Beatles vs. Stones

by John McMillian

  They knew going in: Incidentally, the Stones also said that they sometimes could not even hear themselves play, but was that really true? A couple days after the first Shea concert, the Beatles played a show in Toronto in front of 35,000. Afterward, George complained that he and John had been out of tune, but they were helpless to do anything about it. “When you get on stage,” he lamented, “there’s such tremendous noise” that any attempt to adjust the pitch of his strings would only make things worse. “I’ve been seriously thinking of getting Keith Richard on tour to tune up all of us,” he quipped. “He sounds as if he’s in tune.” Furthermore, when the Beatles talked about how their fans drowned out their music, they often seemed dejected—as if to say, “What a bummer! As a result, we can’t play to the best of our ability.” When the Stones said that screaming fans overpowered their music, however, it often sounded like they might be boasting.

  “They were four musicians”: George Martin, All You Need is Ears: Inside the Personal Story of the Genius Who Created the Beatles (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1994), 132.

  “[Paul] would say”: As quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, An Oral History, 192.

  “As I could see their talent”: Martin, All You Need Is Ears, 167.

  “You don’t know us if”: As quoted in Michael Lydon, Flashbacks: Eyewitness Accounts of the Rock Revolution, 1964–1974 (New York: Routledge, 2003), 12.

  “plastic soul”: Paul can be heard using the phrase on the compilation album The Beatles Anthology 2, after the first take of “I’m Down,” which they recorded on July 14, 1965, and was probably inspired by Little Richard. “Plastic soul, man, plastic soul,” he says. The Beatles had been kicking around different ideas for the title, and then settled on it after their photographer, Robert Freeman, inadvertently created an elastic effect on one of their photos as he projected it onto a 12" x 12" piece of cardboard.

  and it was never that complicated: In “I Feel Fine,” however, the narrator is exuberant about how he can make her feel. “She’s so glad, she’s telling all the world.” Another song, “It Won’t Be Long” also has an unlikely inversion (coming from a male narrator). They sing “It won’t be long, till I belong to you.” The Stones would have said, “till you belong to me.”

  Presumably, she’s not offering: It is doubtful whether the Beatles were familiar with Robert Johnson’s 1936 song “Terraplane Blues,” in which a Terraplane (a model of car made by the Hudson Motor Company) is a metaphor for a woman’s body. (The Stones knew it, however.) Regardless, the two songs had different spirits: the Beatles’ sentiments were mirthful, and Johnson’s were ugly. But the Beatles may well have known Chuck Berry’s 1965 single, “I Want to Be Your Driver.” (“I would love to ride you,” he sings mischievously, “I would love to ride you . . . a-round.”)

  “the pot album”: As quoted in Norman, John Lennon, 432.

  “laughed out of the”: Richards, Life, 143, 172.

  “a song with brick walls”: As quoted in Spitz, Jagger, 66.

  “Because we’d have had”: As quoted in Keith Altham, “The Rolling Stones: Neurotic Bird Song,” NME (February 11, 1966).

  “This is actually a child’s”: Oldham, 2Stoned, 224.

  “Everything in the Rolling Stones’ ”: As quoted in Wyman, Stone Alone, 352.

  “Brian played the sitar”: As quoted in Nigel Goodall, Jump Up: The Rise of the Rolling Stones (London: Castle, 2011), 41.

  “It means paint it black”: As quoted in Caroline Silver, The Pop Makers (New York: Scholastic Book Services, 1966), 117.

  “a big landmark”: As quoted in Davis, Old Gods, 163.

  “the time has come to”: Mike Ledgerwood, Disc (April 9, 1966).

  “There must have been a”: The Beatles Anthology, 203.

  “very cannily worked out”: Richards, Life, 141.

  “That was a great period”: As quoted in Jann Wenner, ed., Lennon Remembers (New York: Fawcett Popular Library, 1972), 88.

  “We were at the peak”: As quoted in Miles, Paul McCartney, 142.

  “didn’t get hurt much”: As quoted in Wyman, Stone Alone, 331.

  “She was laying into my”: Keith Altham, “The Rolling Stones: The Stones Hit Back,” NME (August 6, 1965).

  “thundered on”: Alan Smith, “Second Half,” NME (May 6, 1966).

  “I said to Lennon”: As quoted in Oldham, 2Stoned, 320.

  “I said they couldn’t”: As quoted in Badman, The Beatles: Off the Record, 202.

  “I took my life into”: As quoted in Oldham, 2Stoned, 320.

