Beatles vs. Stones
Read Beatles vs. Stones Online
Authors: John McMillian
Tags: #Music, #General, #History & Criticism, #Genres & Styles, #Rock, #Social Science, #Popular Culture
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CONTENTS
Wheel-Dealing in the Pop Jungle
For my parents
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
—F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
SOUNDTRACK
(Recommended)
The Beatles
“Shimmy Shake” (2:28) (
Live at the Star Club
)
Bo Diddley
“Pretty Thing” (2:48)
The Shirelles
“Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” (2:43)
The Beatles
“Love Me Do” (2:22)
The Rolling Stones
“Come On” (1:48)
The Beatles
“I Wanna Be Your Man” (2:00)
The Rolling Stones
“I Wanna Be Your Man” (1:49)
The Beatles
“Yesterday” (2:03)
The Rolling Stones
“As Tears Go By” (2:45)
Bob Dylan
“Girl from the North Country” (3:22)
The Kinks
“See My Friends” (2:50)
The Byrds
“Bells of Rhymney” (3:35)
The Animals
“We Gotta Get Out of This Place” (3:17)
The Beatles
“Drive My Car” (2:28)
The Beatles
“Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” (2:05)
The Rolling Stones
“Paint It, Black” (3:22) (stereo album mix)
The Rolling Stones
“Stupid Girl” (2:55)
The Rolling Stones
“Let’s Spend the Night Together” (3:36)
The Beatles
“All You Need Is Love” (3:47)
The Rolling Stones
“We Love You” (4:35)
The Rolling Stones
“Street Fighting Man” (3:16)
The Beatles
“Revolution” (3:21)
The Beatles
“Hey Jude” (7:11)
The Dirty Mac
“Yer Blues” (4:39) (
Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus
)
Yoko Ono
“Whole Lotta Yoko” (5:03) (
Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus
)
The Rolling Stones
“Sympathy for the Devil” (8:52) (
Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus
)
INTRODUCTION
In the summer of 1968,
Mick Jagger attended a birthday party in his honor at a hip, new Moroccan-style bar called the Vesuvio Club—“one of the best clubs London has ever seen,” remembered Tony Sanchez, one of its proprietors. Under black lights and beautiful tapestries, some of London’s trendiest models, artists, and pop singers lounged around on huge cushions and took pulls from Turkish hookahs, while a decorated helium-filled dirigible floated aimlessly around the room. As a special treat, Mick brought along an advance pressing of the Stones’ forthcoming album,
Beggars Banquet
, and when it played over the club’s speakers, people flooded the dance floor. Just as the crowd was “leaping around” and celebrating the record—which would soon win accolades as the best Stones album to date—Paul McCartney strolled in and passed Sanchez a copy of the Beatles’ forthcoming single, “Hey Jude” / “Revolution,” which had never before been heard by anyone outside of the group’s charmed inner circle. As Sanchez remembered, the “slow thundering buildup of ‘Hey Jude’ shook the club,” and the crowd demanded that the seven-minute song be played again and again. Finally, the club’s disc jockey played the next song, and everyone heard “John Lennon’s nasal voice pumping out ‘Revolution.’ ”
“When it was over,” Sanchez said, “Mick looked peeved. The Beatles had upstaged him.”
“It was a wicked piece of promotional one-upsmanship,” remembered Tony Barrow, the Beatles’ press officer. By that time, the mostly good-natured rivalry between the Beatles and the Stones had been going on for about four years. Although the Beatles were more commercially successful than the Stones, throughout the 1960s the two groups nevertheless competed for record sales, cultural influence, and aesthetic credibility. Teens on both sides of the Atlantic defined themselves by whether they preferred the Beatles or the Stones. “If you truly loved pop music in the 1960s . . . there was no ducking the choice and no cop-out third option,” one writer remarked.
“You could dance with them both, but there could never be any doubt about which one you’d take home.”
Initially the rivalry was strongest in England. The Beatles began inspiring mass adulation among young teenage girls in the spring of 1963, but it soon became apparent that the group’s invigorating music and seductive charm worked on adults as well. The Fab Four couldn’t quite win over
everyone—
they were too unusual for that—but conventional wisdom held that the Beatles were a wonderful tonic to a society that was finally ready to shed the last vestiges of Victorian Era restraint. Their effect on British popular culture was said to be salutary, pitch-perfect, and perfectly timed.
The Rolling Stones provoked a different reaction. Pale and unkempt, they did not bother with stage uniforms, and they were not often polite. Instead of laboring to win the affection of the broader public, they feigned indifference to mainstream opinion. Musically, they favored American electric blues—an obscure genre in England that was championed by adolescent males as well as females, and that was most suitably performed in dark ’n’ sweaty, smoke-filled rooms. Those who were faint of heart, or who enjoyed a prim sense of propriety, knew to stay away from the Stones. Adults regarded them as a menace.
That is one of the reasons that the debate over which band was better, the Beatles or the Stones, was freighted with such deep significance.
To say that you were a Beatles fan was to imply that (just like the Fab Four) you were well adjusted, amiable, and polite. You were not a prig, necessarily, but nor were you the type to challenge social conventions. For the most part, you conformed. You agreed. You complied. When you looked upon the world that you were bound to inherit, you were pleased.
To align with the Rolling Stones was to convey the opposite message. It meant you wanted to smash stuff, break it and set it on fire.
“The Beatles want to hold your hand,” journalist Tom Wolfe once quipped, “but the Stones want to burn down your town.”
Fans registered their loyalty in readers’ polls conducted by music papers such as
New Musical Express
and
Record Mirror
. Whenever one group displaced the other at the top of the music chart, the news ran under a screeching headline, as if the Beatles and the Stones were football rivals or opposing candidates in a high-stakes election. People also tended to be deeply entrenched in their opinions. Beatles fans were often so devoted to the group that they would hear nothing against the Beatles. Youths who were in thrall to the Stones tended to be equally intransigent; they simply would not abide any criticism of their idols.
It is sometimes said that the “rivalry” between the Beatles and the Stones was just a myth, concocted by sensationalizing journalists and naïve teenyboppers. In reality, we are told, the two groups were always friendly, admiring, and supportive of each other. It is doubtful, however, that their relations were ever so cozy or uncomplicated. The two groups clearly struck up a rapport, but that never stopped them from trying to outperform each other wherever and however they could.
And as most people understand, emulous competition rarely nourishes a friendship; more often it breeds anxiety, suspicion, and envy.
It is little wonder, then, that in some respects the Beatles and the Stones simply could not help but act like rival bands. Ensconced in West London, the Stones fancied themselves as hip cosmopolitans. They were obsessed with a particular style of “cool”—which they associated
with reticence and self-possession—and so they were bemused by the Beatles’ amiable goofball shtick: their corny repartee and their obvious eagerness to please. Furthermore, the Beatles came from the North Country: the industrialized and economically depressed region in England that the young Stones had always assumed was a culturally barren wasteland. Not only were they wrong about that, but like most Merseysiders, the Beatles were sensitive to even the hint of condescension. That may help to explain why when the two groups were first getting acquainted, the successful Beatles sometimes seemed to lord it over the Stones.
