Elliott Landy/ Getty Images
The Apple Boutique, 94 Baker Street. According to Paul, the Beatles envisioned this retail store as “a beautiful place where beautiful people can buy beautiful things,” but it quickly went out of business.
Redfersn/Getty Images
On the set of The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus. From left to right: John, Yoko, Keith, Mick, Brian, and Bill Wyman.
Mirrorpix
The Dirty Mac: Eric Clapton, John, Mitch Mitchell (of the Jimi Hendrix Experience), and Keith. They performed two songs for The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus. The show was filmed in December 1968, but it wasn’t released until 1996.
Getty Images
John and Yoko in a recording studio. The rest of the Beatles hated it when John insisted on bringing Yoko to Abbey Road. Here, they are likely listening to a playback of their debut album together, Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins.
Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Allen Klein, manager of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. “Klein is essential in the Great Novel as the Demon King,” quipped Derek Taylor, the Beatles’ publicist. “Just as you think everything’s going to be alright, here he is. I helped bring him to Apple but I did give the Beatles certain solemn warnings.”
Getty Images
SHOUT OUTS
So many people helped out with this book, whether by reading parts of the manuscript, answering questions, pointing me toward sources, or talking with me at length about the Beatles and the Stones. They include Willie Marquis, Allan Kozinn, David McBride, Dave Rick, Bill Higgins, Steven Stark, Alex Cummings, Joe Perry, Larry Grubbs, Michael Castellini, Jeff Toeppner, Bill Mahoney, Griff, Juan Carlos, Ingrid Schorr, Rebecca O’Brien, Michael Lydon, Christine Ohlman, Steve Biel, Gary Shaprio, Naomi Weisstein, Lizzie Simon, Laurie Charnigo, Anastasia Pappas, Kate Taylor Battle, Andrew Loog Oldham, Todd Prusin, Brendan O’Malley, Eddie Stern, Aaron Buchner and Stef Haller, Brandon Tilley, and J. D. Buhl. Dave Brolan kindly let me reprint a couple of rare Michael Cooper photos at a reasonable price, and Phil Metcalf meticulously copyedited the manuscript.
As always, my three best friends in this profession, Jeremy Varon, Mike Foley, and Tim McCarthy, were tremendously helpful. So too was Whitney Hoke. Special thanks are also due to my old pal Jason Appelman, Heretics of the North Productions, and to to some of my newer Atlanta friends: John Bayne, Stephen Currie and Teresa Burke, and Paul Herrgesell and his lovely family.
I began this book while teaching at Harvard, where Lee and Deb Gehrke gave me with a charming little office at Quincy House, and the Division of Continuing Education supplied an outstanding research assistant, Arwen Downs. I finished it while teaching at Georgia State University, where the department of history supplied me with summer funding and yet another talented and diligent research assistant: Zac Peterson. At the last minute, I received some crucial proofreading assistance from GSU grad student Katie Campbell, and from Lela Urquhart. This book grew out of an essay I wrote for The Believer magazine way back in 2007, where editors Heidi Julavitz and Andrew Leland were both exceedingly helpful.
Special shout outs are owed to Gustavo Turner, Geoff Trodd, and Nick Meunier, all of whom took a special interest in this project and provided feedback on almost the entire manuscript. I deeply appreciate their generosity and kindness. I’m likewise grateful to Peter Doggett for his insightful in-house review of the manuscript and for saving me from several howling errors.
I was fortunate to work with three editors. Amber Qureshi enthusiastically signed this book up, Alessandra Bastagli helped me to finish the first draft, and Jofie Ferrari-Adler saw the project to completion. Jofie has been an outstanding editor: friendly, reliable, flexible, supportive, and smart. Thank you, Jofie! It has likewise been a pleasure working with Jofie’s kind and efficient editorial assistant, Sarah Nalle, and with S&S’s associate publicist, Erin Reback. My amazing agent, Chris Paris-Lamb, first planted the idea that I should write this book, and then he took me on as a client at just the right time. He’s served me remarkably well, and I remain grateful for his friendship, advocacy, and advice.
