Beatles vs. Stones

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Beatles vs. Stones Page 21

by John McMillian


  By contrast, radicals continued to regard the Stones as more militant and more authentic than the Beatles, and it was a perception that Mick Jagger encouraged.

  At a Rolling Stones press conference in 1969, a reporter asked, “What do you think about John Lennon returning his [MBE] medal” in protest of the Vietnam War?

  “At last!” Jagger exclaimed, his Cockney accent back in force. “He should have done it as soon as he’d got it.”

  “I don’t dig hero cults,” sniffed Dave Doggett, editor of Jackson, Mississippi’s Kudzu, “and the Beatles are beginning to smell of that sort of thing.” Jon Landau maintained that the Stones “strive for realism in contrast to the Beatles’ fantasies.” Another writer observed that Beatles songs were frequently elliptical—one had to search for meaning—whereas, “When you hear a Stones song, there is no question in your mind as to what they are trying to accomplish.” “The Stones sing to and for the ‘Salt of Earth,’ reflecting their backgrounds,” added a clueless writer for Detroit’s Fifth Estate. Meanwhile, “the Beatles live in their beautiful, self-enclosed Pepperland.”

  But the Stones’ bloom was brief; soon radicals charged them with elitism and aloofness, especially during their 1969 US tour, when they played in gargantuan arenas and gouged fans with exorbitant ticket prices. This was a new thing; until then, the world’s most popular bands often played halls that held one or two thousand people, in part because the infrastructure and technology for facilitating arena concerts did not yet exist. Oftentimes, the Stones kept fans waiting until late in the night before they started their show, and the best seats weren’t even available for fans; they were reserved for music industry big shots. Youths who believed they shared some commonality of outlook and purpose with the Stones were quick to register their frustration.

  After the Stones played Philadelphia, they were denounced in a lengthy, humorous front-page Free Press article. “A small band of daring fast-moving bandits . . . pulled off one of the cleanest and biggest hauls in recent history at The Spectrum. . . . Operating before almost 15,000 eyeball witnesses, the bizarrely dressed gang . . . made a clean getaway with cash and negotiable paper believed to be worth in the neighborhood of $75,000.” The paper revealed embarrassing details of the Rolling Stones’ contract (remarkable for its “sheer audacity”) and complained that little of the economic activity around the Stones’ show redounded to the community’s benefit. Worse still, the Stones acted like prima donnas, refusing interviews and traveling with a rough security team (“goons”) who made sure fans kept their distance. According to Philip Norman, “Promoters in almost every city attacked them for the huge percentage [of the gate] they had taken, [and] their egomaniacal Rock Star arrogance. . . . To amass their two million gross, it was suggested, the Stones had systematically and callously ripped off teenagers all across America.”

  In 1970, editors at Chicago’s Rising Up Angry completely revised their opinion about the Stones. The previous year, they wrote that, “Unlike the Beatles and their passive resistance with ‘All You Need Is Love,’ and [‘Revolution’], the Stones take a different look at things. They know you can’t love a pig to death with flowers while he kicks the shit out of you.” Though “only a rock group,” the Stones address “real life and how to deal with it, not meditation and cop-out escape.” But fallout from the 1969 tour convinced them that the Stones deserved more critical scrutiny. “They should no longer be able to sing about revolution and give clenched-fist salutes, making money hand over fist unless they actively support what they sing about.”

  To give an example, when the Stones were in Chicago, [radical activist] Abbie Hoffman went backstage to see them. He talked to Mick Jagger and they both congratulated each other on their accomplishments. Abbie then asked Jagger if he could donate money to the Conspiracy (trial defense). Jagger said they had upcoming trials, too. After the uneasy moment, Jagger told Hoffman to ask their business manager, who said no.

  “If the Rolling Stones are part of the family,” antiwar activist Todd Gitlin asked, “why don’t they turn their profits into family enterprises?” Even Liberation News Service—which had once run an inadvertently humorous article headlined “LNS Backs Stones in Ideological Dispute with the Beatles”—turned on the Stones with a scorned lover’s fury. “[C]lapping hands, cutting up, busting loose, fucking, blowing weed, and breaking windows is a far cry from seizing state power,” they observed. “And a lot of the Revolution so far is just a hip ego trip. What do groupies, pimps, PR men and ticket-takers have to do with Revolution? Mick Jagger is . . . a half-assed male chauvinist prick.”

