Beatles vs. Stones

by John McMillian

  Ten days later, the Stones headlined a gig at the Empress Ballroom in Blackpool that ended in a major riot. The trouble began when a youth started spitting at Brian Jones from the front of the stage. (According to an eyewitness, he’d taken exception to Brian’s “effete posturing.”) Keith responded first by standing on the kid’s hands, and then by kicking him in the face. Instantaneously, the whole hall erupted. The Stones beat a hasty retreat, and before police could restore order, fans had thrown shoes, bottles, and coins, ripped up their seats, torn down curtains, smashed a bunch of crystal chandeliers, and leveled a Steinway grand piano. Fifty people required hospital treatment for their injuries, and the town council banned the Stones from ever appearing there again.

  A late-night incident at a gas station in Stratford wound up providing the Stones with even worse (read: better) publicity. It was March 18, 1965, and the Stones were in an upbeat mood; they’d just been voted the most popular recording artists in France, and they were on their way back from their last stop on a short and successful tour with the Hollies—fourteen shows in fourteen consecutive nights. At around 11:30 p.m., they stopped off to stretch their legs and let Bill Wyman use the restroom. But the attendant, a button-downed forty-one-year-old man named Charles Keeley, curtly told them that there wasn’t one. Wyman knew that there was, and so he persisted in asking to use it, only to be denied again. Then the other Stones joined into the fray, badgering the attendant to just let Wyman use the bathroom. Neither side would budge, and the conversation quickly grew heated.

  “Get off my forecourt! Get off my forecourt!” Keeley supposedly shouted.

  “Get off my foreskin!” Jones responded.

  Three of the Stones—Jagger, Jones, and Wyman—then proceeded to unzip their trousers and relieve themselves against a nearby wall.

  The incident would have been forgotten if an offended eyewitness had not taken down their license plate number. But he did, and so this led to The Great Urination Bust of 1965. Three months later, Wyman, Jagger, and Jones were made to appear before the East Ham Magistrates’ Court in London. According to sworn testimony, as Jagger was urinating that night, he yelled, “We’ll piss anywhere, man!” Then the others, as if on cue, supposedly began chanting the phrase: “We’ll piss anywhere! We’ll piss anywhere!” One of them even allegedly did a weird dance as well. As they peeled out of the service station, several of them allegedly stuck their hands out of the windows of their chauffeured Daimler touring car and showed the attendant “a well-known gesture.”

  Noting that Mr. Keeley had referred to the Stones as “long-haired monsters,” the defense attorney asked him if he was pressing charges simply out of spite.

  “The conception of ‘long-haired monsters’ did not influence my decision to complain,” Keeley testified, “although it might have started the ball rolling. It made me determined not to let them go to the staff toilet.”

  The three Stones were fined £5 each for “insulting behavior” and ordered to pay court costs. The magistrates’ chairman concluded, “Whether it is the Rolling Stones, the Beatles or anyone else, we will not tolerate conduct of this character. Because you have reached the exalted heights in your profession, it does not mean you have the right to act like this. On the contrary, you should set a standard of behavior, which should be a moral pattern for your large number of supporters. You have been found guilty of behavior not becoming young gentlemen.”

  The trial got heavy coverage in London’s tabloid press, and as rock writer Marc Spitz points out, it added substantially to their growing legend. “The notion that the Stones should act in a way that would firmly establish them as volatile Cains to the Beatles’ true-blue Abels was already planted in the band members’ heads, and so here was the water-passing, watershed moment. The Beatles pissed where pissing was designated. The Stones did what they liked.”

  Occasionally, the Stones professed to be aggrieved at the treatment they received by adults. Sometimes they claimed they were unfairly persecuted for their long locks. Other times, they protested that the reports about their bad hygiene and slovenly appearance were inaccurate. “Simply because we chose to do something different and wear our hair long they had to make up these ridiculous stories about our hygiene,” Brian Jones complained. “I happen to be particularly fastidious when it comes to washing and wearing clean clothes, so the kind of rubbish which reporters wrote about our not washing is both untrue and unnecessary.” But they must have known that this was a mug’s game. No amount of remonstration was going to deter anyone who wanted to believe that the Stones had fleas leaping off their heads.