This book is dedicated, with much love, to my wonderful parents, Harlon and Judy McMillian.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© LENNY W. DOOLAN V
John McMillian is Assistant Professor of History at Georgia State University. He is author of the critically acclaimed Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America, coeditor of The Radical Reader: A Documentary History of an American Radical Tradition, The New Left Revisited, Protest Nation: The Radical Roots of Modern America, and The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics, and Culture. His writing has appeared in scholarly journals, magazines, and major newspapers. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
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NOTES
INTRODUCTION
“When it was over,” Sanchez said: Tony Sanchez, Up and Down with the Rolling Stones (London: John Black, 2011), 93–94. Paul McCartney and Marianne Faithfull have both told this anecdote as well, and the Beatles’ press officer, Tony Barrow, has commented on it. But the date it occurred is in dispute. Sanchez claims the party took place on Mick’s actual birthday, July 26. But “Hey Jude” was probably not finished then; it was mixed in stereo on August 2 and in mono on August 8.
“It was a wicked piece”: As quoted in O’Mahony, ed., Best of the Beatles Book (London: Beat Publications, 2005), 214.
“You could dance”: See http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/music/news-and-features/beatles-or-the-stones-choose-both-1-513103.
“The Beatles want to hold your hand”: As quoted in Peter Fornatale, 50 Licks: Myths and Stories from Half a Century of the Rolling Stones (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 45.
Fans registered their loyalty: Many other writers have dichotomized the Beatles and the Stones in a similar fashion; cf. Philip Norman’s observation: “Whatever passing allegiance for this or that newly fashionable group, being a pop fan in 1964 Britain depended on one fundamental question: ‘Are you Beatles or are you Stones?’ asked with the searching ferocity of rival factions in a football crowd. Even football factions, though, had scarcely been as rife with implications of reflected character. To answer ‘Beatles’ implied that one was oneself similarly amiable, good-natured, a believer in the power of success to effect conformity. To answer ‘Stones’ meant, more succinctly, that one wished to smash up the entire British Isles.”
And as most people understand: “There is little friendship in the world,” Sir Francis Bacon remarked, “and least of all between equals.” Gore Vidal spoke to the same point when he admitted, “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.” Both thinkers are quoted in Joseph Epstein’s 2006 treatise, On Friendship (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 8.
“the narcissism of small differences”: See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), 58–63.
the opposing qualities of the Beatles and the Stones: That said, some interesting and whimsical takes on the Beatles versus the Stones can be found in the outer reaches of intellectual and pop culture. In 1997, philosopher Crispin Sartwell gained a bit of notoriety when he devised a tongue-in-cheek mathematical formula that he says proves, definitively, that the Stones were the superior band. In 2006, Marxist postpunk rocker
Ian Sevonius subjected the groups to addlepated analysis in his chapbook The Psychic Soviet (Chicago: Drag City, 2006). (“The Beatles vs. Stones dialectic then, was actually Lennon/McCartney’s industrial Sovietology vs. Mick and Keith’s agrarian Maoism,” he concludes.) In 2010, novelist Alan Goldsher published Paul Is Undead (New York: Gallery, 2010) a comic postmodern horror tale (in the form of an oral history) in which the Beatles are portrayed as zombies on a quest for world domination. The plot thickens as England’s foremost zombie hunter, Mick Jagger, begins chasing after the Fab Four.
“Vesuvio closed a couple”: Marianne Faithfull, “As Years Go By,” The Guardian (October 5, 2007).
1: GENTLEMEN OR THUGS?
By December, he was selling: See Andrew Loog Oldham, Stoned: A Memoir of London in the 1960s (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 256.
Since O’Mahony was already: Oldham remembers meeting O’Mahony when the latter was working for Robert Stigwood, the future music impresario. And after Oldham introduced O’Mahony to Eric Easton, and the two became fast friends. See Stoned, 216, 266.
In 1964, when journalist: See Mark Lewisohn, “Foreword to the 1995 Reprint,” in Michael Braun, Love Me Do! The Beatles Progress (New York: Penguin, 1995, c. 1964), 6.
When publishing photos: As quoted in Ray Coleman, The Man Who Made the Beatles: An Intimate Biography of Brian Epstein (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1989), 323.
