Beatles vs. Stones

by John McMillian

  “Mick and I went down to visit George and Pattie Harrison last week,” ran a typical entry.

  They were just about ready to go out to a Saturday night movie when we arrived and so they asked us to go with them. The film happened to be at John Lennon’s private home cinema. What a great way to see a movie. We saw a film called Citizen Kane [by] Orson Welles surrounded by Bourneville chocolate and cups of coffee! . . . Recently I had my 21st birthday. . . . Mick gave me a huge rocking horse on big rockers which I named Petunia. Also a birdcage with a Victorian brass bird in it. The bird sings. That is, it does if you put money into it.

  But of course when Mick and Chrissie first met, Jagger wasn’t famous at all. At that point, he didn’t even know that it was customary to leave a tip at a posh restaurant! Bailey recalled taking Jagger to an extravagant dinner at a place called the Casserole, on King’s Road. “I told him to leave a tip and he said, ‘Leave a tip? What the fuck for?’ I said it was normal practice and suggested he leave a ten-shilling note, one of those old brown banknotes. Mick put the ten-bob note on the plate, but as we were putting our coats on, I noticed his hand slip out and pop the ten shillings back in his pocket.”

  Bailey tells another anecdote: “Later I introduced Mick to Andy Warhol, who I already knew. The first time I took Mick to meet Warhol was at Baby Jane Holzer’s.” Holzer was a flamboyant and well-connected young model who had recently married a wealthy real estate heir; together they shared a colossal property on Park Avenue. “Mick sat down and stuck his feet on her favorite lattice Chinese table,” Bailey continues. “I thought, ‘Fuck, she’s not going to be pleased,’ because I wouldn’t have done something like that, but Mick could get away with it, because the Stones were the cool group.”

  The Stones were the cool group because they valorized youth in ways that the Beatles did not. That’s one of the reasons they wore their reverence for bawdy American blues like a badge: it drew a distance between themselves and polite adult society. Blues music was gritty, earthy, and true to real life; it dealt with hardship and exploitation, of course, but also with themes that have always been on the minds of bohemian youths, like disillusionment, traveling, and sex. That sort of material was anathema to the commercial pop music that the older generations sanctioned.

  Meanwhile, the Stones found that by simply exaggerating their already ingrained haughtiness, they could provoke a considerable amount of consternation among their elders. It was self-intensifying: the more parents obsessed over the Stones—the more adults griped and complained about their hair, their clothes, their hygiene, and their bad manners—the more they fueled the group’s popularity among disaffected teens. And so the Stones had an incentive to just go on behaving badly. “We were encouraged, especially by Andrew, to be a little more outrageous than we even felt,” Keith Richards later confessed. “Since then it’s become a well-known scam.”

  In contrast, the Beatles had won acclaim from the highest stratum of British society. Beatlemania was a “multigenerational psychosis,” said one smart observer. A lighthearted Daily Mirror editorial following their triumphant performance at the Royal Variety Show (the one where Lennon said “rattle your jewelry”) had made that resoundingly clear. “You’d have to be a real square not to love the noisy, happy, handsome Beatles,” the national tabloid said. It was even “refreshing” to see the Beatles generating such enthusiasm from a “middle-aged” audience. The Daily Mirror continued:

  Fact is that Beatle People are everywhere: From Wapping to Windsor. Aged Seven to Seventy. And it’s plain to see why these four energetic, cheeky lads from Liverpool go down so big. They’re young, new. They’re high-spirited, cheerful. . . . They wear their hair like a mop—but it’s WASHED, it’s super-clean. So is their fresh young act. Youngsters like the Beatles . . . are doing a good turn for show business—and the rest of us—with their new sounds, new looks. GOOD LUCK, BEATLES!

  • • •

  At the end of 1963, the London Evening Standard issued a special supplement, “The Year of the Beatles.” “An examination of the heart of the nation at this moment would reveal the word BEATLES engraved upon it,” the paper said.

