Beatles vs. Stones

by John McMillian

  You’d better free your mind instead

  But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao

  You ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow!

  Anyone in the late ’60s who was unfamiliar with the controversy the song provoked would have to be a “Cistercian Monk,” remarked one underground journalist. “The Beatles have said something and what they have said is not going to be popular with a great many,” announced Ralph Gleason, an influential music critic who helped found Rolling Stone. “The more political you are, the less you will dig the Beatles’ new song ‘Revolution.’ ” But Gleason approved of the song’s message. Countercultural politics, he believed, would ultimately prove more transformative than “real” politics. Instead of presenting another ineffectual “Program for the Improvement of Society,” he argued that the Beatles had taken up a more noble task; they were teaching youths to transform their entire consciousness. Wrote Gleason: “The Beatles aren’t just more popular than Jesus, they are also more potent than SDS,” the New Left’s leading student group.

  Distributed through Liberation News Service (LNS), the radical news agency that served hundreds of American underground newspapers, Gleason’s essay was much-discussed. But it was a small radical British newspaper—The Black Dwarf—that was the locus of an even more spirited debate about Lennon’s “Revolution.” Edited by Tariq Ali, the paper’s first issue, dated October 13, 1968, contained a little-noticed essay in which a writer maintained that the Rolling Stones represented “the seed of the new cultural revolution,” whereas the Beatles were interested in “safeguarding their capitalist investment.”

  Two weeks later, another item in The Black Dwarf drew a lot more attention. It was “An Open Letter to John Lennon,” written by an otherwise obscure socialist named John Hoyland. The fact that it appeared shortly after John and Yoko had themselves been busted for drug possession was not a coincidence. Hoyland later said that when Sgt. Pilcher’s drug squad goons stormed into Lennon and Ono’s apartment and found 219 grains of cannabis, it made “the inadequacy of [Lennon’s] philosophy . . . even more evident.”

  The last thing radicals needed to do, Hoyland stressed, was change their heads. Instead, it was time to pursue an aggressive politics of confrontation: “In order to change the world, we’ve got to understand what’s wrong with the world. And then—destroy it. Ruthlessly.” Hoyland also lampooned the Beatles’ recent ventures into hip capitalism, as represented by Apple Corps. “What will you do when Apple is as big as Marks and Spencer and one day its employees decide to run it for themselves?” he asked. “[W]ill you call in the police—because you are a businessman, and Businessmen Must Protect Their Interests?” Finally, Hoyland impertinently told Lennon, “Recently your music has lost its bite,” whereas “the music of the Stones has gotten stronger and stronger.” The Stones, “helped along a bit by their experiences with the law . . . refuse to accept the system that’s fucking up their lives,” he maintained.

  Lennon was so disturbed by the letter that he phoned Ali to complain; Ali encouraged him to write a rebuttal, which appeared in January. It was not terribly coherent. Lennon began by saying, “I don’t worry about what you, the left, the middle, the right or any fucking boys club think,” which (as Peter Doggett has observed) raised the question as to why he was even bothering to reply in the first place. Next, Lennon labored to defend the position he enunciated in “Revolution” while simultaneously trying to maintain his radical cred. “I’m not only up against the establishment, but you too, it seems,” he said. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with [the world]—People—so do you want to destroy them? Ruthlessly? Until you/we fix your/our heads there’s no chance.” Lennon added that Apple Corps was less a moneymaking venture than a vehicle for the Beatles’ creative experimentation, and he professed not to care much about it. But Lennon was disingenuous; “Look man, I was/am not against you,” he said, even though Hoyland—who championed the revolutionary overthrow of the State—was exactly the type of person that “Revolution” targeted. But after radicals like Hoyland objected, Lennon pandered to them by suggesting that the song didn’t really mean what it seemingly meant. Still, he was pissed. “Instead of splitting hairs about the Beatles and the Stones,” Lennon added, “think a little bigger . . .”

  Though Hoyland’s reply seemed to be written in the first person, it was actually written by the Black Dwarf editorial collective, which maintained that “Revolution” amounted to a betrayal.

