been Sutcliffe, rather than Lennon, who dreamed up the idea. Stuart’s sister, Pauline Sutcliffe, made the same claim in her 1994 memoir, Backbeat. Years later, Paul seemed to agree: “We were actually named after chicks, which I think is fabulous,” he said. (Then again, George, Pauline, and Paul may well be mistaken. Others have suggested that it is impossible for the Beatles’ name to derive from The Wild One because the film had not played in Liverpool while the Beatles were growing up.)

  Regardless, the Beatles were androgynous in other ways. Beginning in April 1961 (around the time of their second trip to Hamburg), they started experimenting with the call-and-response vocals, skirling harmonies, and falsetto leaps that were characteristic of the American girl groups they admired, like the Shirelles (and later the Ronettes and the Shangri-Las). Few other male groups, on either side of the Atlantic, were as steeped in the girl group genre or as comfortable embracing its clichés. The Beatles covered nine girl group songs in their live performances, and five of these appeared on their first two LPs. All of the Beatles were briefly friendly with the New York City’s premier girl group, the Ronettes (Lennon had a major crush on Ronnie Bennett), and in a 1963 Melody Maker report, George Martin described the Beatles as sounding like “a male Shirelles.”

  Usually when the Beatles sang songs by girl groups, they switched the relevant gender pronouns, but they didn’t do so in every case. When they performed the Shirelles’ song “Boys,” which was a staple of the Beatles’ live act from about 1961 to 1963 (it was their requisite “drummer number”), they sang the chorus just as it had been wri
tten, from a female’s perspective: “I talk about boys now! (Yeah, yeah, boys!) What a bundle of joy!” In a 2005 Rolling Stone interview, McCartney recalled that the song was a “fan favorite” (Pete Best had sung it before Ringo), though he added, “if you think about it, here’s us doing a song that was really a girls’ song. . . . Or it was [as the Beatles played it] a gay song. But we never listened. It’s just a great song. . . . I love the innocence of those days.”

  More than other performers, the Beatles also had a habit of seeming to sweetly and directly address their girl fans through their use of personal pronouns (“P.S. I Love You,” “With love, from me, to you,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and so forth). In fact, the Beatles’ second US album, Meet the Beatles!, was packaged by Capitol Records so as to contain only songs about relationships. Once, when an American reporter asked Lennon about the Beatles’ heavy reliance of first-person pronouns, he drew a sarcastic reply: “Should it be ‘I Want to Hold Its Hand?’ ” Lennon said. “Or, ‘She Love Them?’ ” But that was merely his way of obscuring the fact that he and McCartney were consciously writing formulaic songs that they hoped their young female listeners would personally identify with. It was a “little trick,” McCartney admitted. “We try to do that, you know, to make it personal.”

  The Beatles also flavored some of their popular early songs with a dash of innuendo. A rough draft of the song that became “I Saw Her Standing There” went: “She was just seventeen / Never been a beauty queen.” McCartney recalls that Lennon laughed incredulously when he first heard it, and then he supplied the roguish “and you know what I mean.” And certainly it’s difficult, nowadays, to listen to “Please Please Me” as anything other than an exasperated plea for oral sex. But few of the group’s contemporary listeners had much to say about any possible sexual insinuations in the Beatles’ work. They projected sexual charisma, to be sure, but it was a charisma that was tamed and domesticated for their youngest female fans. More than anything else, teenagers seemed to swoon over the tenderness and vulnerability that the Beatles expressed in their songs.

  Were the Beatles, in the early ’60s, as romantic and chivalrous toward women as they appeared on their records? Hardly. John’s marriage to Cynthia completely lacked the gauzy optimism we associate with modern-day matrimony. Theirs was a shotgun wedding, held at the local register office, that only five people attended (Epstein, McCartney, Harrison, and two of Cyn’s relatives). After it was over, they decamped to a nearby restaurant, where they all had a lunch of fried chicken and water. According to John’s aunt Mimi, the night before the ceremony, he paid a visit to his boyhood home, where he flitted from room to room and reminisced about his childhood, before finally plopping down at the kitchen table, and weeping. “I don’t want to get married,” he kept saying. Several years later, when a reporter asked him for his thoughts about “the Pill”—a major topic of conversation because of its impact on sexuality, motherhood, and popular culture—he replied, “I wish they’d had it a few years ago.”

  Although Lennon acted honorably when he married his pregnant girlfriend, he never seems to have considered embarking upon a life of constricting monogamy. Nor did any of the other Beatles, who for the most part had steady girlfriends. In fact, the entire group regularly engaged in behavior that no famous person could dream of keeping under wraps in today’s media environment. Peter Jones, a journalist who covered them for the Record Mirror, recalled being in a “difficult position” because he was expected to “gloss over” the Beatles’ tawdry indiscretions. “It was decreed that the Beatles should be portrayed as incredibly lovable, amiable fellows, and if one of them, without mentioning any names, wanted to have a short orgy with three girls in the bathroom, then I didn’t see it.”