  These were the types of accolades that made certain disaffected teens skeptical of the Beatles. The first wave of Stones fans thought of themselves as cultural savants. At the same time they admired the supposedly “authentic” and “iconoclastic” Rolling Stones, they formulated a set of aesthetic criteria that held that only acts like the Stones—only those who could be considered daring, stylish, and edgy—were really worthy of their fandom. There was something wrong, they thought, about the way the Beatles succumbed to the Establishment’s pampering. That made them “sell-outs.” No one put it quite that way, of course, but that was the idea: the Beatles couldn’t be taken too seriously, because they catered to the naïve romantic fantasies of early adolescent girls.

  It was always a flimsy complaint. Sure, the Beatles did everything they could to advance their careers and please their fans, but then again, they never pretended to be doing otherwise. “Selling out,” in fact, is where many show business professionals thought that the Beatles were headed. When everyone got a bit older, and all the frenzy died down, it was very widely assumed that the Beatles would be forced to leave their teen idol reputations behind, at which point the most they could hope for would be to occupy a more traditional role in showbiz, as schmaltzy, low-key, all-around entertainers. Perhaps, like Elvis, they would begin starring in a succession of vapid, formulaic movies? Or host a variety program on television or radio, featuring skits and light comedy? Maybe Lennon and McCartney would reinvent themselves as Denmark Street songsmiths (England’s equivalent of Tin Pan Alley)? Unless they retired, these seemed to be their options. There simply wasn’t any precedent for pop stars doing anything else.

  The Beatles had heard all this, of course. Murray “the K” Kaufman, New York City’s eccentric, fast-talking deejay—the one who had done so much to promote the Beatles when they first came to America—remembers sitting around with the group in February 1965, in Nassau, while they were on a break from making their motion picture Help! Probably they were all stoned out of their gourds. At one point, Paul played some of the Beatles’ own recent records.

  Murray remembers the dialogue going like this:

  PAUL: I bet that about ten years from now, when someone mentions the Beatles, some young kid will say, “Go on now. Here’s your Beatles [pointing both his thumbs down]. Don’t go palming off those old groups from the olden times.” So, you see, we’re just temporary, Murray, babe. Just temporary.

  GEORGE: [smiling] Yeah, that’s right.

  JOHN: Oh well.

  RINGO: Who’s got a cigarette?

  In other words, they did not seem too concerned. Instead of petering out, the Beatles decided to outmaneuver everyone: They grew more, rather than less, ambitious. They started recording material that challenged their audiences with unfamiliar and disorienting words, sounds, attitudes, and images. In the process, they helped to transform pop into art. They pointed to a new future for popular music, and they had a galvanizing effect upon virtually all of their contemporaries. Including, of course, the Rolling Stones.

  * * *

  I. Some listeners hear Jagger sing, “baby better come back, later next week.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  YANKOPHILIA

  The number of people who can remember what it was like when the Beatles made their first few visits to the United States is dwindling every year. Find an American who can recall their first encounters with the Beatles, however, and they’re likely to rhapsodize about how fun and exciting it always was. Along with some other sainted and iconic figures from the ’60s—Martin Luther King, Jr., and Muhammad Ali both come to mind—the Beatles have become almost immune from baby boomer criticism. It bears remembering, though, that the Beatles were responsible for an awful lot of unpleasant commotion back in their day. Consider what it took just to host them at a New York City hotel.

>   In February 1964, when they showed up at the Plaza on their first visit to the United States, it took one hundred city cops, a squad of mounted policemen, and a fleet of hired private detectives just to ensure everyone’s safety. Throngs of teenagers congregated outside, singing, shouting, and waving placards. Fan mail poured in by the heavy bag load. The hotel lobby, normally sedate and luxurious, looked like a battle camp headquarters. To get in and out of the building, the Beatles had to wind their way through the kitchen and use the service elevator, and after they left for good, the Plaza’s management issued an apology for allowing them to stay there. Their rooms had been booked months earlier, they explained, before anyone in the United States had even heard of the Fab Four.