  Having recorded songs like “Under My Thumb,” “Yesterday’s Papers,” and “Back Street Girl,” the Stones were overdue for condemnation on the sexism charge. But for many Movement politicos, it was the Altamont disaster that precipitated their final break. Nettled by criticisms about all the money they were making, the Stones boasted that they would show their gratitude to American fans by headlining a hastily organized “free” outdoor concert at Altamont Speedway, some forty miles north of San Francisco. (In fact, they expected to cash in indirectly since they knew their performance would be featured in the forthcoming concert film Gimme Shelter, directed by Albert and David Maysles.)

  Altamont was a dirty, bleak space for a rock festival, almost completely lacking in amenities for the three hundred thousand concertgoers. Asked to guard the stage, the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang went on a drug-and-booze soaked rampage, assaulting countless hippies with weighted pool cues and kicks to the head. “Their violence united the crowd in fear,” one journalist remarked.

  When the Stones played “Under My Thumb,” the Angels set upon an African American teenager, Meredith Hunter. While trying to escape a beating (possibly a stabbing), Hunter whipped out a pistol and held it high over his head; in an instant, the Angels stabbed and beat him to death. Ever since, historians have presented the Altamont disaster—along with the Manson Gang murders and the Weather Underground’s town house explosion—as the youth movement’s death knell. “It would take a little while longer for the message to filter through to the rest of the world,” Tony Sanchez wrote. But at Altamont, on December 6, 1969, “all the beautiful fantasies of the sixties withered and died like flowers beneath the shower of paraquat.”

  • • •

  Rock ’n’ roll had always been a popular and a performative art—based in part on the commercial exploitation of the blues—and even the most ostentatiously “radical” acts of the 1960s understood this. Neither the Beatles nor the Stones were very radical, however. Both of these immensely talented bands helped to construct images of youth culture that generated powerful confidence, self-awareness, and libidinal energy among their listeners, and as a result, they stimulated a great amount of change. But neither group articulated, or proved willing to defend, a coherent political cosmology. The supposed “ideological rift” between the two bands was nearly as stylized as the contrasting costumes they wore on The Ed Sullivan Show.

  The controversies and discussions generated by the Beatles and the Stones remind us, however, that there was a time when rock’s artifice was frowned upon and its commercial logic was muted. To rock fans in the ’60s, the idea that the Rolling Stones would go on to gross hundreds of millions of dollars playing on gargantuan stages, in outdoor stadiums, while under corporate sponsorship, and as senior citizens, would have seemed unfathomable. Nor could they have imagined (not even in a stoned moment) that Mick Jagger would accept a knighthood, at the Queen’s behest, at Buckingham Palace in 2003. The idea that Michael Jackson would purchase a considerable chunk of the Lennon-McCartney songbook and authorize “Revolution” to be used for a Nike commercial would never have been entertained. As music writer Fred Goodman observed, “Just a few decades ago rock was tied to a counterculture professing to be so firmly against commercial and social conventions that the notion of a ‘rock and roll business’ seemed an oxymoron.” That sentiment was captured in a 1969 letter to the editor of
Seattle’s underground newspaper, Helix: “Why does it cost $50,000 to book the Rolling Stones for a concert? Why does Abbey Road list at $8.98?”

  Why can’t rock groups who want to do free gigs just go ahead and do them . . . And why do rock entrepreneurs . . . make hundreds of thousands of dollars charging high prices for “festivals”? . . . I say FUCK ’EM! FUCK the record companies! Fuck the culture vultures and all those hypocritical assholes who “bring the music!” Fuck the rock groups who have “made it” and feel totally justified in screwing us! Don’t buy their trash! Show the [rock promoter] Bill Graham’s [sic] and the Beatles of the scene that they no longer belong.