  And though he could scarcely believe his eyes, Larry Kane, an American journalist, likewise stayed mum about the night at an Atlantic City hotel suite when about twenty prostitutes were trotted out before the Beatles and their entourage. “Take your pick,” a local promoter told all the men in the room. Another time, at a Dallas nightclub, Kane looked on as McCartney asked photographer Art Schreiber to fetch him a particular cocktail waitress, just as if he were in a whorehouse. In New York, he listened to Ringo complain about being “sore” from his previous night’s exertions. Ronnie Bennett was likewise aghast when, during the same tour, Lennon led her into a hotel room where people sat ringside around a bed while a woman had acrobatic sex with one of the Beatles’ friends. When the Beatles toured Australia, one of their personal MSS guards said, “The only thing they seemed to be interested in was [sic] the very young girls that we were regularly instructed to let past the security screen around their hotel rooms.”

  It is doubtful that most of the Stones saw quite as much activity so early in their career. A bit later on, the types of young and adoring women who sexually serviced the Beatles would become known as groupies, but since that term had not yet been invented, the Beatles unkindly referred to them as “slags.” In Liverpool they had picked up a more charming vernacular expression, however, to describe the hurried and furtive sexual encounters they sometimes indulged in (quickie blowjobs and whatnot): these they called “knee-tremblers.” Philandering is not an unusual vice in the pop world, but one would be hard pressed to name many other musicians or celebrities in the ’60s for whom the gap between the private reality and public façade was so humongous.

  The Beatles strove to maintain their carefully polished image because their goal, which they frequently acknowledged and rarely qualified, was to get as rich as possible. The day they landed at New York City’s Kennedy Airport for the first time, someone from the press corps asked them if they would sing something. “We need money first,” Lennon quipped. Henceforth, Lennon’s sound bites about the group’s material ambitions became a mainstay of their press conferences. What will the Beatles do when all the mania about them subsides? someone asked. “Count the money,” he said. What do you intend to do with all of your money? “Spend it!” How much money have you made? “A lot!” Are you setting any examples for American youths? “Only how to make money quickly.” What has the Beatles’ success meant to you, personally? “More money than I had before.” Would the Beatles ever consider performing behind the Iron Curtain? “If they’ve got enough rubles.” Is that really why you got into this [the journalist asks incredulously]: to get rich? Paul and John together: “Yes!”

  After the antibourgeois social movements of the late ’60s got under way, the Beatles became more cautious about discussing their finances. But it would be wrong to suggest that there was ever anything campy, subversive, or affected in the way they talked about money during their mid-’60s publicity junkets, as if they were only joking, or lampooning the West’s acquisitive tendencies. They spoke the same way in private, too.

  “Somebody said to me, ‘But the Beatles were antimaterialistic,’ ” McCartney later remarked. “That’s a huge myth. John and I literally used to sit down and say, ‘Now, let’s write a swimming pool.’ ” In a 1965 interview with Playboy, McCartney summarized his feelings thusly: “We’d be idiots to say that it isn’t a constant inspiration to be making a lot of money.”

  Nor is it surprising that the Beatles should have been so giddy about all of the loot they were raking in. After all, they had been born into modest circumstances, and they came of age in a rigidly segmented and class-conscious society. And yet while they were still very young, the four Liverpool scruffs suddenly began accumulating fortunes rivaling those of politicians, captains of industry, and heirs and heiresses—the very types of people who, in any other circumstance, would surely have snubbed them. Meanwhile, just about everyone kept reminding the Beatles that they were but a fad. (An extraordinary fad, to be sure, but one that would soon wither and die.) As a result, the Beatles resolved to work feverishly, attempting to earn as much as possible before their narrow window of opportunity was completely shut. And that meant churning out pleasant and appealing pop songs that appealed to their market
, which—though it was large and varied—mainly consisted of teenage girls.

  That was the sticking point with so many hip Londoners in the early ’60s. Whereas they admired the Stones for dealing frankly with sex, lust, angst, consumerism, depression, and suburbia, the Beatles had reined in their bohemianism. They respected propriety because to do otherwise would run counter to their goal at the time, which was to cash in on their unique ability to elicit a hormonal response from young teenage girls. No one in this era referred to Stones fans as rockists, but that was roughly their perspective. They felt that in seeking to appeal primarily to little girls, the Beatles had set the bar awfully low.

  Even back then, however, careful observers might have discerned that the Beatles had more far-reaching ambitions than they were being given credit for. First, there was the moody, black-and-white Robert Freeman photo they used on the cover of their second album, With the Beatles, which was inspired by the artsy shots that Astrid Kirchherr and Jürgen Vollmer took of them in Hamburg. Clad in black turtlenecks and staring impassively into the camera, the Beatles looked like common beatniks, the types of subterranean youths who clustered together for poetry readings and jazz nights at Greenwich Village coffeehouses. EMI absolutely loathed the photo—why weren’t the Beatles grinning?!—and Epstein begged them to agree to something more in keeping with their happy-go-lucky image. They would not.

  Then on November 4, 1963, the Beatles played a four-song set at the Royal Variety Show, which was nationally televised. The Queen Mother, Princess Margaret, and Lord Snowdon were all in attendance. As the Beatles prepared to launch into their final number, “Twist and Shout,” Lennon famously asked for the audience’s help: “Will the people in the cheaper seats, clap your hands? And the rest of you, if you’d just rattle your jewelry.” Had Lennon gone ahead with the line he’d privately threatened to deliver (“rattle your fucking jewelry”), he would have derailed the Beatles’ career. As it happened, he brought down the house. It was a cheeky reminder that the Beatles always knew there was something incongruous about the way they were embraced by the establishment.