Beatles vs. Stones

by John McMillian

  Eight months later, in July 1964, the Beatles released A Hard Day’s Night. The soundtrack to Richard Lester’s loony comedy film hinted at the Beatles’ quickly evolving creativity. It was their first album to contain only original material, and more than anything they’d done so far, it demonstrated the Beatles’ oft-remarked ability to make popular music that on the one hand seemed safe and familiar, and on the other hand, was daring and inventive. (It would take more than forty years, and a mathematician, to even definitively figure out how they played the opening chord—“Chaaaaaang!”—on the title track.) Meanwhile, their film, with its pseudo-documentary style, subtle satire, allusive references, and intelligent repartee, was almost universally regarded as being several cuts above the types of banal, pop exploitation pics that preceded it. Even professional movie critics, who expected A Hard Day’s Night to be terrible, wound up loving it. “This is going to surprise you—it may knock you right off your chair—but the film . . . is a whale of a comedy,” said the New York Times. The New York Journal-American compared it to the Marx Brothers’ comedies of the 1930s. A Village Voice writer called it “the Citizen Kane of jukebox musicals.”

  Around the same time, John Lennon published his first book, In His Own Write, a slim, elegantly designed hardcover collection of surreal short stories, line drawings, and nonsense verse. Lennon had been dashing off that kind of stuff going all the way back to high school, mostly for his own amusement, and he downplayed the idea that his book would reward careful critical analysis. Nevertheless, it promptly drew comparisons to the works of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, James Thurber, Mark Twain, and James Joyce. Reviewing In His Own Write for Book World, Tom Wolfe called Lennon “a genius of the lower crust.” Another writer, in the highbrow Times Literary Supplement, recommended Lennon’s collection to “anyone who fears the impoverishment of the English language and the English imagination.”

  All of this ought to have rendered ludicrous the rockist notion that the Beatles, because they desired the approval of teenyboppers, were therefore not to be taken so seriously. Then again, some of the group’s condescending critics might also have just paid more consideration to what the Beatles were actually saying—literally.

  It was at a book launch party, celebrating the release of In His Own Write, that George Melly, the venerable jazz singer and music writer, buttonholed Lennon and started a conversation about the Beatles’ musical influences. One expects Lennon would have liked Melly. After all, they were both brazen and somewhat rakish characters, and they both hailed from Liverpool. Also, though Melly did not attend art school, he shared some of its enthusiasms, and he was donnishly smart about surrealism. Lennon might have been unnerved by Melly’s bisexuality, but he would have admired his hard-drinking insouciance.

  Nevertheless, that particular meeting did not go well. “During the course of the party,” Melly remembered, “I suggested that despite his fame and money, [Lennon] was surely prepared to own up that not only did he owe a considerable debt to such Negro blues singers as Muddy Waters, but that objectively they were greater artists.”

  Was that a bold statement? At that time, the Beatles had released three impressive albums and six singles—about two hours of music in total. And yet Lennon bristled at the notion that the Beatles weren’t any better than the American blues singers currently in vogue. In fact, it seems he had by then become seriously annoyed at the way so many young Brits were sacralizing the blues.

  “He turned on me with sublime arrogance,” Melly remembered. “He’d admit no such thing. Not only was he richer but better too. More original and better.” Better than Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon, John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed—the whole damn lot of them. “We almost came to rather drunken blows.”

  • • •

  It can be bracing to recall that the first group that threatened to dislodge the Beatles from the top of the hit parade wasn’t the Rolling Stones, but rather, another London-based group. Styled in tweed jackets, high-heeled boots, and choke-collared shirts, the Dave Clark Five didn’t look or sound all that different from many of the Northern beat groups. Nevertheless, some claimed that they represented a new, commercial vanguard—the “Tottenham Sound”—which was poised to finally steal the spotlight from the flourishing scene that Brian Epstein was presiding over in Liverpool. In January 1964, the Dave Clark Five’s hit “Glad All Over” knocked “I Want to Hold Your Hand” from the number 1 position on the UK charts, leading the Daily Express to proclaim in a headline, “Tottenham Sound Has Crushed the Beatles.” Considering that “I Want to Hold Your Hand” had already occupied the top spot for two whole months, and could already be found in an estimated 25 percent of phonograph-owning households in England, it was a bit of hyperbole—but it still fueled speculation that the Beatles were on the way out.