  The following August, the Beatles stayed at the Delmonico. Their exact location was supposed to be kept secret, but when they arrived in the wee hours of the morning, hundreds of fans already stood waiting for them on Park Avenue and Fifty-Ninth Street. Soon after daybreak, thousands more teenagers joined them. Penned behind police barricades, they listened to radio updates about the Beatles, tried to slip past security, and screamed insanely whenever anyone inside the hotel so much as passed by a window. Finally, the chief of police asked the Beatles to stay well inside their hotel rooms and keep the lights down. Nevertheless, some Beatlemaniacs stayed outside hollering until 4:00 in the morning.

  A year later, they made their third visit to New York, spending four nights at the Warwick Hotel, where they had rented the entire thirty-third floor. If anything, the situation there was even worse. “The mop-haired singers were the cause of considerable exasperation among more than 100 policemen, who spent the day trying to hold in check about 1,500 adolescent adorers,” said the New York Times. Police erected barriers on the nearby streets, and to get within about a half mile of the hotel, you had to either prove that you were a guest there or explain that you had business visiting a nearby building. The Beatles were dazzled by Manhattan, and they ached to see more of it, but they could not leave their rooms the entire time they were there, except for two important engagements.

  They were in town, first, to record their third (and final) appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. They headed over to CBS Studio 50 at about 11:00 a.m., and they spent the whole day there, rehearsing just six songs. They made their final taping at 8:30, and except for when Lennon seemed to stumble briefly over one of the lyrics in “Help,” their performance was masterful.

  The following day, the Beatles headed to Shea Stadium, in Flushing, Queens, for their historic performance there. At the time, it was by far the largest concert in history: 55,600 people attended. “We spent weeks drawing up plans, as if they were battle plans, trying to ensure the Beatles’ safety,” said promoter Sid Bernstein. First, a limousine whisked the Beatles away from their hotel. Since city officials had completely shut down the major streets along their route, their limo barreled through every intersection and stoplight in its path. Upon reaching the Pan Am building, about a mile away, they ascended to the rooftop and boarded a waiting Boeing Vertol 107-II—a large, dual-propeller helicopter. The chopper’s pilot treated the Beatles to a brief aerial tour of the city (which the Beatles did not particularly want) and then veered toward Shea. When the chopper lulled briefly over the parking lot, a disc jockey seized the stadium’s PA system: “You hear that up there? Listen . . . it’s the Beatles! They’re here!” So many flashbulbs went off simultaneously that the Beatles’ chopper appeared bathed in the incandescent wash.

  The Beatles landed at a nearby heliport and then clambered into a Wells Fargo armored van that sped them the final distance into the stadium. When Ed Sullivan called them to the stage, the roar at Shea had never been louder. Thousands of teenagers screamed, swooned, fainted, sobbed, and watched in rapturous agony as the Beatles trotted onto the field, smiling and waving. It remains one of the most breathtaking scenes in pop music history.

  Taking all of this in from the opposing team’s dugout were four special guests: Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, along with the Stones’ manager, Andrew Oldham, and journalist Chris Hutchins, who covered the show for NME. All of them were amazed by the frenzy the Beatles created.

  “It’s frightening,” Jagger said.

  “It’s deafening,” Richards replied.

  “Without a doubt,” Hutchins wrote, “it was the greatest, most awe-inspiring night any of us had ever witnessed.”

  Earlier that day, however, Jagger had stressed that he did not desire the Beatles’ unprecedented popular success for himself. “I don’t envy those Beatles,” he remarked. He made the statement while lounging around in the Hudson River basin on a luxury yacht named Princess, which belonged to Allen Klein, the American music executive who was soon to become the Stones’ manager. “Look how much freedom we have, and they’re locked up in their hotel bedrooms without being able to take a car ride, let alone do something like this.”

  It was true: the Beatles felt trapped, besieged, stressed out, and exhausted. They were also often quite terrified by the bedlam that went on around them. They worried about creating a scandal, a riot, an accident, or being assassinated. And when they weren’t anxious, they were frequently bored. Sure, a show like Shea could be thrilling—it was thrilling!—and yet shortly after it was over, the Beatles were sequestered yet again in their hotel rooms. The whole next day had been left “open” on their schedule (a rare thing), but they could barely afford to crack a window. And so they just sat around, smoking weed and watching television. True, they must have enjoyed the company of some of their visitors, including the Ronettes and Bob Dylan. But Mary Wilson, of the Supremes, remembers that when she showed up along with group mates Diana Ross and Flo Ballard, the Beatles were so surly and unpleasant that they all wanted to leave just as soon as they had arrived.