  That’s why the Stones more commonly answered their critics with practiced arrogance: “I don’t particularly care either way whether parents hate us or not,” Jagger told an interviewer. “We know a lot of people don’t like us ’coz they say we’re scruffy and don’t wash,” he said another time. “So what? They don’t have to come and look at us, do they?” “My hair is not a gimmick,” Jones added. “To be honest, I think it looks good. I think I look right with long hair. So I’ll tell you this much: my hair’s staying as it is. If you don’t like it: hard luck.”

  Fans, of course, loved it. Along with their hair, the motley assemblage of colorful clothes that the Stones draped over their skinny frames was an essential part of their appeal. A teenager’s letter to the editor in 1964 amplified the point:

  Suggestions that the Stones should go and have short back and sides are not just wrong but beside the point. You might as well suggest Jackie Kennedy should not dress elegantly, or that Fidel Castro should not have his beard. . . . The Stones are popular because they wear sweatshirts and cord trousers that we can buy too. Long hair is a sign of protest against the crop-headed discipline of the army during wartime. Bright, casual clothes for men are fashionable as a reaction against wartime grey and drab demob suits.

  “I’m fed up with people saying they hate the Rolling Stones because of their hair,” wrote another fan. “England should be very proud of them. People are always moaning that Liverpool is beating the South in talent. Now we have a group to be proud of and half the people moan about them.”

  Nonconformist teens were likewise drawn to the Stones’ live performances, which crackled with an air of danger, and in that important respect were completely unlike what any of the Merseyside acts were doing. “Keith and I will talk about the music hall thing, the vaudeville influence that lay behind all these groups like the Beatles,” Jagger said later on. He was referring to their post-Hamburg professionalism—their hackneyed stage banter, choreographed bowing, and contrived cheerfulness. Jagger continued: “The North of England was so much further behind London culturally at the time—that wasn’t really a bad thing, they just were. So all those young groups had been brought up knowing about the music hall, going to it with their parents, so when a band like the Hollies actually got up on stage, they’d behave like vaudeville entertainers. They were not cool.”

  By contrast, the Stones strutted onto the stage with angry intensity. Cordons of police officers shielded them from their fans, just like they did for the Beatles, but they had to contend with unrulier audiences, who often rushed to the front of the theater, surging and swaying in a great mass (“like palm trees in a hurricane,” Jones once said). “We’d walk into some of these places and it was like the battle of Crimea going on,” Richards said. “People gasping, tits hanging out, chicks choking, nurses, ambulances.” It was just what the Stones wanted. Jagger learned to bait the crowds, vamping and goose-stepping like a rabies-infected soldier. Jones went for the same effect, advancing to the very rim of the stage, leaning over, and leering at one girl or another. If she seemed to be with her boyfriend, then all the better: he’d smack his tambourine right in the guy’s face and flash a wicked grin. Fans hurled gifts and souvenirs at the Stones from every direction. Sometimes, their performances lasted only a few minutes before pissed-off cops forced them to quit. Once the curtains fell, security bums rushed the band out of the venu
e and into their getaway vehicles. To let them linger any longer was to risk catastrophe.

  The Stones also provoked a more complicated sexual response than any other act, and much of it owed to Mick Jagger’s visual appeal as an androgyne. Jagger’s long hair, wispy frame, and wide Caravaggio mouth gave him a feminine quality to begin with, and his preening and teasing mannerisms—the ways he shimmied, gestured, pranced, and wiggled—put it over the top. (It wasn’t for nothing that he’d later be called “the king bitch of rock.”) Phil May, the lead singer of the Pretty Things, always thought that this one of the reasons that Stones’ audiences always had a heavier male quotient than other acts. “The way he performed, he had a sexual appeal for the girls and a homosexual attraction for the boys,” he said. “And I’m not talking about homosexual boys—Mick aroused heterosexual guys as well.” May’s view, which echoes a popular theory that Alfred Kinsey first put across in the 1940s, holds that sexual attraction exists on a gay-straight continuum. “The fact is that everybody has some homosexuality in his makeup,” May surmised, and somehow Jagger was uniquely capable of triggering latent or suppressed desires in some of his male fans. “I’m sure if you had asked any of them that question, they’d have denied it. But there was a duality, especially in the Stones, no denying it.”