  The feeling’s [sic] I’ve gotten from songs like “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “A Day in the Life” are part of what made me into the kind of socialist I am. But then you suddenly kicked us in the face with “Revolution.” That’s why I wrote you—to answer an attack you made on us, to criticize a position you took . . . in relation to the revolutionary socialist movement—knowing that what you said would be listened to by millions, whereas whatever reply we make here is read by only a few thousand.

  During this period, countless other rock enthusiasts turned volte-face against the Beatles. The underground press “ate the Beatles alive,” one journalist remarked. A writer from the Berkeley Barb disparaged “Revolution” as an “unmistakable call for counter-revolution.” Village Voice writer Robert Christgau was likewise disappointed that the Beatles went out of their way to criticize the political left. A writer for New Left Review called the song a “lamentable petty bourgeois cry of fear.” In Ramparts, Jon Landau called the song a “betrayal.” Even a Moscow-based newspaper, Sovetskaya Kultura, chided the Beatles for their “indifference to politics.”

  Balanced against this, a few others read a more complicated message in Lennon’s song. Some held that its musical textures overwhelmed its lyrical content. “Revolution isn’t the strumming of a folk guitar, it is the crashing explosions of a great rock ’n’ roll band,” wrote Greil Marcus. “There is freedom in the movement, even as there is sterility and repression in the lyrics.” “We owe an apology to the Beatles,” said another left-wing writer. “However shitty the lyrics of ‘Revolution’ may be, the message”—that is, the question of whether a revolution was desirable or necessary, and how to go about effecting one—had at least provoked a useful conversation. Another writer credited the song with generating “more thought and discussion over the whole question of violence and revolution among young people than any other single piece of art or literature.” Yet another fan simply would not be deterred. “The Beatles’ politics are terrible,” he said, “but they’re on our side.”

  • • •

  Contra to “Revolution” was “Street Fighting Man,” the Stones’ new single from Beggars Banquet, which was released in the US on August 30, 1968, just four days after “Revolution” (thereby violating the much vaunted agreement that the Beatles and the Stones wouldn’t put their records in direct competition with each other). The original record sleeve (very quickly withdrawn) shows a photo of an LA cop with his boot on the back of a young protestor who is lying, defeated, in the street. Fearful that the song would further inflame the passions of militants who had been involved in the chaos surrounding the Democratic National Convention, most Chicago radio stations refused to play it. Jagger supposedly penned its lyrics after attending a March 17, 1968, rally that began at London’s Trafalgar Square, which drew a crowd of about twenty-five thousand. After listening to speeches, many of the protestors clashed with mounted policemen outside the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square. Cops charged at the protestors with their batons, while youths swung back with tree branches and fence posts and showered them with debris. Half of the fifty people who wound up being hospitalized were police officers. By some accounts, Jagger was in the thick of the action; one remembers him “throwing rocks and having a good time,” while another recalls him “hiding [and] running.” A Michael Cooper photograph taken at the event shows Jagger surrounded by demonstrators, keenly observing what was happening, but not quite participating.

  To his regret, Jagger had to abandon the protest after being
recognized by too many fans. The song’s refrain was thought by some to evoke his feelings of impotence and frustration. (“But what can a poor boy do? / Except to sing for a rock ’n’ roll band? / ’Cause in sleepy London town / There’s just no place for a street fighting man.”) Others saw the refrain as a hedge against the song’s more provocative lyrics.

  Soon after “Street Fighting Man” was released, New York City’s most militant newspaper, the Rat, printed its lyrics in a sidebar. A little later, the Black Dwarf reprinted a handwritten copy of the lyrics that Mick Jagger had given them: “Everywhere I heard the sound of marching, charging feet, boy / ’Cause summer’s here and the time is right for fighting in the street, boy.” Some regarded the song as a clarion call. SDSer Jonah Raskin recalls marching up New York City’s Fifth Avenue in December 1968, protesting the recent police murder of two Black Panthers. When someone beside him started whistling the song’s tune, Raskin writes, “I chanted the words myself: ‘The time is right for violent [sic] revolution.’ I arched one stone after another; the whole plate glass window collapsed.” During many shows on the Stones’ 1969 US tour, Mick wore a shirt with an Omega symbol on the front: the symbol of Resistance, an American antidraft group. When the Stones played Madison Square Garden that year, a group of New York radicals called Mad Dogs draped a nine-by-twelve-foot National Liberation Front (NLF) flag from the top of a balcony. When they played Chicago in November 1969, Jagger dedicated “Street Fighting Man” to the people of that city, “and what you did here last year.” When the tour reached Seattle, members of Weatherman crashed the gates and passed out leaflets. In Oakland, a group of anarchists distributed a broadsheet:

  Greetings and welcome Rolling Stones, our comrades in the desperate battle against the maniacs who hold power. The revolutionary youth of the world hears your music and is inspired to even more deadly acts. We fight in guerilla bands against the invading imperialists in Asia and South America, we riot at rock ’n’ roll concerts everywhere. We burned and pillaged in Los Angeles and the cops know our snipers will return.

  They call us dropouts and delinquents and draft dodgers and punks and hopheads and heap tons of shit on our heads. In Viet Nam they drop bombs on us and in America they try to make us war on our own comrades but the bastards hear us playing you on our little transistor radios and know that they will not escape the blood and fire of the anarchist revolution.

  We will play your music in rock ’n’ roll marching bands as we tear down the jails and free the prisoners, as we tear down the State schools and free the students, as we tear down the military bases and arm the poor, as we tattoo BURN BABY BURN! on the bellies of the wardens and generals and create a new society from the ashes of our fires.

  Comrades, you will return to this country when it is free from the tyranny of the State and you will play your splendid music in factories run by workers, in the domes of emptied city halls, on the rubble of police stations, under the hanging corpses of priests, under a million red flags waving over million anarchist communities. In the words of [André] Breton, THE ROLLING STONES ARE THAT WHICH SHALL BE! LYNDON JOHNSON—THE YOUTH OF CALIFORNIA DEDICATES ITSELF TO YOUR DESTRUCTION! ROLLING STONES—THE YOUTH OF CALIFORNIA HEARS YOUR MESSAGE! LONG LIVE THE REVOLUTION!!!

  Still spooked after nearly being sent to prison after his 1967 drug arrest, Jagger had declared on World in Action, “I don’t really want to form a new code of morals or anything like that. I don’t think anyone in this generation wants to.” But in 1969, he left some believing that he did, in fact, endorse a general uprising. Asked about “Street Fighting Man” being boycotted by Chicago radio stations, Jagger mused, “They must think a song can make a revolution. I wish it could.”

  • • •

  “America, with its ears turned to its transistors, has been following what it imagines to be an ideological debate between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones,” observed a London writer. Although both bands were culturally influential in ways that are difficult to quantify, on close examination the supposed ideological differences between them are harder to discern. Their albums were not, to borrow a phrase, “wax manifestos.” They were more like Rorschach inkblot tests, upon which youths projected their own interpretations. Although Jagger allegedly developed a left-wing critique of capitalism when he was briefly enrolled at the London School of Economics, an acquaintance observed that later, “he grew rather fond of capitalism as first one million, then the next poured into his account.” The notion that he was “radicalized” by his drug arrest seems equally specious; after all, he apparently only attended part of one demonstration in his entire life. Jagger’s friend Barry Miles even suggested that when Mick showed up at Grosvenor Square, he did so at least in part because he thought of it as a social event. “[Jagger] did have a genuine revulsion against the Vietnam War. But I think much more than that it was also the thing to do. That’s what everybody in Chelsea was doing that week, going to that demonstration.”

  In 1968, the Stones appeared in Jean-Luc Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil (also called One Plus One). Before he started filming, Godard announced his creative intentions with a series of non sequiturs that, even in the heady atmosphere of the late ’60s, must have been off-putting to anyone who was rationally minded. “What I want above all is to destroy the idea of culture,” he boasted. “Culture is an alibi of imperialism. There is a Ministry of War. There is also a Ministry of culture. Therefore, culture is war.” What he wound up producing instead was an utter catastrophe of a film that blended documentary-style shots of the band working in the studio interspersed with clips of Black Panthers spouting ugly rhetoric and murdering white women in a South London junkyard. In one scene, a female character named “Eve Democracy” wanders around aimlessly in the forest and, no matter what question she is asked, answers only “yes” or “no.” In another, a girl walks into a porno store and gives a Nazi salute. At one point an off-camera narrator announces that he is waiting on the beach for “Uncle Mao’s yellow submarine,” obviously a reference to the Beatles’ song. No one had even the slightest idea what the hell it was supposed to mean, but it certainly seemed radical.