  “Cartoonists had a field day,” reported Michael Braun. “Cruelest of all was an Elmwood cartoon in the Daily Mail: standing outside a theater where the Dave Clark Five are performing, a group of young girls are pointing at another girl of about sixteen. ‘She must be really old,’ they are saying; ‘she remembers the Beatles.’ ”

  Publicly, the Beatles never appeared the least bit bothered, but privately, they were concerned. “We couldn’t help it,” Lennon later admitted. “Everyone was telling us, ‘Dave Clark is coming, you’ve had it now.’ It worried us, but just for a minute, the way we’d worried in Liverpool that Gerry [and the Pacemakers] would beat us in the Mersey Beat poll.”

  Later in 1964, however, they started fielding questions about a different group. In 1964, the Beatles cut off a journalist who began to ask, “Are you concerned about a poll in Britain which indicated that a group called the Rolling Stones—”

  “There’s many polls,” Ringo snapped. “They just won one of them.”

  An exchange with a female reporter at a Jacksonville, Florida, press conference went this way:

  REPORTER: Are you worried about rumors going around that the Rolling Stones are now more important than the Beatles?

  RINGO: Is it worrying us?

  JOHN: [turning toward Paul, taking the piss] “Is it worrying us,” she said! No.

  GEORGE: Not at all.

  PAUL: It doesn’t worry us, ’cuz you get . . .

  JOHN: [interrupting] We manage our grief.

  PAUL: [giggles] You get these rumors every so often, you know. I mean . . .

  GEORGE: [dings his teacup with a spoon] Dave Clark!

  PAUL: Dave Clark was [supposed to be] bigger than us a couple months ago.

  JOHN: Blind fool.

  GEORGE: Every two months we hear of ’em taking over.

  Still, the Stones had by then garnered a large amount of media attention, in which they were reliably portrayed as noisy upstarts who faithfully reflected the concerns of disgruntled teenagers. An early and paradigmatic article of this type, headlined “Rebels with a Beat,” appeared in the February 18, 1964, issue of Melody Maker. Ray Coleman began his profile of the Stones by describing an exchange he’d had with a forty-two-year-old London cabbie who had picked him up in Mayfair.

  “Was that the Rolling Stones you just left?” the driver asked him.

  “Yes. What do you think of them?”

  “A bunch of right ’erberts!” he replied. (“Herbert” being mildly abusive slang for scruffy, working-class youths.) “ ’Ere, aren’t they the boys they say are trying to knock the Beatles off the top?”

  Coleman remembered thinking at that moment that if he’d been a talent agent or a record executive, “[He] would probably have signed that taxi driver immediately as [his] trends advisor. The Rolling Stones might have had other ideas, like punching him on the nose. Because they deeply resent any suggestion that they are attempting to overtake the Beatles. Yet if the Beatles are to be knocked off from their perch in the future, by a British group, the popular notion is that the Rolling Stones could easily be their successors.”

  The reason, Coleman continued, had a great deal to do with the
ir image, which he said was “perfect.” He described the Stones as “five disheveled rebels who have already made a firm imprint on the hit parade, who have gained a huge following among young people, who never wear stage uniforms, and who JUST DON’T CARE.”

  “There are even rumblings inside show business of a swing against the Beatles in favor of the Rolling Stones,” Coleman added. As evidence he cited a letter that an “alert writer” had sent to Melody Maker. “She asserted that young pop fans instinctively turn against an idol whom their parents endorse, like the Beatles. Fans actually enjoy hearing their elders spurning their worship of their heroes. That way, there is an outlet for their emotional involvement.”

  When Coleman sat down with the Stones, and asked them if they were jealous of the Beatles’ success, Jagger reflexively answered “Yes!” while the rest of the group said “No!” A bit later in the interview, though, Wyman boasted that in some circles, the Stones were being touted as London’s answer to the Beatles. That prompted an interjection from Jagger: “Whatever you do, don’t write that article saying we’re knocking the Beatles,” he said. “They’re good mates of ours. We like ’em and they’ve done much good for the whole scene, see?”