  Either way, until the Stones came along, teenage girls were the most avid fans of popular music groups. “They had pictures of Gerry and the Pacemakers on their walls, Paul McCartney, but the guys didn’t do that,” May continued. What’s more, when guys did attend rock shows, it was usually just as a courtesy to their dates. Oftentimes, they’d stand amongst themselves in the back of the room, snickering and gawking. The Stones, however, provoked a totally different response; boys would be muscling girls out of the way in order to get choice spots in front of the stage. “The chicks were pushed further and further back because they were physically overwhelmed. As a result, the first twenty-five rows would be guys.” That had never happened before.

  Of course, sexual attitudes were already unloosening in the British Isles well before the Beatles and the Stones came along in the early ’60s. Teenage promiscuity was becoming a public worry, censorship was on the wane, and the stodginess of the older generations was being cleverly satirized in the legendary Private Eye magazine, and in the popular comedy stage revue Beyond the Fringe, performed by Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett, and Jonathan Miller. Nevertheless, the Stones were completely alone in deciding that a song like Slim Harpo’s “King Bee” was fit for teenage consumption. (“I can make honey, baby, let me come inside.”) When the Stones covered Willie Dixon’s “Little Red Rooster”—ostensibly a song about a chicken—Jagger sang it with such lascivious intent that American radio stations refused to play it. And of course the Stones’ monster 1965 hit, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” which reached number one in England and America, was about as sexually frank as anything that had ever been played on commercial radio: In the third verse, the narrator complains because the girl he wants to fuck is on her period (“baby better come back, maybe next week.”)I

  Meanwhile, many youths began championing a new ethos of candidness and authenticity in personal relations. No doubt this was largely a response to the glad-handing insincerity that was so rampant in the conformist-minded ’50s. Few baby boomers were as sensitive to the cultural reserve of the Lonely Crowd than punk poetess Patti Smith, who saw the Stones for the first time from her living room, when they performed on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964. Her father, a Jehovah’s Witness assembly-line worker, was watching as well, “glued to the screen, [and] cussing his brains out” during the band’s entire three-song set. He’d probably have been even more upset if he’d known that at that that very moment, his daughter was experiencing a sexual and generational awakening. Years later, she’d write about it in a weird, modernist-flavored prose poem. “I was trapped in a field of hot dots,” she said:

  the guitar player had pimples. the blonde kneeling down had circles ringing his eyes. one had greasy hair. the other didn’t care. and the singer was showing his second layer of skin and more than a little milk. I felt thru his pants with optic x-ray. this was some hard meat. this was bitch. five white boys sexy as any spade. their nerve was wired and their third leg was rising. in six minutes five lusty images gave me my first glob of gooie in my virgin panties.

  Mick Jagger would later be rather cruel to Patti Smith. In a 1977 interview with the British magazine Sounds, he called her “crap,” “awful,” “full of rubbish,” “full of words and crap,” “a poseur of the worst kind,” “a useless guitar player,” “a bad singer,” “not attractive,” and “not really together musically,” before finally concluding (incongruously) “she’s all right.” Flash back to 1965, however, and she was precisely the type of fan the Rolling Stones were connecting with. She certainly wasn’t a teenybopper. At the time, she worked in a New Jersey toy factory, and she longed to go to art school even though she couldn’t afford it. She was creative, aware, and literate, a thrift-store scavenger and a shoplifter of esoteric books. Personality wise, she would have been at stark odds with the types of young teens who, Stones fans claimed, were fecklessly glomming onto the Beatles.