  “John absolutely exploded!”: As quoted in Badman, The Beatles: Off the Record, 202.

  and that turned out to: They would perform live in England just one more time, on January 30, 1969, on the top of the Apple Building in London. Of course, that concert was not preannounced.

  George hid his face behind: See photo at http://johnlennonbeatles.com/2010/02/john-and-george-go-vinyl-crazy/.

  “These are our friends”: As quoted in Dalton, The First Twenty Years, 65.

  “Everything we do, the”: This quote is said to appear in Silver, The Pop Makers, although I was not able to find it in that text. Lennon has made a remark similar to this on other occasions, however. In his 1970 Rolling Stone interview with Jann Wenner, Lennon said, “I would just like to list what we did and what the Stones did two months after on every fuckin’ album.”

  They were in fact highly inventive: The Stones’ sound and attitude was also a major influence on the Garage Sound phenomenon that spread through the US in the mid-to-late 1960s, and that sowed the seeds of protopunk and later US punk (cf. the New York Dolls, the Stooges). Even some of the era’s most distinctive and established artists were influenced by the Stones, as witnessed by Bob Dylan’s studio workout around “I Wanna Be Your Man” (i.e., “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” unreleased until the 1980s) and The Velvet Underground’s intro to “There She Goes Again,” which may have been lifted from the Stones’ cover of Marvin Gaye’s “Hitch Hike” (The intro appears on Gaye’s version as well.)

  It must have been: By contrast, you find far fewer mentions of the Stones in the Beatles’ authorized biography by Hunter Davies, in McCartney’s authorized biography Many Years from Now, and in the Beatles’ The Beatles Anthology book and film project. Once in an interview, Lennon forgot (or pretended to forget) Bill Wyman’s name. “I think Charlie [Watts] is a damn good drummer, and the other guy’s a good bass-player, but I think Paul and Ringo stand up anywhere, with any of the rock musicians,” he said.

  “The possibility of the Rolling”: Keith Altham, “Rolling Stones Have Reached Peak at Home,” NME (March 25, 1966).

  5: POLITICS AND IMAGECRAFT

  “That means”: World in Action television program, July 31, 1967.

  “You are, whether you”: As quoted in Simon Wells, Butterfly on a Wheel: The Great Rolling Stones Drug Bust (London: Omnibus, 2112), 218.

  “We swooped exhilaratingly”: John Birt, MacTaggart Lecture, 2005. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2005/aug/26/broadcasting.uknews.

  “like a lost scene”: As quoted in Esquire, Vol. 71 (1969).

  “It was not the soft-liberalism”: William Rees-Mogg, Memoirs (New York: Harper Press, 2011), 159. Jagger no doubt made his point, but he used a poor example. (It would, under most circumstances, be a crime against society to kill oneself by leaping out of a window.)

  “I’m not a keen protestor”: Paytress, Rolling Stones: Off the Record, 140.

  “Musically, they are a near disaster”: Newsweek (February 24, 1964).

  “long abide as arbiters”: Vince Aletti, “Beatles’ Albums Divert Course of Pop Music,” San Diego Door (Jan. 25–Feb. 7, 1968), 4.

  “Even those who did not”: Richard Flacks, Youth and Social Change (Chicago: Markham Pub. Co., 1971), 70.

  What about this comment: Kane, Ticket to Ride, 38–39.

  “But there’s not much we”: As quoted in “Bach Backs Beatles vs. Viet War,” Berkeley Barb (August 5, 1966), 2.


  “We don’t like war”: “Beatles Strike Serious Note in Press Talk,” New York Times (August 23, 1966).

  “We’d heard rumors”: As quoted in Leo Burley, “Jagger vs. Lennon,” The Independent (March 9, 2008).

  “was an event”: Geoffrey O’Brien, Dream Time (London: Secker & Warburg, 1988), 54.

  “With a bit of effort”: Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1987), 210–211.

  “were no longer strangers”: Jonah Raskin, Out of the Whale: Growing Up in the American Left (New York: Link Books, 1974), 109.

  “the power and audience”: Gene Youngblood, (Milwaukee) Kaleidoscope (Dec. 22, 1967–Jan. 4, 1968), 2.

  “At idle moments more”: Marvin Garon, “And Now, a Word from Our Sponsor,” Berkeley Barb (February 25, 1967).

  “the embodiment of everything we”: As quoted in Davis, 124.

  “I didn’t have the slightest”: Strausbaugh, Rock Till You Drop, 16.

