Beatles vs. Stones

by John McMillian

  The Stones’ appeal was heard on July 31. Keith couldn’t attend because he had come down with chicken pox. When it was over, his conviction was overturned, and Mick was given a one-year conditional discharge. Though all of this court drama unfolded during the summer of 1967—the fabled Summer of Love—the Stones had missed out on the era’s good hippie vibes. They were too busy fighting off their drug convictions and trying to hold their band together. The widespread perception that the establishment had targeted the Stones, however—not for any reasons having to do with maintaining the public order, but rather to make them pay for the insolent attitudes and louche behavior—only managed to enhance their popularity with politically motivated youths. “We weren’t thinking of the Beatles at that period as radical in any way,” remembered Tariq Ali, the young British activist. “They just made pleasing music. But Jagger we felt—there was more of an edge to him and his music at that period and he didn’t like what was going on—sexually and politically—and that became very obvious.”

  • • •

  Something like the Summer of Love would have happened even without the Beatles. Too many flower-power myth makers had too much to gain. Chet Helms, a Bay Area music promoter, was known to boast that nearly 50 percent of the world’s population would soon be under twenty-five, and “they got twenty billion irresponsible dollars to spend.” Many thousands of youths flocked to San Francisco, where psychedelic bands like the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and the Jefferson Airplane commanded the local scene. On a weekend in June, some 50,000 colorfully costumed youths descended on the seaside resort town of Monterey, California, for a three-day hippie music festival.

  Some have pedantically argued that in London, there were two Summers of Love (in 1967 and 1968). Youths were kept abreast of hip happenings in underground publications such as International Times and Oz, which hippies peddled on street corners around King’s Road. The Indica bookstore and gallery (named after a species of marijuana) was an important gathering place, as was the UFO Club (pronounced “yoof-oh”), which is where new bands such as Soft Machine and Pink Floyd performed alongside sensory-overloading lightshows and bubbling oil-slide projections.

  No one disputes, however, that the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s album was the soundtrack to the remarkable summer of 1967. It may not have been the greatest record the Beatles ever made, but when it was released on June 1, 1967, in England, and on June 2 in America, it evoked more triumphal fanfare than any other album in history. A young rock writer at the time, Langdon Winner, recalled driving across the US on Interstate 80 that summer. “In each city where I stopped for gas or food—Laramie, Ogallala, Moline, South Bend—the melodies wafted in from some far-off transistor radio or portable hi-fi,” he said. “For a brief while the irreparably fragmented consciousness of the West was unified, at least in the minds of the young.” Later on, pop critic and historian James Miller made a similar observation: “Everywhere one went, from Los Angeles to London, from Paris to Madrid, from Rome to Athens, snatches of the album drifted out of open windows, faded in and out of consciousness as cars passed by, came in and out of focus in tinny tones from distant transistor radios, the songs hanging in the air like a hologram of bliss.”

  Even the Sgt. Pepper’s cover was enthralling. A masterpiece of Pop Art, designed by Peter Blake, it featured a gatefold sleeve, printed lyrics, and a kitschy cutout sheet insert suitable for children. (Among other items, it contained a fake moustache; the Beatles were now sporting moustaches as well.) It was the cover image, however, that drew the most attention. The Beatles were photographed wearing neon-colored satin uniforms that looked like they might belong to a Victorian Era military band, surrounded by a collage of more than sixty life-size cardboard cutouts of cultural and intellectual figures (Marilyn Monroe, Fred Astaire, William Burroughs, Sonny Liston, Stu Sutcliffe, and so forth). It rewarded hours of stoned scrutiny. Eventually everyone noticed what appeared to be marijuana plants in the garden. Off to the side, a cloth Shirley Temple doll is wearing a tiny knitted sweater that reads “Welcome Rolling Stones.”