Many years later, though: As quoted in Stoned, 256.
“We were the ones”: As quoted in The Beatles Anthology (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2002), 8.
Yes, Stark points out: Steven Stark, Meet the Beatles: A Cultural History of the Band that Shook Youth, Gender, and the World (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 113.
Only Ringo came from central Liverpool: Hunter Davies, The Beatles (New York: Norton, 2002, c. 1968), p. 189.
Their homes got very cold: Steven D. Stark, Meet the Beatles: A Cultural History of the Band That Shook Youth, Gender, and the World (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 42.
“My father drove a bus”: As quoted in David Pritchard and Alan Lysaght, eds., The Beatles: An Oral History (New York: Hyperion, 1998), 17.
“the poor slummy kind”: As quoted in David Sheff, “Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono,” Playboy (January 1981). One of the first books about the Beatles, which Record Mirror journalist Peter Jones published under the pseudonym “Billy Shepherd,” professed to the tell “the real story behind [the Beatles’] rise from the slums of Liverpool to skyrocketing fame.” See Billy Shepherd, The True Story of the Beatles (Bantam, 1964), unpaginated first page.
But by the standards: When Ringo was six, his appendix burst and he developed peritonitis, sending him into a coma that lasted ten weeks. Then when he was thirteen, he developed chronic pleurisy, which kept him in the hospital for almost two years. All of this wreaked havoc upon his schooling, so the poorest Beatle was also the least educated. On an early press release, he spelled the word “anyone” as “enyone.” And on the Beatles’ first US tour, in 1964, a waiter who served the group at an upscale restaurant said that Ringo seemed incapable of ordering off a menu and was baffled by the word oven (as opposed to cooker). Ringo also did not come from an educated family; Freda Kelly, the Beatles’ fan club secretary, recalls a time when Ringo asked her to help with his fan mail. “I told him he must be joking. ‘Get your mum and dad to do it. All the other parents do.’ But he just stood there pathetically and said, ‘Me mum doesn’t know what to put.’ ”
According to the Stones’ official: Jon Wiener, Come Together: John Lennon in His Time (Champagne-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 56.
“One was proud”: Victor Bockris, Keith Richards: The Unauthorized Biography (London: Hutchinson, 1992), 7.
“Two nations between whom”: As quoted in Stark, 40.
“To Londoners,” Steven Stark writes: Stark, 40.
“With us being from Liverpool”: As quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, Beatles Oral History, 51.
“could spend night and day”: As quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, Beatles Oral History, 89.
“We looked at them”: As quoted in Debbie Geller (ed. Anthony Wall), In My Life: The Brian Epstein Story (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 85.
He was, by his own admission: As quoted in Hunter Davies, The Beatles (New York: Dell, 1968), 59; as quoted in Stark, 53.
“His work, erratically presented”: Ray Coleman, Lennon: The Definitive Biography (London: Pan Books, 1995), 83.
“He was the biggest micky-take”: As quoted in Coleman, Lennon, 97.
“he had a very small capacity”: As quoted in Coleman, Lennon, 199.
“came to be regarded”: Pete Shotton and Nicholas Schaffner, John Lennon: In My Life (New York: Henry Holt, 1987), 61.
Though Hunter Davies’s authorized biography: Hunter Davies, The Beatles (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010, c. 1968), 59.
Somehow, he touched her breast: Lennon: “I was just remembering the time I had my hand on my mother’s tit in [One] Bloomfield Road. It was when I was about fourteen. I took a day off school, I was always doing that and hanging out in her house. We were lying on the bed and I was thinking, ‘I wonder if I should do anything else?’ It was a strange moment, because I actually had the hots for some rather lower class female who lived on the other side of the road. I always think that I should have done it. Presuming [or “Presumably”] she would have allowed it.”
“It was the worst thing”: As quoted in Philip Norman, John Lennon: The Life (New York: Harper Collins, 2008), 146.
“All I wanted was women”: Geoffrey Giuliano, Blackbird: The Life and Times of Paul McCartney, 17.
“Without question one”: Giuliano, Blackbird, 15.