  By contrast, when the Beatles: Then again it is doubtful that the Beatles ever got word of the invitation, which was delivered via a fifteen-foot roadside sign that read “The Merry Pranksters Welcome the Beatles.”

  “rockers, bikers”: Peter Coyote, Sleeping Where I Fall (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1998), 163; Fresh Air interview with Terri Gross, NPR (April 28, 1998).

  “Mick’s case had made”: Sanchez, Up and Down, 85–86.

  “I just wouldn’t be”: Jones was also quoted saying, “I remember the first time I took [LSD] was on tour with Bo Diddley and Little Richard.” That was either a fib, or else the reporters got it wrong. It is true that the Stones toured with Bo Diddley and Little Richard in the fall of 1963, but it’s extraordinarily unlikely that any LSD would have been around then. Possibly that is when Brian Jones first smoked cannabis.

  “Pop Stars and Drugs”: News of the World (February 5, 1967).

  He confidently announced: As quoted in Wells, Butterfly on a Wheel, 86.

  Mayfair gallery owner Robert Fraser: “Michael [Cooper] and Robert [Fraser] were both friends of mine,” Jagger later remarked. Fraser, he said, was a bit of “a taste guru” for both the Beatles and the Stones. But Mick also implied that he had the better and more authentic relationship with Fraser, and that the Beatles didn’t fit in quite as well in the Swinging London scene. “I think Robert saw the Beatles as a hustle. Everyone did,” he said. “They were the richest people in that age group. Very silly with their money, they didn’t seem to care. They did very good things, like Sgt. Pepper, and did attract good people. But people did target them as a hustle. Robert saw them as a gravy train when he knew that I was not.” As quoted in Harriet Vyner, ed., Groovy Bob: The Life and Times of Robert Fraser (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), 130.

  “This is the tao of lysergic”: Faithfull, Faithfull, 99–100.

  “There was the kind of social”: As quoted in The Beatles Anthology DVD, episode 8. For a time, the Beatles also seemed untouchable by journalists. The Evening Standard’s pop writer, Roy Connolly, recalled visiting Lennon in November 1968. “Suddenly, a character called Michael X showed up, a real bad guy.” (He was a Trinidad-born British black nationalist who would be hanged for murder in Port-of-Spain in 1975.) “He opened up this huge suitcase and took out enough grass to turn on the entire city of Westminster. Now, I’m a member of the press. Do I mention it? No, nor would John expect me to. That was the deal at the time.”

  “There’s a big knock on the door”: As quoted in Dalton, The First Twenty Years, 98.

  That late morsel of a detail: The irony, Keith later remarked, is that it was a huge rug, made of many dozens of rabbit pelts. All wrapped up in it, she was in fact “quite chastely attired for once. Usually when first you said hi to Marianne you started talking to the cleavage.”

  “ ‘Bang, bang, bang”: As quoted in Dalton, The First Twenty Years, 98.

  “Poor Mick—he could”: As quoted in Norman, The Stones, 227.

  “Please don’t open the case”: As quoted in Norman, The Stones, 228.

  When Snyderman skipped: For a time, Nicky Kramer was briefly suspected as well. After the bust, an authentic East End gangster named David Litvinoff roughed Kramer up in an attempt to get him to confess to betraying the Stones. When Kramer continued to maintain his innocence (according to Richards, even after being dangled outside of a window by his ankles), he was judged to be okay.

  “In his right-hand breast pocket”: Wells, Butterfly on a Wheel, 118.

  All of this was confiscated: Snyderman was finally discovered many years later in Los Angeles, working as a small-time television and experimental film producer under the name David Jove. In the early 1980s, he created the show Night Flight, hosted by musician Peter Ivers on the then-fledgling USA network. When Ivers was murdered in 1983 (someone bashed his skull with a hammer), Jove was a suspect, but he was never charged. He died of pancreatic cancer in 2004. (Incidentally, his daughter is Lili Haydn, the celebrated violinist.)

  “That’s what I feel most bitter”: As quoted in Norman, The Stones, 239.

  “First they don’t like”: As quoted in Hotchner, Blown Away, 251. Of course, the Stones never were offered MBEs. In 2003, however, Mick Jagger received the British establishment’s ultimate nod of approval: he was knighted at Buckingham Palace. Keith was angry about it. “I told Mick it’s a paltry honor. . . . It’s not what the Stones is about, is it?”

  “Free the Stones”: Paytress, Off the Record, 132.

  “vicious”: As quoted in Dalton, The First Twenty Years, 101.