  A few weeks after they released Sgt. Pepper’s—“a decisive moment in the history of Western Civilization,” said The Times’s Kenneth Tynan—the Beatles debuted their new single, “All You Need Is Love,” on a program called Our World, the first global satellite television broadcast. Commissioned by the BBC, their performance reached approximately 350 million people across five continents. If some of the tracks on Sgt. Pepper’s seemed a bit gimmicky or overproduced, “All You Need Is Love” was simple, nonspecific, and repetitive—and that made it perfect for sloganizing the era. The Beatles also pulled off yet another dazzling visual representation of the Summer of Love. They played while perched on stools in a half-circle (with Ringo off to the side) in a flower-strewn studio that was festooned with balloons, streamers, and posters. Meanwhile, a dozen or so friends—all of them gussied up in the finest hippie fashions—sat on the floor around them and gazed up like acolytes. Mick Jagger was among them. At one point in the broadcast, the camera cuts away to a two-second shot of him clapping and singing along in a purple silk jacket.

  Beatles assistant Tony Bramwell had been tasked with recruiting most of the studio audience. To do so, he simply trawled London’s up-market clubs the night before the broadcast and asked various friends to drop in. “Mick said he’d come, no hassle, but he was a bit put out that the BBC hadn’t asked the Stones” to be on the broadcast, Bramwell recalls. “At the time they were doing their album, His [sic] Satanic Majesties Request and he said you couldn’t buy that kind of publicity.”

  Narcissistic as he often was, it is hard to imagine Mick saying such a thing. After all, he knew that he was due in court two days after the broadcast. Surely he ought to have understood that when it came to deciding which music group should represent Great Britain to the entire world, BBC executives had an easy decision. Besides, the Stones didn’t have any promising new material to unveil at the time. They were at another low ebb.

  Although they had a recent hit single with “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” they had been disappointed by the response to their last album, Between the Buttons. They were also terribly worried about everyone’s drug hassles; if anyone in the group had gotten convicted, it would become difficult for the Stones to tour outside of the UK.

  Meanwhile, Brian Jones continued deteriorating. The other Stones had been tolerating his addlepated and neurotic behavior on account of the fact that he was making salutary contributions to the group’s music. Now, they wondered what to do with him. Whenever inspiration struck, Brian was still a skilled dabbler, but more often he was dead weight, a nuisance, an albatross. Certainly it did not help things when, in March, Keith Richards stole Brian’s alluring fashion-model girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg, while they were all on holiday together in Morocco. In fact, Keith and Anita abandoned Brian there, sneaking away at night while he was on an errand, and leaving him behind at the El Saadi Hotel. Brian was devastated by the betrayal, but he had little ground to stand on. Everyone knew he had treated Anita terribly, even to the point of being physically abusive.

  Andrew Oldham had also developed a nasty drug habit (mostly uppers and downers). After Scotland Yard’s drug squad starting going after pop stars like Donovan and then the Stones, he thought it wise to flee the country. Thus it was that during the most precarious months of the Rolling Stones’ career, when the band’s key members were adrift in a sea of troubles—fighting, scheming against one another, and trying to stay out of jail—Oldham was in Monterey and Bel-Air, getting wasted.

  Then again, it probably wasn’t any great loss. Mick and Keith were thinking about cutting him loose anyhow when, to their annoyance, Oldham suddenly reappeared in London, firing on all cylinders and raring to get back to work. The Stones discovered they couldn’t easily break their management contract, but they also learned that Oldham was responsible for paying all of their studio bills. And so they started bleeding him. They’d book hu
ge blocks of studio time and then fail to show up. Or they’d show up hours late or rent two studios at once. Often when they were present they’d just screw around or invite their friends over and make it a party. “Olympic became the nightclub that was open after all the other ones closed,” lamented George Chiantz, a sound engineer. Once when Oldham was there they squandered an entire recording session on purpose, just to piss him off. They kept going into these long, intentionally sloppy improvisational blues jams, winking at one another and waiting for Oldham to explode. Finally, it dawned on them that Oldham was so oblivious that he didn’t even realize was he getting punked.