  As the rock constituency that fueled the New Left and the counterculture faded into memory, so too did the radical newspapers that once printed such clamorous rhetoric. In their place arose the “alternative press,” today’s network of weekly newspapers that are sometimes distributed for free in metropolitan vending boxes or stacked in piles in cafes and bars. Unlike the underground papers, these metropolitan weeklies—which are now on hard times—were always meant to be commercially successful. The “alternative” label they embraced was in fact a transparent bid for respectability, meant to underscore their distance from the political radicalism that sullied the underground press. In return for advertisements in these papers, record companies regularly receive flattering articles, record reviews, and concert listings promoting their artists. Meanwhile, market-savvy researchers and niche advertisers helped to shape a rock culture that is not only older, but is also increasingly heterogeneous. As a global phenomenon, and a multibillion-dollar industry, rock ’n’ roll holds considerable capitalist clout, but today no one thinks of it as a generation’s lingua franca.

  Of course, youths will always turn to rock ’n’ roll as an outlet for their energies, frustrations, rebellions, desires, and as a way of making sense of their lives. But the underground press coverage of the Beatles and the Stones reminds us just how much the audience for rock music has changed. Perhaps, though, we ought not be so cynical. No matter how fractious the New Left may have seemed in the late 1960s, many radicals and hippies continued to regard rock ’n’ roll as their one common denominator, the single force around which they could unify and extend their communal culture. In this context, even the era’s most tepidly political rock heroes—the Beatles and the Rolling Stones—could present themselves as avatars.

  CHAPTER SIX

  WHEEL-DEALING IN THE POP JUNGLE

  In 1967, the Beatles spent the last weekend in August in North Wales, attending a conference on “spiritual regeneration” hosted by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Their entourage—wives, assistants, and friends, including Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull—numbered about sixty people, all of whom were housed in an otherwise empty student college dormitory. Everyone slept in tiny rooms with bunk beds and plain furniture, and everyone paid the same standard rate for lodging: £1.50 per night, including breakfast. Members of the press were forbidden from the campus, and since only one person from the Beatles’ management team had a phone number with which to reach the group—to be used only in case of an emergency—it was expected to be a quiet weekend. But on the afternoon of August 27, the pay phone in the dormitory lobby just kept ringing and ringing.

  The news was devastating: Brian Epstein was dead. At that point, the cause of his demise had not yet been officially determined, but authorities noticed that his bedside table was cluttered with eight pill bottles. He was thirty-two years old.

  “It was simply terrible how lost, how heartbroken, the Beatles were,” Marianne recalled. “They kind of went into close family mode from the sorrow and the pain.”

  The Maharishi tried assuaging the Beatles’ grief with his boring homilies. Brian had not really died, he told them. Rather, he had merely departed the earthly, physical realm; now he was gliding toward some other plane of existence. As they headed out of town, John and George—both glum and visibly shaken—spoke briefly with press. “Meditation gives you comfort enough to withstand something like this, even the short amount we’ve had,” said John. George added, “There’s no real such thing as death anyway.” Of the four Beatles, these were the two who were the most committed to Eastern teachings, but they didn’t sound terribly convincing. Later, Lennon revealed what was truly on his mind. “I knew that we were in trouble then,” he said. “I didn’t really have any misconceptions about our ability to do anything other than play music. And I was scared you know, I thought ‘we’d fucking had it now.’ ”

  • • •

  Before he poisoned himself with sleeping pills, Brian had become highly adept at cultivating press relations. One of the Fleet Street newshounds to whom he’d become especially close was Don Short, a reporter for London’s Daily Mirror. Although Short was known as a tenacious journalist, he and Brian had reached an understanding: when it came to covering the Beatles, there were certain “no-go” areas—things that he might become privy to, like Brian’s homosexuality or the Beatles’ drug use—that he would not report on. If, on the rare occasion, Epstein felt the need to vent about the Beatles, or to talk about them in a way that was not entirely flattering, he could do so with Short, confident that his remarks would not show up in the press.

  One evening over drinks at his Chapel Street town house, Brian asked Short to hazard a guess: Which of Beatles do you think is the hardest to manage?