  On their 1969 tour, however, the Stones refused to allow the Black Panthers to appeal for funds from their stage. In hindsight, it is hard to regard the Rolling Stones’ radicalism as anything but a fad. After all, the band had already been moddish during the mid-’60s, and psychedelic during the Summer of Love; in the mid ’70s, the Stones would dally with reggae, and after that, they would enter a brief disco phase.

  Meanwhile, Lennon’s political thinking in the late 1960s and early 1970s can only be described as muddled. Not long after “Revolution” came out, he launched a series of whimsically flavored avant-garde peace protests with Yoko Ono—beginning with their March 1969 Bed-In in Amsterdam—that seemed to endorse pacifism and flower power. They also sent “acorns for peace” to various world leaders, lobbied for peace while cloaked in a white canvas bag, and commissioned billboards in major cities across the globe, announcing “War Is Over—If You Want It.”

  The following year, after the Beatles broke up, he told Jann Wenner that he resented “the implication that the Stones are like revolutionaries and the Beatles weren’t,” but he never explained what he meant. In the same interview, Lennon disavowed his previous belief that “love [will] save us all” and professed (whether literally or metaphorically) to be wearing a Chairman Mao badge. “I’m beginning to think he’s doing a good job,” Lennon said. When asked about the possibility of a “violent revolution,” Lennon tartly announced, “If I were black, I’d be all for it.” In August 1971, he even turned up at a rally with a sign proclaiming “Victory for the IRA Against British Imperialism.” (The Irish Republican Army, of course, was a terrorist group.) Asked how he squared his pacifism with his support for the IRA, Lennon said, “it’s a very delicate line.” That same year, he placed yet another phone call to the Black Dwarf’s Tariq Ali, only this time it was to play for him (literally over the pho
ne) a didactic new song called “Power to the People,” which seemed to refute “Revolution.” (“We say we want a revolution / Better get on it right away.”) Later on he would change course again. In one of his last interviews, Lennon said, “The lyrics [in ‘Revolution’] still stand today. They’re still my feeling about politics. . . . Don’t expect me on the barricades unless it’s with flowers.”

  Despite the confusion and half-heartedness with which the Beatles and the Stones regarded the exigencies of their day, both bands held such clout over young music fans that their songs, lyrics, behavior, and mannerisms continued to provoke robust debate. Even those who turned against the Beatles after “Revolution” never doubted their influence. But this stirred another complaint: why didn’t they do more? “They could own television stations,” remarked John Sinclair, the notorious Detroit radical. “They could do anything they want to do. They are in a position to carry out a total cultural assault program, the effects of which would be incredible,” and instead they frittered away their energy on embarrassing hobbies like the Apple Boutique, a trendy retail store in downtown London. “I think it may be safely said that they have more power and influence over the ‘revolutionary’ generation . . . than anyone else alive,” said another young writer. If they “really wanted to change the world, the world would feel it.”

  Instead, the Beatles’ politics lagged. “For a long time the Beatles were oracles for our generation,” said a wistful writer for Houston’s underground newspaper, Space City! “Whatever the state of the world was, they seemed to be able to make their music expressive of it; when we began to look analytically at our society they began to tell us what we saw.”

  On the one hand, that was off base. Hardly any social criticism can be found in mid-’60s Beatles lyrics. And yet by 1968, one could plausibly argue that the group had fallen out of step with radical youths. “Revolution” was “probably an honest statement,” rock critic Richard Goldstein remarked. “They probably don’t understand what we mean by revolution.” Recalling that the Beatles had received MBE awards from Queen Elizabeth in 1965, a writer for Milwaukee’s Kaleidoscope newspaper called them “confirmed institutionalists,” adding, “[they] may yet become the Walt Disneys of their day.”