  The rivalry between the Beatles and the Stones, however, was not just about who had the more appealing lifestyle or the greater freedom of movement. It was also increasingly about talent, craft, and influence. And as the Beatles became more creatively ambitious in the mid-1960s, they started functioning a bit like generational pied pipers, inspiring the jealous admiration of their peers as well as legions of imitators.

  It’s almost enough to make one wonder whether Jagger might have envied the Beatles after all. That was the impression that a journalist on assignment for the American pop magazine Hullabaloo arrived at in the summer of 1966. The writer doesn’t identify himself by name, but on the eve of the Stones’ fifth American tour he got a chance to spend three days with the group. At first, they received him coolly. But on the second day, he at least shared a quick car ride with Jagger as the Stones traveled from their hotel to a press event that they held on a yacht, the SS Sea Panther, which was moored up at West Seventy-Ninth Street. En route, they passed an unusual poster advertisement: it was for a car rental company that boasted it was second best in the land. Only one other rent-a-car service was ranked higher. Jagger noticed the sign, then turned, unbidden, and said “That’s us . . . We have to be better because we’re only number two.”

  It seemed odd, this candid and somewhat forlorn admission. It wasn’t really Jagger’s personality to say such a thing. So the journalist said he peered back at Mick, looking for a sign that he was joking. But apparently he was not. He seemed “deadly serious.”

  • • •

  Just because British teens regarded the Beatles and the Stones as natural rivals, it was never foreordained—or even likely—that Americans would do the same. Until the Beatles came onto the scene, British popular culture had not made much of an impact in the US. Also, the two nations had such different media environments. The British had long loved their tacky tabloid newspapers, and popular newssheets like the Daily Mirror and the Daily Sketch, which expressed fanatical reverence for the Beatles, were usually harshly critical of the Stones. Meanwhile, England had a robust music press, which was likewise lacking in the US. Weekly papers such as Melody Maker and NME teemed with hyperbolic headlines proclaiming who was up on
e week, who was down the next, and who beat whom in the latest readers’ poll.

  Those sorts of updates could be thrilling to fans, but they also yielded the distorting impression that a rough parity existed between the two groups. In fact, the Beatles always outsold the Stones by a huge margin. In 2005, Mick Jagger recalled an episode, probably in 1964, “when we were all hanging out at one of the clubs. George was giving me a big spiel about how many records the Beatles had sold more than us. Which wasn’t in dispute! He was so anxious to make the point.”

  Many American reporters, however, may not have known any better. Most of them were well educated, professionally trained, and (they liked to think) “sophisticated.” They practiced a bland and cautious style of journalism, and in some context that standpoint served them well, but it left them almost entirely unequipped to cover the latest youth culture fads. As a result, they tended to parrot what they heard from England: the Beatles and the Stones were “rival bands.” In May 1964, a London-based public relations firm spoon-fed the storyline to US reporters. “Stones Set to Invade,” their press release read. “In the tracks of the Beatles, a second wave of sheepdog-looking, angry-acting, guitar-playing Britons is on the way. . . . Of the Rolling Stones, one detractor has said: ‘They are dirtier, streakier and more disheveled than the Beatles, and in some places, they are more popular than the Beatles.’ ”

  It is little wonder, then, that questions about the Beatles nearly dominated the Stones’ first American press conferences. Asked if he would consider joining a “Stamp Out the Beatles” club, Keith Richards said “no.” But when he was asked, “Are you a Beatle fan,” he equivocated. “I’m not a fan,” he said. “I appreciate some of their stuff. I like them; I think they’re good.” When Charlie Watts was asked the same question, he likewise failed to give a direct answer: “I met Ringo when he came back from here, very tired. Er, yeah, you know, I think they’re very talented fellas. Lennon and McCartney, yeah. I am a Beatles fan, if you can call it that.”