“They let me stay out”: As quoted in Geoffrey Giuliano, Dark Horse: The Life and Art of George Harrison (New York: Bloomsbury, 1989), 10.
“From about the age of thirteen”: As quoted in Bob Spitz, The Beatles: The Biography (Boston: Little, Brown, 2005), 120.
“You kept your head down”: As quoted in Spitz, The Beatles, 335.
cries of ‘Seig Heil!’ and ‘Fucking Nazis!’: Philip Norman, Shout! The True Story of the Beatles (New York: Fireside, 2005, c. 1981), 92.
“Shimmy Shake” as “shitty shitty”: Richard Buskin, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Beatles (New York: Alpha, 1998), 109.
far more so than in England: Speaking of sex in England, George Harrison reminisced that in the late 1950s, “it wasn’t that easy to get. The girls would all wear brassieres and corsets, which seemed like reinforced steel. You could never actually get in anywhere. You’d always be breaking your hand trying to undo everything. I can remember parties and I’d be snogging with some girl and having a hard-on for eight hours till my groin was aching—and not getting any relief. That was how it always was. Those weren’t the days.”
“two or three girls each night”: As quoted in Geoffrey Giuliano, Blackbird: The Life and Times of Paul McCartney (London: John Blake, 1991), 46.
“It was a sex shock”: As quoted in The Beatles Anthology, 53.
“Between the whores”: As quoted in Giuliano, Blackbird, p. 38.
“Virtually every night”: As quoted in Giuliano, Blackbird, p. 38.
“Within seconds the fellow”: As quoted in Coleman, Lennon, 275.
In another despicable episode: Norman, John Lennon: The Life, p. 216.
“They liked us because”: As quoted in The Beatles Anthology, p. 57.
“raw. . . . They were always”: Liz Hughes, as quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, Oral History, 72.
“commanded the stage”: As quoted in Andrew Solt and Sam Egan, eds., Imagine: John Lennon (New York: Macmillan, 1988), 37.
“ ‘Shurrup, you with the suits on’ ”: Coleman, Lennon, p. 241
“John . . . was always ready to have a go”: As quoted in Gareth L. Pawlowski, How They Became the Beatles: A Definitive History of the Early Years (London & Sydney: Macdonald, 1990), 35.
After Stuart Sutclif
fe died: Stuart’s younger sister, Pauline, alleged in her memoir The Beatles’ Shadow: Stuart Sutcliffe and His Lonely Hearts Club (London: Macmillan, 2002) that it was actually Lennon who made the fatal attack upon her brother, and that it occurred in Hamburg, not Liverpool. She also claimed that McCartney witnessed the vicious assault, and that she learned of it firsthand from Stu. But McCartney denies having seen such a fight, and Stu’s lover, Astrid, doubts it happened, “because if it had, Stuart would have told me.” Lennon was closer to Stu than anyone else in the Beatles, and all things considered the allegation does not seem very credible.
“The Beatles when they lived”: As quoted in Oldham, Stoned, 293.
“He was a rebel”: As quoted in Wyman, Rolling with the Stones (New York: DK Publishing, 2002), 19.
Brian “sometimes talked of becoming”: As quoted in David Dalton, ed., The Rolling Stones: The First Twenty Years (New York: Knopf, 1981), 12.
“an old ladies’ resting place”: As quoted in Wyman, Stone Alone (New York: Da Capo, 1997), 77.
“He started to rebel”: As quoted in Philip Norman, The Stones (New York: Penguin, 1994), 54.
“Brian was totally dishonest”: As quoted in Wyman, Stone Alone, 103. Photographer Nicky Wright, who did the cover for England’s Newest Hit Makers, remembered a time when Brian came to him and said, “ ‘Here you are—here’s a present for you.’ Inside were all these wonderful records—Howlin’ Wolf, Lightnin’ Hopkins, John Lee Hooker. Twenty years later I realized they belonged to Long John Baldry when I read a magazine interview where he mentioned he lent a stash of Chess records to Brian, and never got them back!”
“Within two weeks Brian”: As quoted in Wyman, Stone Alone, 107.
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