  Only when Lennon and McCartney showed up at Olympic Studios one night did the Stones finally have a productive session. “Prior to their arrival the atmosphere in the studio had been akin to a bunch of relatives waiting graveside for a priest to do the honors,” said Oldham. The Stones were trying to record a zeitgeist-catching summer anthem of their own, a hippie hymn called “We Love You”—but they couldn’t get it off the ground. After hearing the work in progress, however, John and Paul quickly restructured the entire song around their own high backing vocals.

  Record executive Tony Calder was in the studio that night as well. “Lennon said, ‘Set the mike up,’ and they went in and put the falsetto voices on,” he remembered. “I had tears in my eyes; it was magic, that, absolute magic. It rescued the record—no, it made the record. It was phenomenal.”

  Many years later, when Oldham published his recollection of that night, his purple prose pulsed with enthusiasm.

  The two Beatles didn’t listen to the “We Love You” track for much longer than they’d spent running down “I Wanna Be Your Man” to my songless Stones just two and one half years before. They picked up the [headphones] and sniffed each other out like two dogs in heat for the right part. . . . John and Paul just glided in and changed a runway into an airplane with wings. Their voices locked and smiled like brothers, creating the signposts to give the disarray, the [song’s] fractured parts and rhythms something to belong and cling to. Everybody, my gobsmacked Stones as well, straightened up as vision became reality. We’d just have another major lesson from the guv’nors as to what this recording thing was all about. In plain English, I’d just seen and heard a fuckin’ miracle.

  It did turn out well. When “We Love You” was finally released in August, it was widely interpreted as a “thank you” to the many fans that had supported the Stones during their trials. A top ten hit in England, it featured a blazing piano lead from session player Nicky Hopkins and the rhythmic blasting of old Mellotron played by Brian Jones. It even contained a bit of sound vérité: before the song gets underway, listeners hear a heavy chain dragging across the concrete and then a jail door slamming shut. Everyone got the reference immediately. Lennon and McCartney’s high harmonies were largely disguised in the mix, but careful listeners could discern Lennon’s distinctive nasal vowels—We luuuv youuu—after the middle eight and again toward the end of the song.

  In a 1967 interview, Mick seemed to half-apologize for the song. “It’s just a bit of fun,” he said. “I’m not involved in this ‘Love and Flowers’ scene, but it is something to bring the people together for the summer—something to latch on to.”

  It was a questionable statement, coming from Mick. He wasn’t involved in the love and flowers scene? As a gesture of thanks to John and Paul for their contribution, Mick sent huge bouquets of flowers to their homes in Weybridge and St. John’s Wood (respectively). Biographers agree that by then, he and Marianne had both become interested in flimsy counterculture pursuits like astrology and the I Ching, and Mick’s reading diet was increasingly devoted to studies on magic and the occult, paranormal phenomena, and books about “fairies, goblins and elves.” For a time, he even kept a Native American teepee set up inside the Rolling Stones’ Maddox Street office, into which he would occasionally go and sit for peaceful contemplation. A week after “We Love You” came out, the couple made yet another excursion into fashionable hippiedom when they joined the Beatles in North Wales for what was supposed to be a ten-day seminar in spiritual enlightenment led by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. John and George were particularly smitten with the Maharishi’s glittery promise of cosmic consciousness. Their sojourn was cut short, however, when the Beatles got word that their faithful manager, Brian Epstein, had died from a sleeping pill overdose at his home in London.

  The Stones finally released Their Satanic Majesties Request in December 1967—just in time for Christmas. Needless to say, the album was widely panned as ersatz Beatles. Over the years, this aberrational collection of lackadaisical songs and weird sounds has gained some notable defenders, who argue that the Stones ought to have been praised for their experimental brio. Back in 1968, however, the negative consensus around Satanic Majesties was widely held. It has been called a parody, a put-on, an imitation, a washout, an oddity, “a lovely puddle of psychedelic mumbo-jumbo,” and a dog.