  They promptly announced: Wells, Butterfly on a Wheel, photo insert between 210 and 211.

  “The Rolling Stones are”: As quoted in Paytress, Off the Record, 136.

  In Britain, it is an: William Rees-Mogg, “Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel?” The Times (London) (July 1, 1967).

  “monstrously out of proportion”: Carey Schofield, Jagger (London: Methuen, 1983), 134.

  After the News of the World: “A Monstrous Charge,” News of the World (July 2, 1967).

  “Are we expected to accept”: As quoted in Wells, Butterfly on a Wheel, 218.

  “We weren’t thinking of the Beatles”: Spitz, Jagger, 106.

  “they got twenty billion irresponsible”: As quoted in Miller, Flowers in the Dustbin, 263.

  “In each city where I stopped”: As quoted in Greil Marcus, “Another Version of the Chair,” in June Sinner Sawyers, ed., Read the Beatles: Classic New Writings on the Beatles, Their Legacy, and Why They Still Matter (New York: Penguin, 2006), 81.

  “Everywhere one went”: Miller, Flowers in the Dustbin, 257–58.

  “a decisive moment in the history”: As quoted in Norman, Shout!, 331.

  “Mick said he’d come”: Tony Bramwell, Magical Mystery Tours: My Life with the Beatles (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1996), 195.

  “Olympic became the nightclub”: As quoted in Oldham, 2Stoned, 354.

  “Prior to their arrival the”: Oldham, 2Stoned, 344.

  “Lennon said, ‘Set the mike up’ ”: As quoted in Oldham, 2Stoned, 354.

  The two Beatles didn’t listen to: Oldham, 2Stoned, 344.

  Lennon and McCartney’s high harmonies: Because they were signed to different labels, the Beatles and the Stones were not supposed to sing on each other’s records. The Stones knew that Lennon and McCartney’s appearance on “We Love You” would help sales, however, so they let it circulate as a rumor. In August 1967, when an NME journalist asked Jagger point-blank whether John and Paul had sung backup on the song, Mick craftily managed to affirm the rumor while technically denying it. “Don’t ask me a question like that—you know we could not do things like that when we work for different labels. That’s Keith and I singing—listen . . .” (at which point Jagger humorously tried, and failed, to reach the high harmonies on the record).

  “It’s just a bit of fun”: Paytress, Off the Record, 140.

  “fairies, goblins and elves”: Norman, The Stones, 284.

  Their sojourn w
as cut short: Beginning in mid-February 1968, the Beatles, their wives and their assistants all got together for an extended stay in the Maharishi’s idyllic ashram in Rishikesh, India, where their days were drug-free and devoted to peaceful contemplation. But Ringo couldn’t stomach the food, and Paul was put off by the Maharishi’s tendency to drench the Beatles in buttery, over-the-top praise—calling them “the saviors of mankind” and so forth. So they both left, with polite regrets, before the course was over. John and George, however, claimed they were getting profound (even life-changing) results from practicing Transcendental Meditation. So it was surprising when they abruptly fled the retreat and angrily severed their ties with their spiritual mentor on April 12. To this day, it has never been precisely clear what their objection was, but it had something to do with the Maharishi’s alleged sexual hypocrisy. After claiming to be celibate, he supposedly made a pass at one of his young female students or was otherwise caught in a compromising position. But Mick Jagger—who was not there—circulated an alternative account of what transpired. In his recently published diaries, Christopher Isherwood recalls meeting Mick on the set of Ned Kelly, a motion picture that was filmed in the Australian outback in 1969. “[Mick] told me with amusement that the real reason why the Beatles left the Maharishi was that he made a pass at one of them: ‘They’re simple north-country lads; they’re terribly uptight about all that.’ Am still not sure if I believe this story.”

  “a lovely puddle of psychedelic”: Steve Appleford, The Rolling Stones: Rip This Joint: The Story Behind Every Song (New York: Da Capo, 2001), 55.

  “the prototype of junk”: Keith Altham, “Rolling Stones: Year of the Stones’ New Heart,” NME Annual (1969).

  “I can remember”: According to the Rolling Stones, 114.

  “You have lost the plot”: Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot, The Beatles vs. the Rolling Stones: Sound Opinions on the Great Rock ’n’ Roll Rivalry (Minneapolis: Voyageur Press, 2010), 19.

  “the first psychedelic”: Jim DeRogatis, Turn On Your Mind: Four Decades of Great Psychedelic Rock (Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, 2003), 57.