  Short quickly assumed it was John Lennon. He was the most volatile and sharp-tongued member of the group, the one most likely to go off script at a press conference or get ensnared in some kind of embarrassing shenanigan.

  “In fact, Brian’s answer was McCartney,” Short recalled. “Paul wanted to project himself as the nice guy, but in terms of arranging Beatles business, he was the problem.” Paul frequently pestered Brian with questions and concerns about the Beatles’ business affairs, and he wasn’t shy about reminding Brian that it was his job to keep the Beatles happy. Usually McCartney got whatever he wanted by relying on his wooing and soft-selling skills, but sometimes he could be domineering and pushy—a bit of a control freak, even—and Brian would be intimidated. “John may have been the loudest Beatle, but Paul was the shrewdest,” claimed the group’s PR man, Tony Barrow.

  In 1965, the pop music industry was abuzz about an audacious American accountant by the name of Allen Klein, who renegotiated the Rolling Stones’ record contract with Decca to the tune of $1.25 million in advance royalties. (That may not sound like much today, but it was unheard of at the time.) He did it with a bit of panache as well. Keith Richards recalls that he summoned the Stones and said, “We’re going into Decca today and we’re going to work on these motherfuckers. We’re going to make a deal and we’re going to come out with the best record contract ever. Wear some shades and don’t say a thing. Just troop in and stand at the back of the room and look at these old doddering farts. Don’t talk. I’ll do the talking.”

  When Klein barreled into Decca’s boardroom with the Stones following behind him, he dispensed with any pleasantries. “The Rolling Stones won’t be recording for Decca anymore,” he announced.

  Decca’s sixty-five-year-old chairman, Sir Edward Lewis, was appalled by the scene. When he reminded Klein that the Stones were already under a contract, Klein shot back that he did not care. (“A contract is just a piece of paper,” he was known to say.) According to Keith Richards, Sir Edward was literally drooling while Klein went through his spiel. (“I mean not over us, he was just drooling. And then somebody would come along and pat him with a handkerchief.”) When it was over, Richards said, “They crumbled and we walked out with a deal bigger than the Beatles’.”

  Paul was annoyed. If the Beatles were the most successful act in show business, he reasoned, why didn’t their record contract with EMI reflect that? Paul understood, of course, that when the Beatles were first getting going, Epstein’s career guidance had been invaluable. Epstein had managed the group with all-consuming devotion and uncanny prescience. But it was becoming i
ncreasingly apparent that Epstein lacked Klein’s sharklike mentality, as well as his deep knowledge of contractual law and music industry accounting practices.

  Then again, so did just about every other pop group’s manager. In the mid-’60s, Klein was an acknowledged force in the fast-growing music business. He’d made his reputation by performing aggressive, small-print audits on behalf of his clients, including Bobby Darin, Lloyd Price, and Bobby Vinton, and then recovering unpaid royalties. In 1963, he renegotiated soul singer Sam Cooke’s contract with RCA, and won him $110,000 worth of back payments. Before long, record labels seemed almost fearful of Allen Klein. Others in the music industry, however, admired him. Klein’s personality was gruff (almost gangsterlike); he had a stout frame, oily hair, and one of his favorite words was “motherfucker.” But he also had a deep and abiding love for pop music, and he was unquestionably good at what he did. In some quarters, Klein’s sybaritic lifestyle—his fancy yacht and his high-rise office—enhanced his reputation.

  After the Beatles quit touring, Epstein’s responsibilities on their behalf had greatly diminished. What the group most needed now, some people said, was a disciplined and hawk-eyed moneyman who could oversee their increasingly complicated finances. All eyes pointed toward Klein. Not only had he gotten the Stones a huge advance payment, he also increased the group’s royalty rate to 25 percent of the wholesale prices of each LP they sold (about 75 cents per album). When Epstein renegotiated the Beatles’ contract with EMI in late 1966, he must have tried to get a similar deal, but he fell short. The Beatles received only 15 percent per album sold in England, and 17.5 percent for each LP they sold in the US on the Capitol label.

 

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