  At the same time that the Stones courted fans like Patti Smith, they were busily insinuating themselves into the extravagant lifestyles of the English upper class. Jagger was by far the most socially anxious of the whole bunch. When he started dating Chrissie Shrimpton in the fall of 1963 (he was twenty years old and she was eighteen), it was probably at least partly because he saw her as a ladder up to where he wanted to be. Chrissie was the well-heeled younger sister of Jean Shrimpton (“the Shrimp”), arguably the world’s first supermodel. Known everywhere as the sexy face of new London, Jean was engaged to England’s hippest photographer, David Bailey. (Later she’d be linked to the nation’s trendiest actor, Terence Stamp.) Chrissie wasn’t quite the doe-eyed knockout that her older sister was, but she was certainly very pretty, and she was confident beyond her years. Legend holds that she introduced herself to Jagger by boldly approaching him after a gig asking, “Will you kiss me?”

  They were a power couple, and initially, Chrissie had the upper hand; she was more worldly and better connected. Nicky Haslam, a British socialite and interior designer, remembers that when Chrissie first started bringing Mick around, she sheepishly joked to her fancy friends, “he’s my cleaner—I put an ad in the paper and he turned up.”

  Soon enough, though, she was raving about her new boyfriend to everyone in fashionable London. “He’s great,” Bailey remembers her saying. “He’s going to be bigger than the Beatles.”

  The only problem was, the two rarely seemed to get along very well. Almost everyone in the Stones’ orbit back then remembers how frequently and furiously Mick and Chrissie used to argue with each other. In his memoir, Stoned, Andrew Oldham recalls when he went to see the Stones for the very first time in April 1963—before he even knew exactly who Jagger was, or what he looked like—he saw Mick and Chrissie having a blazing dispute in an alleyway outside the Crawdaddy Club. Marianne Faithfull has a similar recollection in her memoir about the night she met Jagger, in March 1964, at a record release party for Adrienne Posta. Chrissie “was crying and shouting at him, and in the heat of the argument her false eyelashes were peeling off,” she said. Maldwyn Thomas, a friend of the couple, remembers “famous, plate-throwing, Hollywood-style rows.” Sometimes, Chrissie would attack Mick in a pugilistic fury, lock him out of the house, or find someplace to disappear to for a few days, so that he had no way of reaching her. “Mick would cry a lot,” Shrimpton said many years later. “We both would cry a lot.”

  Oldham figures that many of their problems arose as the relationship’s balance of power shifted as a result of Mick’s “growing charisma . . . and his obvious enjoyment of it.” Chrissie arrived at the same conclusion. “We’d be walking down the street,” she said, “and suddenly he’d see some Stones fans. My hand would suddenly be dropped, and he’
d be walking ahead on his own.

  Eventually, Jagger would vent his frustrations in his music. “Under My Thumb,” “Stupid Girl,” “19th Nervous Breakdown”—each of those scathing and abusive songs are thought to have been written about Chrissie Shrimpton. Jagger’s most vicious put-down was probably “Out of Time,” which the Stones recorded while he was simultaneously winding things down with Chrissie while avidly courting his next inamorata, Marianne Faithfull. (“You’re obsolete my baby, my poor discarded baby . . . you’re out of time.”)

  Then again, Chrissie had done a lot for young Mick. She introduced him to London’s fashionable intelligentsia, and she took him to trendy boutiques, like Bus Stop and Biba. She was also the first person to get him entry into forbidding clubs like the Ad Lib, the Cromwellian, and the Scotch of St. James, where Mick mingled with pop culture royalty. “Mick liked to imagine their romance to be the stuff of newspaper gossip columns,” a biographer observed. “So he would refer to it, in tour interviews with provincial journalists, sitting on the cold back stairs of some northern Gaumont of ABC, sniffing with the faint flu that plagued all the Stones and tilting a Pepsi bottle against his lips. ‘ . . . there’s all those lies being written about me and Chrissie Shrimpton.’ ” After the Stones became popular in the US, Chrissie even started writing a column for Mod, called “From London with Luv,” in which she kept American girls informed about all of their fabulous activities.