  Coleman was also behind the “Boiling Beatles Blast Copycats” story mentioned in chapter 2, as well as the infamous “Would You Let Your Sister Go with a Rolling Stone?” headline. He did not, however, fancy himself as the type of lowbrow hack who was always trying to stoke controversies. Privately, he had middlebrow tastes (jazz, chess), and by the time he joined Melody Maker in 1960, at around age twenty-three, he had already worked in the newspaper trade for eight years, having started out as a copy boy for the Leicester Evening Mail. At Melody Maker he hoped that by taking a serious approach to his trade, he could help vitalize the public discussion about pop music.

  Nevertheless, he soon began lamenting that the show business beat at Melody Maker was too much about the “biz” side of things. He was compiling tour date listings and cranking out celebrity puff pieces, rather than writing sharp and penetrating profiles. Eventually he grew so bothered by the paper’s fatuity that he tried to defect to the more highly regarded Daily Telegraph, but he was unsuccessful. At his interview, an executive asked him where he currently worked.

  “Melody Maker,” Coleman answered.

  “And where did you work before that?”

  “The Manchester Evening News.”

  His interviewer fixed him with a quizzical look. There was a pregnant pause. Finally, he said, “Tell me, Mr. Coleman: Why did you leave journalism?”

  The exchange motivated Coleman to work even harder at trying to improve Melody Maker. Eventually he became the paper’s editor-in-chief and then a respected celebrity biographer. In his writings on the Beatles and the Stones circa 1963 and 1964, however, he was in a transitional phase. His “Rebels with a Beat” profile showed his penchant for putting across shrewd insights while at the same time indulging in a bit of promotional hagiography. The Beatles were fond of Coleman, because he was one of the few writers they encountered who always expressed interest in their music, as well as their celebrity; but they may not have been thrilled to see the Stones—whom they had in some ways befriended, and whom they’d given a song—characterized as their new rivals.

  Regardless, the template that Coleman helped to construct was picked up again and again. Many of the same journalists who had complacently described the Beatles as boyish and good-humored were now lazily portraying the Stones as filthy and obnoxious. “They look like boys who any self-respecting mum would lock in the bathroom!” a Daily Express journalist remarked, just ten days after Coleman’s piece came out. “But the Rolling Stones—five tough young London-based music-makers with doorstep mouths, pallid cheeks and unkempt hair—are not worried what mums think! For now the Beatles have registered with all age groups, [but] the Rolling Stones have taken over as the voice of the teens.” An Australian journalist, Lillian Roxon, remarked that while the Beatles “looked as if they had been personally scrubbed down by Brian Epstein himself, the Rolling Stones looked as if they had been sent to bed every night for a week with the same clothes on and no supper. The Beatles’ songs had been rinsed and hung out to dry. The Stones had never seen soap and water. And where the adorable little wind-up Beatle mop-tops wanted nothing more than to hold a hand, the hateful rasping Stones were bent on rape, pillage and plunder.”

  A bit paradoxically, some of the Stones’ popularity owed to the obscurity of the music they championed. Unlike “ordinary” teens, who could be counted on to unthinkingly embrace whomever the show-business Establishment decreed should be the flavor of the month, the Stones’ supporters fancied themselves as curious and more discerning types. In this way, they somewhat prefigured modern-day hipsters—those urban twentysomethings who prize, above just about everything else, their supposedly superior cultural knowledge. When the niche constituency for R&B started growing in England in the early 1960s, Jagger even wrote an unguarded (some would say “uncool”) letter to Melody Maker solely for the purpose of stressing that he had been in the vanguard of the whole scene. “I used to write letters to Pye Records [a British label] pleading with them to release Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley records long before this beat thing got commercial,” he said.

  I don’t know if the people at Pye remember my name, but they ought to. They sent me back catalogues and they were very sympathetic. To the critics, then, who think we’re a beat group who came up overnight knowing nothing about it, we invite them to examine our record collection. It contains things by Jimmy Reed, Elmore James, (John Lee) Hooker and a stack of private tapes by Little Walter. That’s a good start.