  Writing in NME, Keith Altham called it a “strange electrical holocaust.” Rolling Stone’s publisher, Jann Wenner, said it was “the prototype of junk masquerading as meaningful.” Even the Stones soon disavowed the record. Sounding a bit like a drunk after a bad night, Keith Richards later claimed amnesia: “I can remember virtually nothing of those sessions. It’s a total blank.”

  Somewhere in the midst of the Satanic Majesties recording sessions, Oldham resigned. “You have lost the plot,” he tartly told them. Oldham understood that however much they tried, the Stones were unconvincing as hippies, and besides, the psychedelic era had already passed its high water mark. The Stones did find the wherewithal, however, to see that Satanic Majesties got a really groovy record sleeve. Just like Sgt. Pepper’s, it was designed by Peter Blake and photographed by Michael Cooper. It was shot with a special Japanese camera, however, which gave it a 3-D effect; the cover image shifts and changes as it’s viewed from different angles, and carefully hidden in a flowerbed are images of all four Beatles. But posed as they were in a mystical landscape out of Tolkien—sitting cross-legged, with Jagger wearing a purple robe and a crescent-emblazoned wizard hat—the Stones looked ridiculous.

  The rock critic Jim DeRogatis has optimistically called Satanic Majesties “the first psychedelic rock album to satirize the prevailing optimism about LSD and to hint that there could be a dark side to the psychedelic experience.” But of course satire implies social criticism. If the Stones seemed acid-fuddled, it was because they were eating LSD, not ridiculing it. They were glomming onto a trend. Besides, other bands—arguably including the Beatles—had already alluded to LSD’s harrowing aspects.

  DeRogatis is correct, though, that the Stones were never fully aligned with the era’s incense-scented idealism and flower-powered frippery. (Keith: “I’m quite proud that I never did go and kiss the Maharishi’s goddamn feet.”) Probably that was good for their ensuing fortune, because shortly after Satanic Majesties came out, the political landscape began shifting yet again. The Vietnam War intensified in 1968; by the end of the year, the US had more than half a million troops there. In Paris and Chicago, popular rebellions were met with tear gas and billy clubs; in Prague, the students were met with tanks; in Mexico, they faced guns. In America, FBI and local police forces illegally harassed, surveilled, and in some cases physically attacked civil rights and youth culture activists. In Chicago, the police murdered two Black Panthers in cold blood. After Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, major urban rebellions—marked by arson, looting, and shooting—broke out in more than one hundred American cities. There is some likelihood that on June 5, 1968, when Senator Robert F. Kennedy was killed in California—at the very moment that Sirhan Sirhan’s bullet went into RFK’s brain at the Ambassador Hotel—the Rolling Stones were at Olympic Studios, in London, recording “Sympathy for the Devil.”

  • • •

  “Even beyond the usual hysterical interest attracted by any new Beatles record,” Time magazine announced, “Hey Jude” / “Revolution”
was “special.” Released in the US on August 26, 1968, it soon became one of the bestselling 45s in music history. Many were drawn to “Hey Jude” for its infectious chorus and unconventional four-minute fade out, but it was Lennon’s raucous “Revolution,” on side B, that captured the attention of American radicals that summer. “That’s why I did it,” Lennon said later, “I wanted to talk, I wanted to say my piece about revolution.”

  “Revolution” opens with Lennon screaming abrasively over heavily distorted guitars, but it quickly settles into a bluesy romp, and it soon becomes apparent that Lennon’s sonic epistle to the New Left does not express solidarity, but disaffection. Though Lennon says he shared the goals of many radicals (“We all want to change the world”) he disavows their tactics (“When you talk about destruction / Don’t you know that you can count me out?”). Elsewhere, he expresses skepticism of the New Left’s overwrought rhetoric (“Don’t you know it’s gonna be alright?”) and he says he’s tired of being pestered for money for leftwing causes (“You ask me for a contribution, well you know / We’re doing all we can”). The final verse amounted to an endorsement of the apolitical counterculture, and a toxic kiss-off to the Movement’s ultra-radicals:

  You say you’ll change the constitution, well you know

  We all want to change your head.

  You tell me it’s the institution, well you know