  Nevertheless, he had a point; it was not easy, in early-’60s England, to come across authentic Delta blues or amped up Chicago-style R&B. You had to make an effort. Oftentimes, that involved getting those types of LPs directly from the labels, such as Chess, in Chicago, or Specialty, in Los Angeles. American records were usually pricier than British ones, and of course you had to pay for shipping, too. Mick Jagger started ordering imported blues LPs as a teenager. “He’d send money orders,” remembers Marshall Chess, whose father and uncle cofounded Chess Records in 1950. “I worked in the shipping room. I remember sending boxes of records to England. Filling out the customs forms. That first wave of blues lovers wanted those Chess albums. . . . It was rare. It wasn’t an everyday thing, to get an order from England.”

  The Stones’ name, of course, was a tribute to Muddy Waters’s 1950 song “Rollin’ Stone,” and their earliest fans would have gotten the reference immediately. As the group’s popularity swelled, however, the majority of youths who heard about them would not have experienced such a pleasurable frisson of recognition. Initially, Stones fans were predominately city dwellers, and they fancied themselves as a savvy and discerning lot. They were the types of youths who, in addition to liking R&B, may also have been conversant in jazz. They might have taken some of their style cues from the Beats—Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs. A few of their more literary minded enthusiasts might have gone so far as to line their bookshelves with Rimbaud, Dostoyevsky, and William Blake. They’d have bonded over, and felt protective about, their beleaguered “outsider” status, and they would have snickered at pop’s lumpen love of the Beatles. One Stones fan from the Netherlands recalled that at his local disco, the Pink Elephant, “Beatles fans were not allowed. The sign on the door said ‘Stones Fans Only.’ ”

  Naturally, when parents declared that they were horrified by the Stones, or tried to make life difficult for them, they only bolstered the group’s status as rebellious icons. Later on, of course, the Stones would become the most gargantuan touring band of all time, and with a retinue of lawyers and personal assistants, they practically immunized themselves from petty hassles. But it was very different in the early ’60s. At some hotels, nighttime porters even prevented the Stones from bringing female guests into their rooms. Other times, they were banned altogether from hotels, refused ri
des by taxi drivers, denied service in restaurants, or heckled by local yokels. “We’d even go into a shop to buy a pack of cigarettes and they would refuse to sell us any,” Wyman recollected. “We don’t serve the likes of you in this establishment,” they’d sneer. “Kindly leave.” Once, when the maître d’ at the Grand Hotel in Bristol turned them away, it provoked yet another tabloid headline: “The Rolling Stones Gather No Lunch.”

  Uptight authorities even picked on Stones fans. In May 1964, the Daily Mirror reported that a Coventry headmaster had suspended eleven students for “imitating the Stones’ hairstyle.” They were told to stay away from the school until they “cut their hair neatly, like the Beatles.” American music critic Anthony DeCurtis recalls that in October of that year, the day after the Stones appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show, “[E]very single one of my teachers gave a lecture about the Rolling Stones and how repulsive they were. They’d pat you on the head for liking the Beatles. They got a kick out of them. They didn’t get a kick out of the Rolling Stones.”

  Similarly, some parents forbade the Stones. One fan recalled feeling lucky growing up, because although her parents would have preferred it if the Beatles had been her favorite band, they at least allowed her to keep Stones LPs in their home. By contrast, most of her young girlfriends “had to sneak the records and hide them from their parents,” she said. “This, of course, just added to the fun. I can remember listening to England’s Newest Hit Makers with my friend Linda, the record player muted under a stack of pillows in her bedroom. That was how much her mother hated the Stones.”

  On July 4, 1964, the Stones made a notorious appearance on Juke Box Jury, the BBC’s nationally televised music panel show. The footage has since been lost, but a surviving photo captures the group’s mood. Instead of chatting amiably about the records they heard, the Stones were impolite and abrasive. “Nobody was particularly witty or anything,” Keith Richards said later. “We just trashed every song they played.” According to a Daily Sketch reviewer, the Stones “indicated their pleasure or displeasure by catarrhal grunts that an ear, trained in the illiterate school of young people, could sometimes distinguish as ‘Well, yeah, er, I, er, mean, like, well it’s, ha-ha, awful then. Naw, definitely not, in’nit?’ ” Even New Musical Express, a music paper that was normally favorable to the Stones, called their appearance on Juke Box Jury “an utter disgrace.” In lieu of an apology, the Stones later maintained that they had not set out to cause a furor, but rather that the show’s producers had asked them to comment upon a boring batch of records.